The following feature appears in the March 2026 issue of Mile High Sports Magazine, which is available now. To see the full digital issue, click here.
Buried on the back court, far away from the main entrance, Brihanna Crittendon’s career on the national AAU girls basketball circuit got off to a humble start.
This isn’t the Riverdale Ridge scoring machine that would rewrite the Colorado basketball record books with 3,073 points. It’s an eighth grader playing on the back court in a Dallas gym, assigned to teams that don’t have players college coaches want to watch.
“People in Colorado always knew who I was because I was tall,” said Brihanna, who became the all-time leading scorer in Colorado basketball history in her recently concluded senior season. “But [in] the summer of my eighth-grade year — heading into my ninth-grade year — I got my first college offer. I started to get more attention, and people knew who I was.”
It’s not yet the Brihanna that will go on to claim a 2024 CHSAA state title and become the latest high-profile girls basketball star to sign with Texas. It’s an AAU game being coached by her dad, Greg Crittendon, and it’s played on court No. 8 with stale popcorn under the bleachers.
Moms join Chelsea Whitfield-Crittendon with their white-and-green Starbucks coffee cups, legs stretched out on bleachers, searching for a comfortable location. Dads wear their branded golf visors, dreaming of sneaking off for a quick twilight round once everyone is settled back at the hotel.
There’s a shadow of the success she’ll later encounter, setting the CHSAA state freshman scoring mark with 811 points. A year later, she shattered the sophomore season tally of 809 points. It’s long before she’ll eclipse a 43-year-old record to become Colorado high school basketball’s all-time leading scorer with 3,073 points.
But at this game, little brothers, like Bryce Crittendon, are dribbling old basketballs in the corner, peering beyond the giant partitions that separate courts from ceiling to floor, and waiting for the slightest pause in the action to sprint out and launch half-court shots to entertain all in attendance and cure their stircrazy athletic boredom.
But as college coaches pass through, they stop for a second. When it comes to world-class talent, it looks different, sounds different and even walks differently.
Being stuck on court No. 8?
That didn’t last long for young Brihanna, and all the accolades that would follow: Colorado Ms. Basketball 2024 and the 2026 McDonald’s All-American Game.
“Coaches walked by, they took a peek and would say to me, ‘where have you guys been?’” Greg said. “We were in Colorado. We didn’t know a whole lot about the scene. But by eighth grade, she had her first college offers.”
Because they lacked the connections to get into the higher-level tournaments, Greg brought the Colorado Lockdown team
to tournaments under the banner of the New Mexico Clippers.
“By the next tournament, we’d moved up almost to center court,” Greg said. “The last two years, every game was court No. 1 or court No. 2 – the main courts. Sometimes there were 100 courts, but they always found us; they found her — and the tournament would move us up to a prominent spot.”
One by one, college coaches would stake their claim to a chair to catch Brihanna play. A backpack with their school name and logo would be draped across a chair: Tennessee, TCU, Colorado, Oregon, Washington Ohio State, UCLA… all came for a glimpse of what Brihanna was doing on the court.
Suddenly, Brihanna entered an exclusive group. She’d play in Select 40 and Power 24 events. She played in the prestigious Blue Star Basketball Camp.
“That’s where your life changes,” Greg said. “Every college team wants you. She killed it there. That led to Team USA tryouts, and everything you can imagine.”
Iron Sharpens Iron
(Randy Parietti Photography)
Confidence courses through Brihanna’s voice when she talks about her playing career at the next level.
The first stop is Texas.
ESPN ranks her as the No. 8 recruit in the nation. Next year, the No. 10 recruit, Addison Bjorn, will join her in the Longhorns’ burnt orange and white uniforms. Given the numerous underclassmen on the Texas roster and its No. 1 ranked 2026 recruiting class, the Longhorns are going to be loaded with talent.
Practices could be more challenging than some of the games Texas will play — which is exactly what Brihanna wants.
“I wanted to find a place that will push me to be the best version of myself, on and off the court,” she said. “Texas was that place. It’s going to be awesome at practice, because I will have to push myself to be in the position I want to be in. When I was choosing a school, I didn’t want to be promised anything. I wanted a fresh start where I have to earn everything.”
