Completed Event: Women's Basketball at #23 Alabama on February 15, 2026 , Win , 79, to, 71
Final
Women's Basketball
79
at #23 Alabama
71
University of Oklahoma Athletics
Sooners Eye Second Trip to Final Four
March 24, 2006 | Women's Basketball
NORMAN, Okla. (AP) -- The last time Sherri Coale made it past the first weekend of the NCAA Tournament, it was something like a rite of spring for Oklahoma.
Led by Stacey Dales and LaNeishea Caufield, Coale's Sooners had made it to the round of 16 in back-to-back seasons before losing out in the regional semifinals. An experienced squad, the Sooners were hungry for more and made it to the 2002 national championship game.
"The Sweet Sixteen was like a little checkmark going on to the real business at hand. That team was highly motivated and on a mission,'' Coale said Wednesday as the second-seeded Sooners continued preparations for Saturday's game (ESPN, 1:30 p.m. CT) against third-seeded Stanford in the San Antonio Regional.
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These Sooners didn't start with the same expectations. Picked to finish fourth in the Big 12, Oklahoma's high hopes were built over the course of an impressive season. With freshman center Courtney Paris shattering records, the Sooners became the first team to make an undefeated 16-0 run through the Big 12, then topped it off by winning the league tournament.
After starting the season ranked No. 25, the Sooners climbed to No. 7 before the start of the tournament with Paris leading a squad without a senior in the starting lineup.
"These guys haven't been to the Sweet Sixteen before. This is a whole new deal for them,'' Coale said. "They're excited but they're not giddy, which is good, which tells me that they expected to be here.''
Oklahoma (31-4) got to the regional semifinals with wins over Pepperdine and BYU, the latest successes in a compartmentalized season. The Sooners broke the season down into segments -- first the preseason Women's NIT, then a tournament in San Francisco, the final nonconference stretch and finally Big 12 play and the postseason tournaments. The most recent segment was a two-game "tournament'' in Denver -- also known as the first two rounds of the Big Dance.
The approach has worked almost flawlessly. They're now riding the longest winning streak in school history. The current 19-game span eclipsed a 17-game run in early 2001.
At each stop along the way, Oklahoma has paused to recognize what it has accomplished.
"I think all of us who are hypercompetitive tend to poke ourselves in the eye repeatedly when things don't go the way they're supposed to, so we make it a formal deal to stop and celebrate good things that happen,'' Coale said.
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Now, guard Erin Higgins says she can't remember what losing feels like. After Oklahoma's most recent defeat -- a 75-71 loss Jan. 9 at then-No. 10 Ohio State -- players still felt positive.
"I remember the Ohio State game losing, but I remember it didn't feel like a loss. I remember feeling like, 'Wow, we're not going to lose a game in the Big 12.' We just played so hard and so well,'' Higgins said.
Coale left that game with the best possible feeling.
"I can tell you when we lost to Ohio State, I thought we could go to the Final Four,'' she said.
And so, the Sooners find themselves only two games from reaching that pinnacle for the second time in school history -- taking time again to think about how far they've come, then moving on to the next great challenge.
"There's only 16 of us left. It's definitely a big deal and a big situation,'' said Paris, who needs only 12 rebounds to break the NCAA record of 534 set by Drake's Wanda Ford in 1985.
"It all comes down to what you do on the court, and that's the big part. The process sounds really fun, though. Just everything with it -- getting there and practicing and being part of it all -- is really fun.''
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