Coale has seven freshmen on this year’s roster
NORMAN — The Oklahoma women’s basketball team opens with an exhibition against Northeastern State at 7 p.m. Monday.
Earlier last week, Sooners coach Sherri Coale talked about playing with a small lineup this season, competing in the Big 12 with that group and coaching perhaps her youngest team since she’s been at OU.
Q: You want this team to play fast with the small lineup. How has that come along since practice began?
A: "Tempo is a very fragile thing. If you go too fast, it manifests itself with a bunch of ugliness and a bunch of turnovers, a lot of people not knowing what page a lot of the other guys are on. You have to be able to play as fast as you can play collectively. There’s a lot of learning the goes in to that — learning one another, individuals learning about their own capabilities. So there’s a lot of individual things that you figure out, but you’ve also got to figure out one another . ... I think maybe the greatest improvement that I’ve seen has been in terms of our interior guys moving with urgency off of the speed of our perimeter guys."
What are the benefits to playing in the Big 12 with a small, fast lineup?
"You have to make the best of whatever scenario that you have. I’m sure the big teams in the Big 12 think they have the advantage because they’re big. I know when I had Courtney and Ashley Paris, I thought that was an advantage.
Yet I think what we can do is be better decisionmakers, be faster decision-makers, to maybe outwit and outstretch some of that length and size that we’ll see in that league."
What’s it like coaching a team with seven freshmen?
"I love coaching guys that want to learn, and these seven guys really want to learn. It has been so much fun being in the gym with them. They’re curious.
They’re not afraid to be exposed — to try something and fail miserably at it. They’re able to laugh at themselves a little bit and then we come back and we fix it. That’s a process that really helps us grow."