Raegan Beers right on time for Sooners
Thanks to its senior post, Oklahoma moves past Michigan State into Sweet 16
People don’t really remember it this way, but way back when, in ’08-’09, Courtney Paris was not herself the length of her senior Sooner season.
Perhaps she was tired.
As a freshman, she became the first collegiate player, man or woman, to score 700 points, grab 500 rebounds and block 100 shots. As a sophomore, she did it again.
Nobody had done it before and nobody’s done it since.
Though she would earn first-team All-American status in her third and fourth seasons as well as her first and second, she still slowed down.
Most remember the senior night she grabbed the microphone and earnestly told fans she would pay back all four years of her scholarship if she failed to lead Oklahoma to a national championship.
Lost in the wash is that after averaging 23.5 points, 15.9 rebounds and 3.4 blocks her second year on campus, she averaged 15.9, 13.6 and 2.9 her fourth.
She’s still the program’s best player ever to put on the uniform. She’s still the most dominant player the women’s college game has seen.
But she relaxed.
Didn’t quite have the same fire.
It’s kind of been that way for Raegan Beers.
A third-team AP All-American at Oregon State two years ago, Beers has not repeated the honor since coming to Norman.
After averaging 17.5 points her final season with the Beavers and 17.3 last season at OU, she entered Sunday night averaging 15.8 this one and 14.4 against SEC regular-season foes.
Too often, she’s put herself in foul trouble. Too often, she hasn’t been as engaged as she might have been.
Too often, she scored between 10 and 15 points and grabbed between five and nine rebounds against conference foes — five times — keeping herself from being the fearsome factor she is at her best.
Just not now.
Right now, she’s all there.
So even though the Sooners coughed the ball up 23 times in Sunday night’s 77-71 round-of-32 NCAA tournament victory over Michigan State, and even though it might have been a very different result had the game been in East Lansing rather than Norman, Beers is performing like a woman who doesn’t want to quit playing college basketball.
And that’s a big, big, big deal, most of all because OU’s next opponent is bound to be No. 1 seed South Carolina on Saturday in Sacramento.
Maybe it was the venue:
Lloyd Noble Center.
“I love this place. I love these people,” Beers said. “It was fun to end it in the LNC with this team … This is a really cool team [and] a coaching staff that has poured a lot into me for two years that I’m so, so grateful for.”
Or maybe, just now, she’s found a new level.
Throwing aside OU’s no-show loss to LSU at the SEC tourney, Beers scored 23 and 18 points heading into the NCAA tournament.
Then, Friday, against Idaho, it was 18 points, 10 rebounds and four assists.
Then, Sunday, against the Spartans, it was 18 points, 14 rebounds, no assists but four steals.
And though OU could never open up a 10-point edge on Michigan State, the moment it most appeared the Sooners would not lose was authored by Beers.
With 8:19 left in the third quarter, after OU had already scored the first four points of the half to pull within one, Beers, who found herself unguarded above the free-throw line, rose and swished a 17-footer to put the Sooners up a point and for good.
She followed 34 seconds later with another one just like it, pushing OU ahead 45-42 and forcing a timeout from Spartan coach Robyn Fralick as the arena exploded and Beers and her teammates bounced toward the huddle.
OU might have played a cleaner game, might have shot better than 42.6 percent (29 of 68), but got just what it needed from Beers, just as Beers got just what she needed from herself.
This time, she faced no real foul trouble, it only becoming a factor when her second foul of the third quarter gave her three 3:57 before the fourth.
The 29 minutes Beers played dwarfed her season average of 24.5 and exceeded her SEC average of 26.7, and the 11 shots she got off were more than she’d taken in 12 of her previous 15 games.
All good things.
“We’re a much better team with Raegan Beers on the floor,” Sooner coach Jennie Baranczyk said Saturday.
Sure enough.
And the Sooners are an even better team with Beers playing as she’s playing, flirting with 20 points, grabbing double-digit boards and finding other ways to help, too.
OU, which has taken too many steps backward at various points this season, is getting a big leap forward from … well, let’s just call her the Sooners’ most important player on the days Beers makes herself exactly that.
Now she’s done it a couple straight games at the season’s most important hour.
It’s bound to take a huge effort from all involved to get past the next challenge, but if Beers continues to play as she’s playing, it’s a start.
As for Paris, she kind of found it at the end, too, going for 19 points, 16 boards and six blocks against Purdue on March 31, 2009, a 74-68 victory that sent OU to the Final Four.
Of course, now is not then and Beers is not Paris.
But you never know.