Freshman forward Aishah Sutherland struggles for a rebound during Saturday's WNIT Championship game against the University of South Florida. The Bulls defeated the Jayhawks 75-71.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Deep inside Allen Fieldhouse construction workers and their materials dot the floors and hallways.
For the first time since the start of Kansas’ $7.8 million renovation project, the Jayhawks wandered through and admired the nearly-completed improvements.
They marveled at the players’ lounge with flat screen TVs and leather couches, and sat in a locker room that featured freshly-printed Jayhawks on chairs, cabinets and the floor.
“It feels like everything is at the tip of our hands right now,” senior guard Kelly Kohn said. “We’ve built up this team, we’ve built up experience, we’re building from what we did last year and we’re stepping into a brand new facility. It’s all fitting together.”
That’s evident in the goal that was verbally, and publicly set by Kansas’ players and coaches. The Jayhawks want to compete for the Big 12 championship. Coach Bonnie Henrickson and her players expected to.
Without an apparent clear-cut favorite entering the season, the Big 12 appears open for the taking. Kansas, meanwhile, returns four starters from last year’s team, including preseason Big 12 player of the year Danielle McCray.
“I think in our huddle, realistically, we should expect to be in a position to win a conference championship,” Henrickson said. “We could finish sixth or maybe seventh and still go to the NCAA tournament, but no one wants to finish sixth or seventh. No one would be excited about finishing sixth.”
Last season, Kansas’ players and coaches gathered in the Wagnon Student Athlete Center in late March and watched the NCAA Tournament selection show with a faint hope that Kansas might pop onto the screen.
That never happened, and the Jayhawks found themselves in the Women’s National Invitational Tournament attempting to salvage a season that Henrickson described before the WNIT as a “disappointment.”
Now, in a rather large leap from hoping to make the tournament to fully expecting to make the field, Kansas is relying on an experienced cast to make that goal a reality.
“This year has to be the year,” junior guard Sade Morris said. “This is the year that we have to prove to everybody and back up what we’re saying.”
Kansas’ biggest reason for optimism entering this season is Morris and McCray, a scoring duo Henrickson dubbed “Batman and Robin.”
If Kansas is indeed to contend for the Big 12 championship — if the Jayhawks are going to hold true to their word — McCray and Morris must continue playing well together during the season.
The pair combined to average 34.3 points last season and played their best basketball of the season down the stretch when Kansas inconsequently won nine of its final 12 games.
“This year, there’s no question about it,” junior forward Nicollette Smith said. “We’re going to go to the NCAA tournament. But we’re more thinking about winning a Big 12 championship this year. That’s what we’ve really been focused on.”
Added McCray, who averaged 21.6 points per game last season: “We don’t just want to enter the NCAA tournament. We want to go far in it.”
It’s a far cry from the preseason tone of past seasons, when simply making the NCAA Tournament was a healthy, although sometimes distant goal.
Not this year.
“A lot of media days we’ve come in here and said, ‘Our goal is to go to the tournament and our goal is to be contending for the Big 12,’” Kohn said. “And every year it slips away and slips away. I just feel like this year it’s a whole new feeling.”
As Kohn spoke, her teammates nearby flipped through one of the media guides — a book that ultimately represents the turning of a new season.
Behind the Jayhawks, down a stretch of hallways, workers continued putting the finishing touches on Kansas’ renovations.
“The one thing that these new facilities make our players feel like is you want to be in there every day,” assistant coach Karen Lange said. “You feel like a winner. You also get the sense that these people put this much into us and now it’s time for us to give back.”
— Edited by Megan Morriss
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