How Lee Cummard hopes BYU can build from its WBIT success moving forward

BYU head coach Lee Cummard looks on in his team's game against Houston during a first-round game at the Big 12 women’s basketball tournament at the T-Mobile Center in Kansas City on Wednesday, March 4, 2026. | Denny Medley\Big 12 Conference When BYU reached the WBIT championship game last week, the Cougars matched up with a Columbia team that couldn’t have been more different from them. Statistically, the Cougars and Lions did share some commonalities, each scoring nearly the same amount of points per game and posting similar shooting and turnover numbers.

But Columbia lapped BYU in perhaps the most crucial category for success in a postseason setting: experience. The Lions’ best players were juniors and seniors who had played together for their entire college careers, reaching two consecutive NCAA Tournaments in 2024 and 2025 before slipping into the WBIT field this year. BYU, conversely, was an underclassmen-dominant, rebuilding group that exceeded expectations in Lee Cummard’s first season at the helm of the program, catching fire late to earn the WBIT’s top overall seed.

Columbia’s grizzled veterans ultimately captured an 81-64 championship victory over the young Cougars, bringing an anticlimactic end to an otherwise very encouraging Year 1 of the Cummard era. BYU finished 26-12, going 11-10 in Big 12 regular season and tournament play while reaching both the Final Four and championship game of a major postseason tournament for the first time in school history. “We’ve done some really good things and set a good foundation or standard that we want to approach things by,” Cummard told the Deseret News earlier this week.

“I feel like we were spoiled with the group that we had this year. ... We have some really good things in place to have a larger core and even better core.