Virginia women’s basketball made its first NCAA Tournament appearance in 1984, which started a 20-year streak of NCAA Tournament berths. Once revered as a basketball superpower, the Cavaliers have since settled into long-standing — around eight years to be specific — mediocrity. Now, in 2026, patience is a liability instead of a virtue. The team is strong on paper, but alas, the game is played on hardwood. There is still much to be proven.
Virginia has reached the NCAA Tournament just four times over the past 20 years, with its most recent appearance coming in the 2017-18 campaign. Since their most recent tournament cameo, the Cavaliers have never finished a season higher than ninth place in the ACC.
But when Coach Amaka Agugua-Hamilton took over in 2022, the program inherited something new — hope. After all, Agugua-Hamilton has a postseason pedigree. She led Missouri State to the NCAA Tournament three times and also reached the tournament six times as an assistant at Michigan State and Virginia Commonwealth University.
Now in her fourth season on Grounds, Agugua-Hamilton has improved Virginia’s record each season. Last year, she led the Cavaliers to their first winning record since 2018. However, the most prominent checkpoint for this program’s development still has yet to be obtained — the ever-elusive ticket to the NCAA Tournament, which is the most prominent checkpoint for the development of this program. At this current juncture, it has yet to be determined whether 2025-26 marks a breakthrough or yet another collapse.
Considering the program received a transformational multi-million dollar donation last year, expectations should no longer be about improving on the margin. In the 2025-26 season, Virginia must be an NCAA Tournament team.
While the Cavaliers are 13-5 and currently sit fifth in the ACC with a 5-2 conference record in the early goings of conference play, they have been inconsistent so far. They have skirted by against weaker teams, blown leads in conference play twice and even suffered an unfathomable home loss to UMBC.
Over halfway through the season, the Cavaliers have just one win against a Power Four team with a winning record. If a team wants to make the bracket, it must consistently beat other quality teams and avoid poor losses. But when it comes to winning big games — or avoiding resume-sinking upsets — the Cavaliers have yet to prove themselves as a consistent force under Agugua-Hamilton, with a 6-22 record against ranked opponents.
This situation is not all that dissimilar to Agugua-Hamilton’s first few seasons on Grounds, in which the team sprinted past inferior competition but crashed in ACC play.
In 2022-2023, the Cavaliers started 12-0 before collapsing to 3-15 in the latter half of the campaign. The next season, Virginia was three points away from upsetting No. 6 LSU and picked up a few quality wins before losing to Wofford at home and finishing the year with a 16-16 record. The squad managed to make the Women’s Basketball Invitation Tournament, but bowed out in the second round. In 2024-25, the Cavaliers started 6-1 before they found themselves on the receiving end of shocking upsets from Washington State and Wyoming. In each of the last three years, Virginia has had a losing record in ACC play.
To be fair, the three of the Cavaliers’ four Power Four losses this year came while junior forward Sa’Myah Smith was sidelined. Had Smith been available, perhaps those defeats at the hands of Nebraska, No. 7 Vanderbilt and Syracuse could have gone Virginia’s way. But with an eight-year streak of missing the NCAA Tournament, no excuse will make up for the fact that this program needs to produce satisfactory results this season. On paper, they certainly could go far.
Megastar junior guard Kymora Johnson is an All-American candidate, while junior forward Smith — a major transfer acquisition — senior guard Paris Clark and graduate guard Romi Levy form one of the most productive supporting casts across all high-major teams. The Cavaliers also have some serious size in the frontcourt, with four players checking in at 6-foot-4 or taller. That size has helped the team lead the nation in blocked shots. Toss in talented scoring guards from the bench, and this roster looks unmistakably tournament-ready.
With all that talent, if the Cavaliers cannot reach the postseason, the program might be in a new level of purgatory worse than ever before — a situation in which no amount of high-end talent can save a program that simply hasn’t been a genuine ACC contender in over a decade. In that case, the blame would fall on the coaching staff.
Failure to earn an NCAA Tournament bid is not an option for a team with a roster this deep and added funding. Should Virginia fail to achieve its full potential this year, it will not be because of a lack of talent or financial investment — it will be because the chasm between promise and performance has once again proven to be too wide to cross.
There was once a time when Dawn Staley and Geno Auriemma — who have won a combined 15 national championships as head coaches elsewhere — called Charlottesville home as a player and assistant coach, respectively. And while those two have gone on to produce careers worthy of the Hall of Fame, Virginia has yet to have a coach other than Debbie Ryan lead the team to any inkling of postseason success.
Perhaps Agugua-Hamilton can change that longstanding narrative. She has been to the NCAA Tournament several times. But Virginia has waited long enough for a special year where a cohort of Cavaliers can finally return to the big dance. If they fail again, perhaps it is time for Virginia Athletics to do some serious rethinking about the leaders of this program.
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