NORMAN — It’s hard to know how much of Oklahoma’s struggles would have been abated had Whitney Hand never torn up her knee in the Virgin Islands.
Because when the Sooners really struggled this season, it wasn’t one more gunner they really needed, nor was it a little more scoring punch they sorely lacked.
It was maturity.
A willingness to play hard.
It was the kind of urgency that’s carried from the practice court to the locker room to the tip, no matter how few nor how many fans are there to watch.
Indeed, the only players you could pretty much count on to play hard every night were team captain and starting forward Amanda Thompson and point guard Danielle Robinson. Yet not even those two could guarantee they would also play smart.
It’s easy to forget how much this team struggled. But how else can falling behind 16 points to Arkansas at Lloyd Noble Center be explained? Or being taken to overtime by Marist? Or trailing Army in the second half? Or trailing Creighton in the second half?
The Sooners won every one of those games, but they weren’t getting better. Though coach Sherri Coale has used the word much of the season, they were hardly being resilient, either.
All they were really doing was proving the motivational pull of absolute desperation after playing down to, or below, their opponents for extended periods.
Finally, a few things happened.
What the Sooners had escaped time and time again they finally failed to escape: not so much a loss but an absolute embarrassment of an 18-point homecourt defeat to Texas.
That was their resiliency moment, their sand-in-the-face moment. The very next game, they throttled then-No. 10 Oklahoma State in Stillwater.
A few games later, when No. 1 Connecticut visited, the Sooners led after the half and, even on a night they hit only a third of their shots, the Huskies still new they’d been in a — pun aside — dogfight.
Along the way, the hardest working player on the team, Thompson, found still another gear. The most dynamic player on the team, Robinson, started talking better care of the ball, while also keeping herself out of foul trouble and on the court.
Then Jasmine Hartman emerged. Carlee Roethlisberger began to play better off the bench than she had as a starter. Joanna McFarland became more a weapon and less a mere body when Abi Olajuwon failed to keep herself on the floor.
What the Sooners have done, and may still be doing even as they await Sunday’s late-night NCAA Tournament opener against South Dakota State, is snowball.
OU is just 5-4 over its last nine games but the statistic is meaningless.
The games: Connecticut, at Kansas State, Nebraska, at Texas, at Texas A&M, Oklahoma State and, at the Big 12 tourney, Baylor, Oklahoma State and Texas A&M. Of that entire string, only one team, Kansas State, hasn’t spent time in the top 10.
More important, the Sooners have won three of four; one via dominance, 95-62 over the Cowgirls the last night of the regular season, and the following two in atmospheres that resembled the second weekend of the NCAA Tournament rather than the only weekend of the Big 12 tournament.
Their last effort, a Big 12 title loss to the Aggies, played out more like a showcase for both teams than a clear indication of who might win the next one, should there be a next one.
What OU has done is arrive at a place in which it just knows. It knows it’s going to come out and play hard. It knows its best players will bring something very close to their best games.
It knows it’s no longer a matter of flip a coin and see which team shows up.
The Sooners know everything but whether or not the ball’s going in the basket. Should it, there may be a lot more basketball still to play.
Clay Horning 366-3526 cfhorning@normantranscript.com
