Tully Bevilaqua grew up in a wheatbelt town called Merredin, three hours east of Perth on the Great Eastern Highway, and she spent most of her childhood playing Australian rules football against boys. She arrived in the WNBA as an undrafted free agent in 1998, signed by the Cleveland Rockers, and the league took its time figuring out what to do with her. The Indiana Fever figured it out in the spring of 2005, and the franchise was never quite the same.
She came to Indianapolis by way of Portland and Seattle. She was a founding member of the original Portland Fire in 2000. She won a championship with the Seattle Storm in 2004 — a role player on a ring team coached by Anne Donovan, behind Sue Bird and Lauren Jackson. Indiana signed her as a free agent the next spring and handed her the job nobody else on the roster wanted, which was to put her face in the ball-handler's chest every night for forty minutes.
What followed was the defensive run that built the Fever's identity. She made the All-WNBA Defensive First Team in 2005, 2006, 2008, and 2009, and the Second Team in 2007 and 2010 — six straight years on the league's defensive honor roll, every one of them in Indiana stripes. She paired with Tamika Catchings at the top of the floor and made opposing guards spend the entire possession working uphill. The Fever became the team you did not want to draw in May.
In 2009 she helped take Indiana to its first WNBA Finals. The Phoenix Mercury won the series in five games, but the run is still the moment longtime Fever fans point to when they explain what the franchise was before the championship arrived. Tully was thirty-seven years old that summer. She played in Beijing the year before with the Opals and brought home a silver medal. She had already lived three basketball lives by the time she was doing her best work in Indianapolis.
She left Indiana after the 2010 season, played two more years in San Antonio, and retired in 2012. The Fever won the title that October — Catchings, Douglas, January, Zellous — and the championship rightly belonged to the team on the floor. But the culture they played out of had Tully's fingerprints on it. She had spent six years showing what the standard looked like.
She came back to the franchise as a coach in 2024 and the Fieldhouse crowd remembered exactly who she was. The Vault keeps her here at the front of the defensive era — undersized, undrafted, unrelenting, and the reason the rest of it got built.