Oklahoma’s women’s basketball team received great news Monday when the Associated Press ranked the team at No. 5 — the first time the program had received a top 5 ranking since 2009. As relative newcomers to the SEC (the Sooners played their first season in the conference last year), achieving that ranking is “really cool,” as Coach Jennie Barancyzk said to The IX Basketball by phone Monday.
Barancyzk, who is in her fifth year with the program, added, “The SEC is such a massive conference … to be considered one of those [top 5] teams, you kind of forget sometimes when it’s your first time in [the conference].”
But Barancyzk was just as quick to note that nothing can be taken for granted, and the Sooners still have plenty to prove.
“I don’t think that’s something that we’ll forget or that we will take for granted, and, yet, we know that we’re not where we want to be, either,” she added.
The Sooners are in the midst of what Barancyzk said is “a really fun season,” with a roster that is “gelling and learning and growing.” That roster includes senior Raegan Beers, who contributed 15 points and 11 rebounds against Mississippi State on Jan. 4, as well as freshman Aaliyah Chavez, who chose Oklahoma after an intense recruitment period that included offers from LSU, Texas, and South Carolina.
The roster is “a really, really interesting mix of some experience that’s really, really good, with some really young talent that have incredibly bright futures,” Barancyzk explained. “And we’re depending on them right now to have more experience than they do. And so I think you get to see kind of some of those bumps in up in who we are right now. You see moments that are really good, and then you see moments that we had to get better.”
While the AP’s ranking is notable, she added, the team also has to “understand that sometimes it’s not because you’re really good, it’s sometimes it’s because somebody else lost a game or something changed too. So there’s more to it than just you got really good, and now you’re ranked fifth. It’s a fluid poll for a reason.”
The Sooners are still a new team to many SEC fans, and there’s a lot to learn. When asked what SEC fans should now about Oklahoma, Barancyzk zeroed in on a few key traits: the team is fun, but they’re also “normal people.”
“We play hard and we’re not afraid to fall down,” she explained. “We’re also not afraid of big moments either … I know it doesn’t sound all that impressive or flashy, [but] we’re just a solid blue-collar, roll-up-your-sleeves, ‘let’s go to work and do this together’ type of team. And at the same time, it’s basketball, and we want to give everything we have, but also we want to have fun doing it.”
The Sooners will have plenty of chances to prove they’ve earned this spot in the immediate future. The team’s upcoming slate includes games against Ole Miss, Kentucky, LSU and South Carolina. Three of those four games will be played at home at the Lloyd Noble Center in Norman, Oklahoma, and Barancyzk said the best thing fans can do to keep the team motivated is to simply show up.
“I think the challenge is to is to stay day-by-day, game-by-game,” she said of their upcoming matches. “You can’t play Kentucky before you play Ole Miss, and you can’t play South Carolina before you play Kentucky … They’re very different teams. They’re different game plans. They’re different. You play at different places.
“What I’m excited about is to continue to see our home crowd grow, and I think the SEC has brought that the attention on women’s basketball that at a national level is incredible,” she continued. “We’re trying to grow it in our state here as well. And so to be able to host these great teams, I’m really looking forward to us having a great crowd, and that helps us prepare.
“The best crowds have the best teams,” Barancyzk concluded. “And so we have to continue to grow.”