Horns have score to settle with OU
AUSTIN — The thirdranked Texas women’s basketball team will travel to No. 20 Oklahoma for a Wednesday night matchup between the top two teams in the Big 12.
The Sooners (20-7, 14-2 Big 12) currently hold a one-game lead over the second-place Longhorns (26-3, 13-3) with just two games left in the regular season, the teams’ final one in the league before moving to the SEC.
Texas is entering the rivalry game on an eightgame win streak and its current ranking in the Associated Press poll is the highest one it has received all season. The Longhorns have found a way to win despite multiple setbacks, including the loss of star point guard Rori Harmon to a season-ending ACL injury in late December.
“It’s so difficult to do it with a healthy team,” Texas coach Vic Schaefer said Monday. “And to know that this group’s done it with 40 games missed by starters. …It’s really just quite remarkable.”
Aside from Harmon, starting forwards DeYona Gaston and Taylor Jones have had to sit out for multiple games due to various injuries. Freshman forward Madison Booker, who morphed her own game to take over for Harmon, also had to miss one game.
Despite the injury bug, the standard for the Longhorns remains the same. Texas is still very much in the running for another regular-season conference title and another NCAA Tournament run, “Do I want more for them? Absolutely. Am I demanding? Absolutely. We don’t apologize for that around here but I also realize, and I see it everyday, what they’ve accomplished to date,” Schaefer said.
The next thing Schaefer wants from his team is a win at Oklahoma. Aside from having the best conference record in the Big 12, Oklahoma is also the most recent team to beat Texas, with a 91-87 win in Austin on Jan. 24.
“Sometimes you need to get your butt kicked to realize that you need to kick it in gear and that everybody is out for you,” junior guard Aaliyah Moore said. “That game for us was an eye-opener about things that we needed to work out. We did not play good team defense at all.”
Schaefer did not mince his words either when discussing the loss to Oklahoma.
“There’s nothing at Texas that’s done that way — nothing,” he said. “So it’s not OK for us as a program affiliated with Texas to do that, and they needed to know that. And they got the message.”
Since allowing the Sooners to score 91 points on them, the Longhorns’ past eight opponents averaged just 57.1 points per game.
“There probably were missed layups, so many other things that we could have done better to change the outcome of the game,” Moore said. “But we know that if we lock down on defense, we have a chance to win.”
Even though the ending to Harmon’s season may have seemed an impossible obstacle to overcome a few months ago, the Longhorns are rising to the occasion. Another conference title remains very much possible.
“We’re still in the hunt for a Big 12 championship,” Schaefer said. “That’s quite remarkable. You have to give them their props.”