Last March, I watched the ACU women’s basketball team walk off the floor in Las Vegas with an NCAA Tournament bid right in front of their grasp.

California Baptist won the WAC championship game 74-58. The Lancers cut down the nets, punched their ticket to March Madness, and left the Wildcats to settle for the WNIT.

But this year, it feels hard to imagine a world where the Wildcats fall short of the tournament.

ACU has a new conference, a veteran core, and a path to the NCAA Tournament that hasn’t been this clear in years. Anything short of a bid this season would be considered a missed opportunity.

The wall is gone

For the last few years, California Baptist has been the problem. The Lancers won three WAC tournament titles in six seasons, including the one they took from ACU in March.

Now they’re gone. On July 1, Cal Baptist left for the Big West, and the WAC became the United Athletic Conference. ACU, UT Arlington and Tarleton State are now joined by Austin Peay, Central Arkansas, Eastern Kentucky, North Alabama, West Georgia and Little Rock.

That’s a lot of new names, but it’s also a league where nobody has more recent experience playing for a title than ACU.

The Wildcats went 24-11 last season, finished second in the WAC at 13-5, and made a run to the WNIT Super 16. They also picked up the program’s first-ever WAC tournament win along the way. This team wasn’t thrown together in the transfer portal, but instead handpicked and crafted to be a winning team.

Pieces are already here

ACU doesn’t need to rebuild; it needs to finish the job.

Payton Hull and Meredith Mayes were the preseason picks to carry this team last year, and they’re back for their senior seasons. Erin Woodson earned WAC All-Tournament Team honors after leading ACU with 16 points in the title game.

Add in what head coach Julie Goodenough brought in through the portal this offseason in Salena Carrasco and Samara Morrow, and this roster has the experience and the depth to handle a 16-game conference schedule.

People outside Abilene are noticing, too. Mid-Major Madness, a website that specializes in the ‘mid-major’ conferences of college basketball, opened its UAC preview by naming ACU the team leading the league into its new era.

No Handouts

Being the favorite on paper doesn’t mean much once the ball goes up. If anything, it adds a target on your back.

Every team in this league is going to circle the ACU game on its calendar. For schools coming over from the ASUN, beating the Wildcats is the fastest way to gain ground and stay ahead of the curve. ACU is going to get everyone’s best shot, home and away, for 16 straight conference games.

And this isn’t a league full of pushovers. Eastern Kentucky won the ASUN regular-season title last year, and its coach, Greg Todd, was named ASUN Coach of the Year. The Colonels have no reason to care what the Wildcats did in the WAC. The Wildcats see them twice, on Jan. 13 and Feb. 17, and those two nights could go a long way toward deciding the top seed.

Then there’s the part of mid-major basketball nobody likes to talk about. Nobody from the UAC is getting an 

at-large bid. One bad night in Allen and the whole season ends on the wrong side of the bracket. ACU learned that the hard way in Vegas.

So no, this isn’t a coronation. ACU has to go earn it, one game at a time, the same way it got to that title game last year. The difference is that this time the door is open a lot wider.

Why it should matter

Women’s basketball has made the NCAA Division I tournament once. A second trip would be the biggest moment for this program in years, and it would put ACU in front of a national audience during the one month that everyone in the country is watching college basketball.

It matters for this campus, too. A winning team gives people a reason to fill Moody on a weeknight in February. It gives the campus a reason to tailgate on a cold night to try and will the team towards the finish line.

And this year, ACU students don’t even need a plane ticket. The first UAC tournament is March 10-14 at the Credit Union of Texas Event Center in Allen, Texas, which is a whole lot closer than Las Vegas.

The bottom line

There should be no questions surrounding this team. A deep roster with tons of experience, and a head coach that will give you an advantage in every game you play in; it might feel easy to go ahead and write them in.

But the Wildcats know what a championship game feels like, and they know how it feels to lose one. There isn’t a stat that exists to quantify that, but the best teams are visually more prepared in big games.

Fill the seats in Moody for every game, make the trip to Allen in March and watch with your own two eyes an NCAA tournament-caliber team.