Rematch with Notre Dame gives Sooners chance to see how far they’ve come without injured Hand

Sooners get anticipated rematch with Irish

NORMAN, Okla. — When Whitney Hand let out a shriek, Oklahoma coach Sherri Coale knew immediately what had happened. She had seen it, and heard it, all before.

Star point guard Danielle Robinson feared the worst, too. And she ended up being right.

Hand wouldn’t be coming back after the damage done to her right knee, not this season. The Sooners, already without former national player of the year Courtney Paris and twin sister Ashley Paris, would have to try to duplicate last season’s run to the Final Four short-handed.

“We were shocked, really,” said sophomore guard Jasmine Hartman, recalling the team’s immediate reaction after Hand was hurt on Thanksgiving weekend. “We tried not to be shocked but of course we were shocked because Whitney’s our best player.”

Hand, who emerged as Oklahoma’s primary outside threat as a freshman last season, tore a ligament in her right knee during a blowout win against San Diego State during the Paradise Jam tournament in the Virgin Islands.

While that diagnosis wasn’t immediately known, Coale had a good idea what doctors would say once the Sooners got back to the U.S.

She saw three different players suffer the same injury back in 2003, when Oklahoma was last coming off a Final Four trip.

When she addressed her team after the San Diego State game, she tried to prepare them for the possibility that Hand wouldn’t be back this season.

“I just remember their resolve, that they weren’t all in the locker room crying and panicking,” Coale said. “I’m sure that they did plenty of crying away from that, but as a team collectively, they never showed anything but resolve. They didn’t even wince.

“I can remember their faces just drawn together in that locker room and their heads shaking and them believing. Just do the same thing we wanted to do. We just might have to do it in a little different way.”

The coping began the next day when Oklahoma lost 81-71 to Notre Dame. On Sunday night, they will face the Irish again, this time in Kansas City, Mo., in an NCAA tournament regional semifinal. Notre Dame is seeded second and Oklahoma third.

In the first meeting, Oklahoma fell behind 21-8 before rallying to take the lead in the second half. But just as soon as the Sooners went up on Carlee Roethlisberger’s 3-pointer, Notre Dame roared back with 20 straight points over the course of 7½ minutes.

“We didn’t know who we were when we played them the first time. We had lost Whitney less than 24 hours earlier and we had just figured out who we were with Whitney, and then we were without her,” Coale said. “So, we were sort of a headless horseman.”

Coale didn’t get a single point from her bench in the second half against the Irish. Just five games into the post-Paris era, she and her staff had to create a new game plan without another key player.

Roethlisberger flourished in Hand’s starting spot for a time, then was replaced late in the regular season as Coale went with Hartman’s defensive presence. Roethlisberger now comes off the bench with freshman post player Joanna McFarland, and the two are the only reserves that have cemented regular roles for the Sooners.

Instead of finding a replacement for Hand, the Sooners have found other ways to win without her. Hartman regularly gets assigned to slow an opponent’s top perimeter threat, freeing Robinson of the responsibility and allowing her to focus more on the offensive end.

Roethlisberger provides more offensive punch and the versatility to score inside, as she did in Oklahoma’s second-round win against Arkansas-Little Rock, or hit an occasional 3-pointer.

“When we got back from the Virgin Islands, we talked about what everybody was going to have to do,” Robinson said. “Everybody had to be willing to do extra to make up for the loss of Whitney, and that’s what we’ve done.”

All their work has allowed the Sooners to come full circle, and a victory in the rematch against Notre Dame would net them only their third berth in the round of eight — even if this isn’t how they had envisioned it.

“I think it’s been a little bit more patch and glue and twist than maybe it would have been if Whit were here,” Coale said. “But that’s OK. There are lots of ways to win.”