Hailey Van Lith never thought her first game in a WNBA jersey would take her back to Baton Rouge, La.
The guard will play her first preseason minutes with the Chicago Sky on Friday in an exhibition game against Brazil in a familiar setting — the Pete Maravich Assembly Center, where she spent the toughest year of her collegiate career with LSU.
For Van Lith, it’s not an unwelcome homecoming. Baton Rouge will always hold a special place in her development as a college player.
The guard’s first three years at Louisville shaped her identity on the court. And her final year at TCU offered a specific environment to correct her shooting efficiency and build a portfolio to improve her draft stock.
But that year at LSU? That’s when Van Lith figured out exactly who she was — as a player, as a person and as a future pro.
“It was the year that helped me get ready for the league the most from a mental perspective,” Van Lith told the Tribune. “(That season at) LSU was like — this is the mentality that you have to have to be a pro. You have to just figure out how to make things work when it’s not what you expected it to be.”
“For me, LSU was just a year that I had to make ends meet and figure it out no matter what. And that’s what the pros is. You want to play on a team, you want to have a job, so you do whatever you need to do to make that happen.”
LSU was never the right fit for Van Lith. That’s not exactly a secret. Both Van Lith and Angel Reese openly acknowledged that fact when the Sky drafted the rookie with the No. 11 pick last month.
At Louisville, Van Lith stood out as a high-volume shooting guard. She took 13.2 shots per game and averaged 15.4 points, leading the Cardinals to a pair of Elite Eight appearances and a Final Four.
But her role shifted immediately upon landing in Louisiana. Coach Kim Mulkey wanted to mold Van Lith into a starting point guard — and felt that was the challenge Van Lith had accepted by transferring. As a result, her shooting volume plummeted to 9.9 attempts per game.
“She knows at the next level that’s her only chance — to be able to tell them somewhat, ‘I can handle the ball if you need me to,’” Mulkey said at an LSU boosters banquet in 2024. “She had to embrace a change in her mindset of not shooting it 20 to 30 times a game but finding who’s open and getting them the ball. And sometimes it was hard because she would be pressured and she’d be pounding the heck out of that ball.”
Every day, Van Lith faced the same internal battle: “This is what they see for me. This is what they want me to produce on the court. And this is what I want to do. So how do I try and make both people happy?”
It was awkward and often unwieldy on the court. But Van Lith needed that discomfort.
“When I was younger in college, I was so stubborn,” Van Lith said. “Like, I was going to prove to everyone that I could be exactly how I wanted to be and I wasn’t going to conform at all to what they wanted me to be.”
For Van Lith, growing up meant accepting she wasn’t always right — and even when her self-righteousness seemed valid, it still didn’t fit into the overall ethos of assimilating to a championship team. In basketball, compromise is always a necessity. Sometimes coaches are wrong. Sometimes players are right. But Van Lith never could be successful if she couldn’t embrace criticism.
Even though the 2023-24 season didn’t end in a championship run, Van Lith values the way the experience forced her to compromise for a team’s system, a crucial trait for a rookie adapting to her new WNBA team.
“Nothing will ever work if you’re super hostile or closed-minded,” Van Lith said. “It’s a team. If you want to be like that, go play tennis.”
No, that year did not end the way Van Lith or Mulkey or any LSU player, coach or fan hoped. The Tigers wanted a championship. In some ways, they expected it. And the way everything ended was both demoralizing and daunting for Van Lith, who was forced to face the gaps in her skill set — and how those deficiencies might affect her WNBA potential.
But any perceived hostility between Van Lith and the LSU program is largely manufactured by those on the outside. Van Lith considers her time at LSU to be essential to her selection as a first-rounder. Mulkey praised the guard as “one of the hardest-working players that I’ve ever coached.” And when Van Lith chose to transfer to TCU, neither coach nor player publicly framed the decision with malice.
“Her aspirations were to get drafted this year, and she realized, ‘I need another year and I need to go back to a place where I can relax and get back to my normal position,” Mulkey said in April 2024. “And what do you do? You hug her and you wish her well.”
Ultimately, Mulkey was correct. Adopting the skill set of a point guard was crucial for Van Lith to successfully make the transition to the WNBA. She will be asked to make a similar transition in Chicago, where the Sky hope to mold her into an on-ball guard in the secondary rotation behind star point guard Courtney Vandersloot.
If she succeeds with the club, Van Lith could be in line to inherit that position from one of the best passers in WNBA history. And barely a year after leaving Baton Rouge, Van Lith finally feels ready to embrace this position.
The rookie spent the first three days of training camp glued to Vandersloot, watching how the veteran used her body to manipulate screens and read razor-thin openings for skip passes halfway across the court.
This will be another challenge — and Van Lith knows the growing pains that will accompany that learning curve. Running point in the NCAA is difficult. In the WNBA? It’s a feat at which few truly succeed.
“The window of time that you’re open is much smaller than in college,” Van Lith said. “(In college), you can get loose from your defender and you have like three seconds where you could be open. Here, it’s maybe one second. Maybe. The decision-making when you do get open has to be much crisper and it has to be tighter.”
When in doubt, the guard knows she can rely on her physicality while honing her on-ball skills. She spent the first few days of training camp collecting tokens of that grit — a bruise on the inside of her right elbow, a handful of scratch marks across her stomach, a court burn framing her left knee.
“We don’t really have refs out here, so they’re probably letting a little bit go,” Van Lith said with a laugh.
But that’s OK. Van Lith is tough enough to take it. More than anything — her shot or her passing or her defensive sharpness — it’s this trait the guard values about herself.
And when she returns to Baton Rouge on Friday, Van Lith hopes LSU fans will recognize the resilience she forged in her year with the program.
“It wasn’t always clean and pretty and it was definitely up and down, but I think I did a pretty good job with my circumstance and what was being asked of me,” Van Lith said. “I still have a lot left to learn, but now at least I’ve got a little head start.”
