Editor's note: Oklahoma coach Sherri Coale will share a diary with ESPN.com throughout the 2002-03 season.

Feb. 24, 2003

	Coale

We finally beat Iowa State and it wasn't even my birthday! Now my scrappy bunch of tattered but not torn troopers have given me something even my Final Four glory girls couldn't: a victory over the Cyclones. If I could stick it on my fridge, I would.

My warriors have had an uphill climb. Imagine being the squad that follows the best women's basketball team in the history of an institution. Imagine trying to be Stacey Dales or LaNeishea Caulfield or Rosalind Ross. Imagine trying to keep your coach's season record on an upward escalation -- when last year's tally reads 32-4. Suddenly it's like trying to buy Donald Trump a Christmas present when you don't own the moon.

Three games remain in Big 12 play. Members of the media ask lots of questions that have to do with "have to's" these days. I have always hated that phrasing in sports. There is never really any game you "have to" win. Oh, certainly every game in the NCAA Tournament is a "have to" or your season is over. But "have to's" seem to me to belong more in the operating room than on the basketball court. We need to finish strong to earn a spot in "Bracketville," that's for sure. (I know that was a one-year Nike campaign, but it was good enough to endure.) We've played the nation's fifth-toughest schedule, we have an RPI in the twenties, and we have a conference tournament yet to play that is loaded with opportunity. The crowded room has a back door, but I'm not telling anybody. This squad needs to learn to walk through the front one in an orderly fashion.

This has been a season of warped time. It seems like only yesterday Stacey, Roz and Company were boarding our charter bus in plastic tiaras headed for our sweep of Big 12 tournament honors in Kansas City. And yet, simultaneously, this year's season opener with Caton and Erin on the floor in Tennessee seems like another lifetime. I imagine that one day I will speak of this season in much the same manner that my grandparents describe their early treks to school. I can only hope it offers me the patience and the wisdom their experiences afforded them. Most days I get the feeling it will leave me with 80's hair and an out-of-touch vocabulary instead.

	Theresa Schuknecht helps make OU's senior class "anything but typical," writes Coale.

Wednesday is Senior Night and it's never very easy. It's hard for fans or coaches or teammates to say goodbye to people who have become part of who they are. Sometimes players graduate and take with them points and rebounds and assists. And sometimes they don't. But they never just leave. Something always accompanies them when they go.

Our current senior class is anything but typical. Theresa Schuknecht graduates in May after one year of competition in a Sooner uniform. She transferred here last year as she enjoyed our national title run in redshirt fashion. She inherited this season not only the lofty expectations of a post-Final Four squad, but the unanticipated dependency of a young team without its leader. That's certainly more than she bargained for, but she's not once tried to run away. Theresa is an outstanding student-athlete who teaches children's Bible hour at her local church and will graduate with honors with a degree in business.

Kate Scott is a great story. She is an English major from Overland Park, Kan., who walked on our burgeoning team four years ago. She caught our attention with her conditioning, she impressed us with her 3-point shooting, but she won us over with her work ethic. In about a year Kate will be in a classroom somewhere extolling the virtues of Ophelia to 16- and 17-year-old kids and in the process, no doubt, will pass on to them the value of showing up every day and making a contribution in your own special manner. Scholarshipping her has been one of my best decisions in seven years.

And last but not least, we say goodbye to Stephanie Simon. Steph is from Clinton, Okla., a high school all-stater in both basketball and tennis, and like Kate, a walk-on who earned her ride. Steph is one of the toughest players I've ever been associated with. Her toughness is as physical as it is mental, and though she has spent more of her career on the sidelines in street clothes than she did in uniform, she never once failed to affect our play. We will miss her even keel and her grit. I'm calling it right now: She will make an indelible mark on the world.

These three players have been an important bridge in perhaps the toughest of all times. Their insistence that this thing we have created not slip away is one of the main reasons it hasn't. Teams don't achieve without special seniors. The aspiration of Theresa, the steadfastness of Kate and the toughness of Simon are threads of the fabric of our program. They just keep showing up, and in their image, so does our team.

For more on coach Coale and the Sooners, visit Oklahoma's official athletic site.