Hailey Van Lith joined the Chicago Sky Monday night as the No. 11 selection in the WNBA draft.
That means she’ll run it back as a pro with her former LSU teammate Angel Reese.
Van Lith and Reese played a single season together at LSU in 2023-24 on a star-studded roster that also featured Aneesah Morrow and Flau’jae Johnson. Each of them earned All-America honors at some point in their college careers.
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Van Lith joined the Tigers as a transfer that season after two All-ACC campaigns at Louisville. But the roster didn’t produce a repeat of the 2023 NCAA champion LSU team that saw Angel Reese secure Final Four MOP honors.
LSU started the season as the overwhelming No. 1 team in the nation, earning 35 of 36 votes from the Associated Press panel. But the Tigers earned a No. 3 seed in the NCAA tournament and fell to Caitlin Clark and No. 1 seed Iowa in the Elite Eight.
Reese was then done at LSU and left for the WNBA draft, where she was selected by the Sky with the No. 7 pick. Van Lith left LSU after a single season to transfer to TCU, where she earned All-America honors in her final season of college eligibility.
Hailey Van Lith and Angel Reese are teammates again. (Sarah Stier/Getty Images)
(Sarah Stier via Getty Images)
Reese, Van Lith respond to reunion
Now, Van Lith is a member of the Sky, and Reese is glad to see her. Reese responded to the news on social media.
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“We ain’t do it right the first time,” Reese wrote. “Let’s run it backkkkk.”
Van Lith, meanwhile, spoke about her relationship with Reese and what it means to reunite with her former teammate.
“Angel has maintained contact with me this whole past year since she’s been in the league and I transferred,” Van Lith said Monday night. “I really appreciate her. We have a very mature relationship, a very mutual respect relationship, where we both have respect for each other’s game and also the character and the person we are off the court.
“So mostly I’m just excited to get to be around her again. I think we have a lot of similarities about how we carry ourselves and our mindset on, you know, what’s important to us? And you know, she’s a dog man, she turns up the intensity of everybody around her. So I’m excited to be in that environment with her again, where she can pull more out of me than than I think I have.”
Van Lith joins a young Sky team with plenty of opportunity to improve following a 13-27 campaign in 2024 that left them out of the playoffs.
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