The No. 4 Longhorns just earned their first Southeastern Conference tournament championship when they dismantled perennial NCAA Tournament title contender South Carolina, 78-61 on Mar. 8. Texas burst out of the gate with a 14-0 lead, never let its lead dip below double figures and ran away with a wire-to-wire decision. The Gamecocks had claimed the previous three SEC titles, and this was their worst conference tournament loss since 2011.
Coach Dawn Staley has created a dynasty that has reached the heights of the program at UConn that Gino Auriemma has continued to lead or Pat Summitt directed at Tennessee from the late 1980s through the early 2000s.
Could Texas be the new kid on the block under coach Vic Schaefer?
The Longhorns are 10th all time in NCAA Tournament wins, yet this season they have posted 14 wins over ranked opponents. Three of those wins came against teams ranked in the AP top five.
Justice Carlton is a 6-foot-1 sophomore guard that tore through the South Carolina defense to the tone of 13 points in the first quarter. Leading scorer Madison Booker (18.9 points per game) is only a junior, and she’s got sophomore Jordan Lee (13.1 points) as a stout second option. The 2025 No.5 recruit in women’s basketball, according to ESPN, was Minnesota native Aaliyah Crump – who will wrap up her freshman season as the team’s fourth-leading scorer.
“Brihanna has so much left in her, and that’s what’s scary; her upside is ridiculous,” Greg said. “In college, she’ll get 20 hours per week to play and train basketball. Right now, she might get 10 hours per week. She’s going to be around the best athletes in the world. Olympic golfers, great volleyball players, softball players; she’ll eat lunch with the best of the best.”
It’s not a stretch to say Brihanna is walking into an absolute meat grinder when it comes to competition at Texas. There’s no guarantee of playing time. While some athletes reach a fork in the road and choose the path of least resistance to a starting spot and extensive national exposure, Brihanna will have to earn every minute she sees on the court next season in Austin.
“Texas is the toughest place she could have chosen for college,” Riverdale Ridge coach Tim Jones said. “It’s a no-nonsense school. They have lots of talent in that locker room. The wings are tough. The guards are tough.”
Yet, Brihanna found comfort in the challenge of being with some of the most talented basketball players in the entire country. She knows those lofty goals only can be reached if she’s pushed.
“The culture in Texas is great,” she said. “The girls are awesome. They all have the same goals and mentality as me, and I wanted to be around people with the same mindset. Our goal is to go out and win some championships.”
Breaking the Record
Fans squeezed into the Riverdale Ridge stands on Valentine’s Day 2026 to catch a glimpse of history.
Clusters of navy and baby blue balloons lined the gym. Tracy Hill tried to subtly slip into a row of bleachers adjacent to the scorer’s table and behind the visiting team’s bench.
That approach didn’t last long. The announcer recognized her and asked for a selfie. When the crowd started to stir around her, Schaefer introduced himself and asked her to sit near half-court. Greg and Chelsea came over and shook her hand.
A member of the CHSAA Hall of Fame, Colorado Sports Hall of Fame and the National High School Hall of Fame amassed a state-record 2,934 points in her four-year high school career at Ridgway. In 1980 to 1983, when Hill rewrote the record books, there was no 3-point line and girls didn’t use a 28.5-inch ball.
Yet she rang up a 32.2 points per game average, still tops all time in Colorado. Set the mark for most points in a season with 928, and under the tutelage of her father, Steve Hill, helped lead the Demons to 73 straight wins.
But on Feb. 14, she was at Riverdale Ridge, ready to pass the torch to Brihanna.
“This was so important,” Hill said. “Bri needed to know how I feel about her. When she was out there playing, I relived my career through her. It was brilliant. When we met at half-court after she broke my record and embraced, it was like we’d known each other for years. We tuned everything around us out and just had a conversation with each other that we will never forget.”
With a steal and a sprint to the other end of the court, Brihanna etched her name in the history books with a right-handed layup.
Brihanna high-fived a few teammates, hugged a few on the bench and then headed to half-court to embrace Hill.
“The hug, the smile and how we embraced, it wasn’t just we shook hands it was an instant, hug and embrace,” Hill said. “We were in our own little world for a little bit.”
A ride from Nucla, where Hill lives, to Thorton wasn’t easy. Slick roads made it a 6 hour commute. But Hill will treasure the moment she shared with Brihanna.
