​BATON ROUGE, LOUISIANA – MARCH 22: Head coach Vanessa Blair-Lewis of the George Mason Patriots during the First Round of the 2025 NCAA Women’s Basketball Tournament held at Pete Maravich Assembly Center on March 22, 2025 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. (Photo by Beau Brune/NCAA Photos via Getty Images) | NCAA Photos via Getty Images Flour, eggs, sugar, frosting. Guard, forward, center.The first group of ingredients is for baking a cake. The second is for putting together a basketball team.George Mason women’s basketball head coach Vanessa Blair-Lewis strikes the connection between the two and likens a college basketball team and season to baking a cake.“The exciting part comes from when you get them all in the bowl and you start mixing it,” Blair-Lewis said. “That’s what non-conference is. You start mixing this together. We’re going to learn some things about ourselves, maybe some lumps we got to kind of bang out and get the batter smooth.“Come conference time, we’re going to put that cake in the oven. You’re going to have the temperature all set, and then it’s going to bake. You’re going to find out what you have. This part of it is the exciting part. You have all the ingredients, and you’re just starting to stir it up to find out what this cake is going to look like. And then in March to be able to take it out of the oven and celebrate.”Blair-Lewis has fine-tuned the Patriots’ recipe.George Mason won its first Atlantic 10 championship in 2025 and earned its first NCAA Tournament berth. GMU won a share of the A10 regular-season title last season, another first for the program.That’s a far cry from the three-win team Blair-Lewis inherited when she took over the program in 2021.“We just went to work,” Blair-Lewis said. “We believed big enough that we weren’t surprised by the results, and that’s where our hashtag comes from, ‘believe big.’ If you’re going to believe, you might as well believe big. There’s no limits on believing. That’s a part of my faith. That’s a part of being faith-based. We believed big, and we did it. We did the thing that we said we were going to come here to do. It’s still a giant that can be woken up. We still have so much more to do here.”Listen to the full interview with Blair-Lewis on the “Anything But Mid” PodcastSpotify:View LinkApple Podcasts:View LinkThe job is far from done for Blair-Lewis and her staff. The Patriots lost all five starters and seven of their top eight scorers from last season’s team that went 26-10 and 16-2 in the Atlantic 10.Despite the change, Blair-Lewis has a positive outlook on this upcoming season due to GMU’s handful of holdovers and transfer portal additions.“I am probably more excited than I’ve ever been,” she said.Mary Amoatang is the lone returning scorer from that top eight from last year and gears up for her sophomore season after garnering All-Rookie and All-Defensive team honors as a freshman. The Columbia, Md., native av