AUSTIN, Texas — Here’s the way it’s worked for the Oklahoma women.
Even before the preseason, all the way back in the fall, it was being communicated this must be a team that plays great defense. That was the lesson from the Sooners’ ouster in last year’s NCAA Tournament.
So OU came into the season with a new defensive focus. The idea was it would complement a Sooner offense that was already accomplished and returned five starters. Well, OU played defense well enough but the offense, at least once conference play began, was slow to come around. It began to come around when Sooner coach Sherri Coale shuffled the lineup, putting Jenna Plumley at the point.
For eight games since the shuffle, three of them in the Big 12 tournament, the Sooners played progressively cleaner on the offensive end. Graduation day may have come in Game 9, the first round of the Dayton Regional at Frank Erwin Center, when the Sooners shot almost 57 percent and turned the ball over only 10 times against Southeast Missouri State.
If that wasn’t a big enough step forward, OU turned around and played more defense than it’s played all season Monday night in a 78-47 victory over Marquette.
If OU already appeared to be peaking at the right time, then its peak was raised in the first two rounds of the NCAA Tournament. The Sooners can only hope their new level continues to rise, or even holds steady, when they meet Mississippi Sunday at Dayton Arena in Dayton, Ohio.
“That’s how we have to play,” All-American center Courtney Paris said. “There’s no pressure. There’s just having fun and executing on offense and defense.”
Indeed, OU managed to do both at the same time, at its highest level yet, in the second half against the Golden Eagles.
They Sooners shot 58.6 percent (17-for-29) from the floor and 87.5 percent (14-for-16) from the free-throw line. Meanwhile, they held Marquette to 20.5 percent (8-for-39) shooting. They also outrebounded the Golden Eagles 30-16. OU even blocked five shots after the half.
The transformation from a team struggling to find itself to one that has everything figured out would appear to be complete. Coale believes it could never have happened without just such a regular season, filled with peaks and valleys.
“We aren’t able to play this way if we don’t go up and over and through all the mountains that we’ve had to go through the whole year,” she said.
Paris believes the journey has been necessary, but the fruits are clear.
“This year, it’s been harder,” she said. “We had to find a new chemistry. We had slumps. We had to blend … We figured out how to get more people to play together.”
And if there’s any more to gain than finding their best over the first weekend of the NCAA Tournament, the Sooners may have done just that by way of the circumstances in which they pulled away, first against SEMO and then Marquette.
Both times OU pulled it off with Courtney Paris on the bench.
Paris was out for 6 minutes against SEMO and the score went from 22-14 SEMO to 32-27 OU. Against Marquette, Paris sat the final 11:53 of the first half after committing her second foul. The Sooners outscored the Golden Eagles 19-9.
“We wanted to play every second,” reserve point guard Britney Brown said.
On both sides of the court, independent of who might have been on the floor, OU was, at least, very close.
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JERRY LAIZURE
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