“It was so awesome,” Brihanna said. “She’s such a nice and genuine person. She drove up here to see her own record broken. That’s so special and amazing. I’m grateful I got to meet her. She told me how proud she was of me. So, I’m glad I broke her record. That record meant a lot to her and everyone in Colorado. It’s so cool she was at the game and I got to talk to her.”
The Call
Ten white digits popped up as Brihanna held the illuminated phone in her hand; the first three coming from a Texas area code.
She didn’t know the number, though. She was a rising eighth grader that just wrapped up her first AAU tournament of the live portion of the recruiting calendar, and it was April.
It was Texas A&M coach Joni Taylor. She’d watched a quarter of Brihanna’s game and told Greg he was going to offer his daughter a scholarship.
“A couple of days later, I got the call,” Brihanna said. “I didn’t know what to say. Little eighth-grade me didn’t talk that much.”
What could she say?
Texas A&M was first to the party. The Aggies let Brihanna know they wanted her skill set in their program. It was the first of many offers to come.
“Her very first AAU team that we went out of state for on that circuit, she picked up her first Division I offer,” Chelsea said. “She stood out at the camps.”
It was only a few years earlier that Brihanna made the decision to pour all of her energy and efforts into basketball. She played volleyball, too, and had a choice to make. As a middle schooler, Brihanna said there’s no way she could have envisioned where basketball would take her.
“Baby Bri would have laughed and looked crazy,” she said when asked if she ever could have dreamed of a college scholarship to play basketball. “In sixth grade I played basketball, but I feel like it wasn’t a sport I was good at. I played volleyball, flag football and even T-ball. But in 5th grade, I decided it would be basketball.
“I like how physical and how competitive it is. I felt like there was a contact part of the sport I was drawn to and that I always grew up watching.”
The Closeup
Surrounded by the towering gray concrete walls in the bowels of Denver Coliseum, Brihanna wears a big smile.
A large white sheet of paper stretches from well above her head and covers the floor. She shifts her black shoes and dribbles a brand-new Wilson Evo basketball between camera flashes.
Chelsea watches the photo shoot. There’s a faded metal door in the background, the kind that makes a racket when it’s rolled up for entrance into the stadium which was dedicated in 1952.
Even in the drab surroundings, Brihanna’s mega-watt attitude is palpable: Her look so professional, her attitude so polished, it’s easy to imagine her raising a Final Four trophy, playing a nationally televised WNBA game in the summer or sporting a red, white and blue USA jersey in the Olympics.
“The Olympics, the WNBA; Bri speaks all those things into existence,” Jones said. “She has those dreams; she has that determination and wants those things.”
A long, black compression sleeve covers her left leg. She’s wearing her black Riverdale Ridge jersey with baby blue piping running down her shorts and around the neck and arms. Her No. 3 is prominent on her torso just beneath ‘The Ridge’ written in white script across her chest.
She’ll share a story in these pages with Brooklyn Gilhooly, a freshman at Regis University studying for the GLOBAL Inclusive College Certificate Program. At Riverdale Ridge, Brihanna has officiated basketball games for the school’s Unified program.
That same easy smile, making sure the players in the game have a great experience, she’s a world-class athlete giving back to the game – to the entire community. Brooklyn wears her gold Regis Rangers jersey; the shield on her chest with a light-blue silhouette of their namesake looking serious.
They shake hands and fall into the photo shoot looking like best friends. Arms draped across a shoulder, Brihanna standing behind Brooklyn, elbows resting on both shoulders wearing ear-to-ear sized smiles.
Brooklyn stands just a shade beneath Brihanna’s shoulders, yet they both look larger than life. Magnetic personalities drawn together under the banner of basketball. Chelsea notes how intense her daughter is in everything she does.
“Ever since she was little – I think it’s a family thing – we are very competitive,” Chelsea said. “Everything we’ve done, whether it’s Girl Scouts, where she’d be the top salesperson in the state of Colorado – anything she did, she wanted to be the best. The Turkey Trot at school, she’d win that every year. Anything with some competition, she wanted to be a part of it.”
That’s the drive that carried Brihanna to become the leading scorer in CHSAA girls basketball history. In fact, no boy has reached the 3,000-point mark. In Colorado, she’s in a class of her own. It’s what will fuel her career at Texas. It’ll motivate her to achieve the great heights to which she aspires.
She’s ready to take the next step. Colorado basketball’s favorite daughter, ready for a world-wide closeup.