Dungee, Mulkey part of a national trend

The Sooners losing promising sophomores Chelsea Dungee and Nancy Mulkey in the last week mirror a trend of top players transferring.

NORMAN — For the majority of Sherri Coale’s 21-season tenure as the Oklahoma women’s basketball coach, the Sooners have built an unshakable foundation.

Under Coale’s direction, the team has made 18 consecutive NCAA tournament appearances with 15 20-win seasons.

Coale’s teams have achieved those feats thanks in large part to high retention rates. From 20092016, Oklahoma had only four players transfer from the program.

But in the last week, Coale granted releases to two of her most promising rising sophomores: Chelsea Dungee and Nancy Mulkey.

Neither appeared to write a public explanation on social media, only retweeting announcements of their transfers on Twitter. Both of their Instagram accounts are private.

Both entered the season ranked in ESPN’s top-100 prospects for the class of 2016 and combined to start 36 games. Each player was in a position to be a key contributor in the upcoming season.

Dungee, however, was granted a release to transfer a week ago, and Mulkey followed six days later, becoming just the fifth and sixth transfers in the last seven years.

While the transfers are usual for Coale’s typically rock-solid program, the moves aren’t all that unusual for women’s basketball players.

“I think this is the new normal in women’s basketball,” said ESPNW women’s basketball college basketball writer Mechelle Voepel. “It’s been that way, really the last few years it’s been very noticeable.

“This year, you look at for instance, the national championship team had two super, high-profile transfers on it. Next year, Connecticut is going to have really high-profile transfers.

“I don’t think it’s anything that is specific to any program or conference or region of the country. It’s more reflective of the mindset of today’s players and also the world we live in now in terms of social media and how they view their situation and how quickly they want things to change if they’re not happy.”

This season alone, many top players have left their programs without much explanation.

Big Ten freshman of the year and WBCA National Freshman of the Year Destiny Slocum announced she would continue her career at Oregon State a week ago. Slocum entered the season as a member of Maryland’s top-ranked recruiting haul, and she averaged 11.2 points and six assists in the Terrapins’ 32-3 season.

Slocum is the second consecutive Big Ten Freshman of the Year to leave her original program after Nebraska rising junior Jessica Shepard, who was committed to the Huskers throughout her high school career, announced her intent to transfer in March. Shepard, who won the conference rookie honor in 2016, left Nebraska after scoring 1,112 points, reaching the 1,000-point threshold faster than any other player in Nebraska history.

Slocum didn’t give a reason for her transfer, and she wasn’t the only Terrapin to leave the program in 2017. Freshman Jenna Staiti and sophomore Kiah Gillespie also elected to leave the program. Staiti has already found a new home at Georgia, and Gillespie said she was leaving the team because of “personal family issues,” according to The Associated Press.

Rutgers, another Big Ten program, also took a hit as it granted transfer releases to four players — including its top three scorers — at the conclusion of the 2016-17 season.

In the ACC, Louisville lost three players after the season including rising sophomore Ciera Johnson, who was a McDonald’s AllAmerican.

The Big 12 isn’t immune to this transferring trend as Baylor center Beatrice Mompremier, a top-20 player in the 2015 class, was granted her release in early April. Oklahoma State freshman forward Alexes Bryant, a McDonald’s AllAmerican nominee in high school, decided to leave the program in February.