For more than two decades, Auburn head women’s basketball coach Johnnie Harris has paced the sidelines of basketball courts after having entered the coaching ranks at the conclusion of her playing days. And at each of her stops, Harris has helped the trajectory of the program.

Her first head-coaching gig at Auburn has been no different.

Hired in April of 2021, Harris inherited an Auburn program that went 5-19 and 0-15 in SEC play the season prior.

In Year 1 under Harris’ leadership, the Tigers increased their number of wins two fold from the season before. By her second season, Auburn mustered a winning record, finishing 16-15.

Now, midway through her third season on The Plains, Harris has the Tigers sitting with a 14-7 record, which features a statement win over Kim Mulkey and the reigning national champions in the LSU Tigers.

Harris and Auburn were presented with another opportunity at a statement win as Dawn Staley and the top-ranked, undefeated South Carolina Gamecocks paid Neville Arena a visit Thursday night. However, Auburn couldn’t get the job done, ultimately falling to South Carolina 76-54 in what was just a five-point game at halftime.

Nonetheless, Staley couldn’t help but take notice of the work Harris has done to get the bow of Auburn’s ship pointed in the right direction.

“She’s here. She’s here. She is here,” Staley said. “She has her talent. She has her defense. She has a great coaching staff. She’s got talent. She’s got players that believe in her system. It’s not a fluke — what’s happening.”

Staley has been around the sport of college women’s basketball as a coach since 2000 — when she took the reins of the Temple’s program — and has been around the consistently improving landscape of women’s basketball in the SEC since 2008 as South Carolina’s head coach.

In Staley’s 16 seasons with the Gamecocks, she’s seen three different coaches at the helm of the Tigers’ program — first catching the end of Nell Fortner’s era, followed by Terri Williams-Flournoy’s nine-year tenure, and now Harris.

And Staley knows Harris inherited a program that had been limping along — something that’s not an easy, overnight fix.

In Staley’s 15 years at South Carolina, the Gamecocks have won fewer than 23 games in a season just three times. And all three of those times came in Staley’s first three years at South Carolina.

“You don’t turn it around as she’s turned it around in three years, in our league, in this day in age,” Staley said of Harris.

And while Harris — as seasoned as she is — doesn’t need the validation, it doesn’t hurt to hear South Carolina’s two-time national championship-winning coach and six-time SEC Coach of the Year honoree sound off like that.

However, Harris would attest she hasn’t done anything special. Instead, she’s simply tried instilling a mindset of toughness.

“That’s our theme, that’s what we’re building this program about,” Harris said. “Yeah, we play really good defense, but you have to be tough to maintain poise to go out there and play a team like that, to play a team like LSU… It’s about toughness and that’s what I’m trying to build this program on.”

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Ahead of Thursday night’s date with No. 1 South Carolina, Auburn’s Savannah Scott tiptoed out into the center circle, where she’d meet South Carolina’s Kamilla Cardoso for the game’s opening tipoff.

It was a lopsided-looking meeting as Scott measured just 5-foot-8 to Cardoso’s 6-foot-7 stature.

But it was Scott who won the tipoff.

Sure, it was a small win that didn’t at all end up foreshadowing what would’ve been the upset of upsets, but sometimes that’s how rebuilding takes shape — in a showing of toughness and the refusal to be intimidated by a certain opponent or moment.

“I’ve been a part of rebuilding and it just takes a little time,” Harris said. “But you have to keep building brick-by-brick. And I think we’re on the right path.”

To Harris’ point, there’s a very good basketball coach who was on the opposing sideline Thursday night that would agree.