Chameka Scott, a starting guard on Baylor's 2005 NCAA championship team, died Sunday night from cancer, the school announced. She was 33.
Scott was a native of the Friendswood, Texas, in greater Houston. She played at Baylor from 2002 to 2006, the era in which the Lady Bears first emerged as a national power in women's basketball under coach Kim Mulkey.
Scott averaged 7.8 points and 4.3 rebounds per game during Baylor's 2004-05 championship season and averaged 8.8 and 6.4 the next year as a senior.
Scott played briefly in the WNBA and then overseas for a few years.
Her professional basketball career was cut short, though, by Crohn's disease. Scott then worked for Chevron as a performance coach on a deep-sea oil rig. She was diagnosed with cancer in 2015 after a colonoscopy found a malignant blockage. Scott had recovered from that initial cancer discovery.
But Mulkey, speaking to the media on Jan. 12, said that cancer had returned aggressively to Scott, who was back in the hospital in Houston and receiving treatment. Scott told ESPN.com in 2016 that she approached her battle with cancer similarly to how she approached being a basketball player.
"For me, as an athlete, my body had been tested physically day in and day out," Scott told ESPN in 2016. "So the challenges I had to face with cancer -- the weight loss, the surgeries, the recovery -- no matter how bad it got, I knew there was a process. You push your body hard, then you build back up. And the discipline to do that is like playing, too."
Mulkey, on coaching Scott, said to ESPN: "She did it the right way. She worked her rear end off. She didn't get off the bench much her freshman year, but she never stopped asking questions about how she could improve. She basically worked her way up the ladder into the starting lineup."