Where are they now? TCU’s ‘Sutton Twins’ are all grown & loving the Horned Frogs’ Sweet 16 run
In terms of achievements that were once equally preposterous and inconceivable 30 years ago, TCU reaching the Sweet 16 in women’s basketball is on the same level as the school making the national title game in football.
Until 1996, few programs in NCAA Division I women’s basketball were less relevant, or worse, than TCU; it existed in name only. Unlike the football team, which wasn’t good, TCU cared about that sport. The women’s basketball team received no such sentiments.
As the current players, coaches and school celebrates their record-breaking season that has them in the Sweet 16 for the first time where they will play Notre Dame on Saturday in Birmingham, Ala., most of them have no idea just how bad it used to be.
They know they were 1-17 in Big 12 play two years ago, and last season forfeited games because of injuries which led to midseason open tryouts just to find warm bodies.
They don’t know about the ‘80s, or early ‘90s when the program existed mostly to satisfy Title IX requirements.
That began to change in 1996 when the school hired former New Mexico State coach Mike Petersen, who in his first year landed a pair of recruits from 2A Gunter, Texas who started the process of changing it all.
When a program looks back at the point of origin of its success, the arrival of twins Amy and Jill Sutton was a flag in the dirt for a team that is now on the biggest stage for the first time in its history.
“It’s hard to say there weren’t some doubts. I am glad we didn’t have the transfer rules then that exist now,” Amy Sutton, now Porter, said in a phone interview.
Amy Porter is currently a high school teacher; she and her husband, former TCU football player Ashby Porter, live in Celina. The couple has two children, ages 19 and 20. Ashby and Amy recently closed on a house near TCU’s campus, where they plan to attend as many games as possible.
Jill Dodd is married and lives in North Richland Hills with her husband; the couple has three children, ages 19 to 8. Jill coaches and teaches at Fort Worth Christian.
Without young people buying in to something that exists only in an imagination, TCU is not where it is today.
TCU’s program started in 1977, when the team was a part of something called the Texas Association For Intercollegiate Athletics for Women. In the five years it was a member of the TAIAW, TCU had three winning seasons.
After that, when the program joined the Southwest Conference, it fell to a level that no search party could have located. From 1981 to 1996, the team never had a winning season, was 91-287 overall, and 28-178 in conference. They were a combined 0-28 in its final two SWC seasons.
It was common that good teams would not play their starters more than five minutes against those bad TCU teams; the rumor was Texas once didn’t even bother to bring their regulars for a road trip to Fort Worth. And attendance? Just make up a number, because no one was checking.
That’s the program Petersen inherited, and convinced the Sutton twins to join.
“A lot of schools would not recruit us because we were a package deal, and the fear was that we were the same player,” Jill said. “We had gone on a recruiting visit to Southwest Missouri State (now Missouri State). And that was when they had (NCAA scoring leader) Jackie Stiles, and when we came back we were convinced that’s where we were going to go.”
Their parents encouraged them to look at TCU. These were small town girls whose graduating high school class was 32. The twins didn’t realize the jump from Gunter to Springfield, Mo. was bigger than they expected, and their parents knew it.
Between the proximity, and Petersen’s sales job, the Sutton twins changed their minds and committed to TCU, starting in 1997.
“Petersen convinced us that they would turn it around and that’s what sold us,” Amy said.
The arrival of twins is always a good marketing hook, and that was successfully used to land some media coverage that the program previously never experienced. A local TV reporter produced a profile on the twins, and asked them, “Were you born on the same date?”
Other than a small mark, distinguishing one from the other required a detective’s eye, or a jersey number.
In the Sutton’s second season, and third under Petersen, TCU finished 16-12 for its first winning record as a Division I program. Petersen, however, left after that year to join his close friend, Dan Monson, to serve as his assistant coach on the men’s basketball team at the University of Minnesota.
That departure left a mark on the entire roster. The Sutton twins had two years remaining of eligibility, but at the time there was no transfer portal. To transfer required sitting out a year.
“(The portal) would have made it so easy to bail, and we couldn’t,” Amy said. “After he left, that was hard. There was a lot of uneasiness when they hired (Jeff Mittie).”
The entire team stayed, and in the Sutton’s senior year under Mittie, TCU finished 28-8, won the Western Athletic Conference, and its first ever NCAA Tournament game, an upset over Penn State.
“To win that game, it ended our careers in a way that felt like we really accomplished something,” Jill said. “And now, this (current) team is blowing the doors off of it.”
All of these things start somewhere, and for TCU it was with the arrival of the twins from tiny Gunter, Texas.
“It was the whole group. When we signed we also had Karen Clayton, Sally Burrows, Sally Spencer and later we had Misty Meadows and Shonda (Mack) and Tricia Payne,” Amy said. “We were all a part of it.”
Could they have envisioned where TCU is today, in the Sweet 16? Yes. They did.
While they are not on the team, they are a part of it.
This story was originally published March 25, 2025 at 3:56 PM.
