Tramel: Jennie Baranczyk needs talent upgrade at OU

Baranczyk dreams of championships, but OU must upgrade its talent level

NORMAN — Jennie Baranczyk fell in love with basketball by tagging along her to older sister’s practices at St. Pius grade school in Des Moines, Iowa.

Des Moines then had no youth basketball for girls, so Baranczyk – then Jennie Lillis – joined the boys teams at the YMCA.

“I loved every second of it,” Baranczyk said. “I love basketball. There’s nothing better than being part of a team.”

Now Baranczyk has joined a new team. The unique basketball history shared by the states of Oklahoma and Iowa crossed again Tuesday, when Baranczyk was introduced as OU’s women’s coach, succeeding icon Sherri Coale, who retired after 25 seasons at the Sooner helm.

Iowa and Oklahoma were the last two states to play the antiquated 6-on-6 high school version of the game — two sets of 3-on-3, with no one allowed to cross the midcourt line. Iowa dropped 6on-6 in 1993, Oklahoma two years later.

Baranczyk missed the halfcourt game by a few years; she graduated from Dowling Catholic in West Des Moines in 2000, played at the University of Iowa and began a coaching career that eventually landed at her hometown Drake.

“When you’re part of a team, you get to work together for something great,” Baranczyk said from a Lloyd Noble Center podium. “We did that when I played at Iowa, and we did that at Drake, and we’re going to do that here.”

Baranczyk won the press conference. But coaches almost always win the

press conference; Joe Castiglione wasn’t going to hire a dud.

So that was the easy part for Baranczyk. The hard part will be restoring the luster to an OU program that stagnated in the final four seasons under Coale, who had taken the Sooners to three Final Fours and 19 straight NCAA Tournaments.

The hard part will be recruiting – and retaining – players who can compete against Baylor instead of Missouri State.

That was Coale’s downfall. The Sooner talent level fell, some of the elite players transferred, and OU was no match for Kim Mulkey’s Bears. In the past 11 seasons, the Sooners are 1-20 against Baylor, winning only with a 2015 upset.

So when Baranczyk talks about winning championships, a road that went through Norman back in Coale’s glory days and now goes through Waco, that means recruiting better players.

And when Castiglione talks about OU being a destination program, that means recruiting better players.

“When we got onto this search, we found how people really thought about the Oklahoma program,” Castiglione said. “They see the University of Oklahoma program that some people term a blueblood. They know from the banners you see here, the Final Four appearances, the consistent championship performance, the way women have succeeded in our program.”

So all the talk that every coach talks – Baranczyk, Porter Moser, Coale before her retirement, Lon Kruger, doesn’t matter who – is relevant and right, but it means nothing if you’re overpowered on the talent end. And OU, by its standards, hasn’t had the talent it had when Phylesha Whaley and Stacey Dales and the Paris twins and Danielle Robinson wore crimson.

“At Oklahoma, you can attract players from all over the country,” Baranczyk said.

“Starting with in-state recruits. There’s a lot of talent here in Oklahoma.

That’s what we want to be able to do first. Obviously, we’ll be able to expand as well. With my background, we’ve been able to recruit all over the country. Anywhere from LA to New York to everywhere in between.”

Baranczyk said all the right things, saying she wanted geographic diversity on her staff – which hopefully means an assistant or three with strong Texas ties. And she also dropped a hint when talking about the 6-on-6 heritage that Oklahoma and Iowa share.

The 6-on-6 style emphasized fundamentals, and there’s still a remnant of that in this part of the country, though those rules have been gone more than a quarter century. Baranczyk said she implements some old drills from 6-on-6 days in her daily practices.

“Every day, we work on some intuitive-play drills,” Baranczyk said. “I want them to continue to be basketball players. One of the things we do is a version of 6-on-6. Lot of questions when you first start. ‘What do you mean you can’t cross halfcourt? What do you mean you can’t do this? What do you mean I have to be defense the whole time?’”

But Oklahoma’s different geography lifts it a step above Iowa. Bigger state. Right next to a huge state. Oklahoma provides access to all kinds of bigger, faster, stronger players. The kind of players Baylor has used to dominate the Big 12.

“That’s what I’m really excited about, to put that together,” Baranczyk said.

Baranczyk knows the score. She’s no longer in the Missouri Valley. She’s in the Big 12. “A beast of a league,” Baranczyk said. “But our goal is to win championships and to compete for championships. Oklahoma has the pedigree.”

Now it just needs the kind of ballplayers OU had when Coale was riding high.

Berry Tramel can be reached at 405760-8080 or at btramel@oklahoman.com. He can be heard Monday through Friday from 4:40-5:20 p.m. on The Sports Animal radio network, including FM-98.1. Support his work and that of other Oklahoman journalists by purchasing a digital subscription today.

PHOTOS BY BRYAN TERRY/THE OKLAHOMAN New OU women's basketball coach Jennie Baranczyk said Tuesday at Lloyd Noble Center that the Sooners' “goal is to win championships and to compete for championships. Oklahoma has the pedigree.”