BOULDER — This year’s CU women’s basketball team isn’t Ceal Barry’s Buffs. They might be better.
“This team is identical to the 1994-95 team from my senior year,” said Shelley Sheetz, the former Buffs star who’s in her first season as a CU assistant. “That was an Elite 8 team and the best team that’s ever come through this program with the highest ranking, a No. 1 seed in the tournament, (a program-record) 30 wins and finishing the season No. 2 overall in the nation.
“This team has that, and possibly more. I’ve told them, ‘Why not raise a different banner that we don’t have in the rafters?’ We don’t have that Final Four banner yet. This team has the pieces of the puzzle to take this program to the next level.”
Over the last three years, the omens pointing to the Buffs’ ascent have become hard to ignore.
The Buffs toppled Stanford in overtime in 2021 at the CU Events Center, a triumph over the eventual national champions that was the program’s first win over a No. 1-ranked opponent.
The next season, they returned to the NCAA Tournament for the first time in nine years before falling in the first round. Then last year, they built on that with their first Sweet 16 showing in 20 years. And they’ve kept rising this season, opening with beating defending national champion and No. 1 LSU to move to No. 3 in the nation, the Buffs’ highest ranking since 1995.
All of it underscores the work head coach JR Payne has done in her eight seasons to bring CU back to national prominence — and back where the Buffs were in the 1990s and early 2000s under Barry, the Hall of Fame coach.
The confidence of this current team stands in stark contrast to when Payne took over in 2016, when the Buffs were coming off a 7-23 campaign that went down as one of the worst in program history. A full rebuild was in order, and Payne and her associate head coach/husband Toriano Towns were tasked to do it, starting with transforming the program’s culture and confidence.
“When we first got here, we had some talented players for sure, but they had lost so much that they didn’t really believe they could beat Oregon, or beat Stanford, or (any top team),” Payne said. “That’s been the coolest thing to watch over the past couple of years. Now, we actually believe we can beat everyone in the conference and the country.”
Payne and Towns, whose careers have been intertwined since they first met as student-athletes at Saint Mary’s College of California, used their tried-and-true blueprint to accomplish the turnaround. They coached together at Gonzaga, Boise State, Southern Utah and Santa Clara before landing at CU, with Payne as the boss in the latter two stops.
“We used to always say that whichever one of us gets a head job, the other would be the assistant,” said Towns, who is CU’s defensive coordinator. “Once that happened, it was awesome. And one of the beautiful things along the way was that it was always two people that really supported each other’s career.”
In Payne’s first head coaching gig at Southern Utah, the duo took over a down-and-out program and morphed the Thunderbirds back into a winner. In their final year there in 2013-14, Payne led SUU to a school record for wins and the first postseason berth in program history with an NIT appearance.
“When we got there (to Southern Utah), we always like to look back and say that we were the worst team in America,” Towns said. “Truly. They hadn’t won a road game in four years. … But we did a great job of finding kids who were underdogs and who were overlooked by a lot of other institutions. And we were able to bring them in and get them to believe in a collective vision.
“We’re a blue-collar program and we’ve always been that way, so we got those blue-collar kids who were tough and wanted to prove something. We out-worked people, out-scouted people; we built a team of toughness and we-over-me.”
That same philosophy has worked in Boulder.
Payne’s never gotten a five-star recruit or a McDonald’s All-American. Even for the top in-state recruits, CU seems to be an afterthought, although those types of blue chips might be coming soon given CU’s recent success.
No matter: Payne’s still found a way to win “because of the makeup of who we are.”
“The identity and core of our team is under-recruited, chip-on-our-shoulder, super tough, prove everybody wrong,” Payne said. “I wouldn’t say no to (a five-star recruit), but we just haven’t had that opportunity. … For us, the culture of who you are is more important than what you are.”
CU returned four of its five starters from last year’s tournament run, an unheralded cast that as high school players didn’t garner as much attention compared to the stacked rosters at other Pac-12 powerhouses.
Point guard Jaylyn Sherrod, the Buffs’ heart and soul, didn’t have any other Power 5 offers coming out of Birmingham, Ala. But after establishing herself as a cornerstone at CU and bouncing back from hip surgery that ended her 2020-21 season, she could’ve entered the transfer portal in the offseason, where she likely would’ve had her pick of places to play.
But it was her relationship with Payne that kept her in Boulder.
“I’m an intangible (type of) player, and someone who watched all my teammates on my stacked AAU team get all the top offers,” Sherrod said. “But JR was the only one who took a chance on a 5-foot-6 kid from Alabama, and it’s worked out pretty good for us. JR is like a second mom to me.”
Outside of Sherrod, CU’s primary cast also features guards Tameiya Sadler, three-point sharpshooter Frida Formann and former Valor Christian star Kindyll Wetta, plus forwards Quay Miller and Aaronette Vonleh. Transfer guards Sara-Rose Smith (at Missouri last year) and Maddie Nolan (Michigan) have helped round out the Buffs’ depth.
Wetta knows there are more eyes on her because she’s the lone local player on the roster, and she pointed to the team’s rise as reason for Colorado’s top recruits to consider the Buffs. One of the state’s five-stars, Grandview junior forward Sienna Betts, recently committed to UCLA. The other, Riverdale Ridge sophomore wing Brihanna Crittendon, remains uncommitted, but the Buffs have offered her.
“I feel like this program and this coaching staff speaks for itself,” Wetta said. “The locals who are going elsewhere, you see them transferring all the time. … With it becoming a better and better program, there’s no reason why Boulder shouldn’t be a No. 1 option for Colorado recruits. It’s on the table, now it’s just a matter of whether or not (local players) are going to take notice.”
While Wetta hopes another strong season will sway those players, the Buffs are managing fine without them.
Vonleh drew a shout-out from Shaquille O’Neill after the Buffs shocked LSU on national television, and Payne believes she “could be one of the best, if not the best, center in America.” She began her college career at Arizona before transferring last year to CU, where she started 33 games.
“She’s one of the most athletic players I’ve ever coached for her size, strength and agility,” Payne said. “She’s so humble and soft-spoken, but it’s great to see her growing in her confidence, because we’ve always believed she could be that dominant player.”
The Buffs still have room to grow collectively, however, if they want to top last season’s NCAA tournament run.
Their lone loss so far, a 78-60 defeat to North Carolina State at the Paradise Jam Classic, exposed the Buffs’ potential for poor shooting (32.8% from the field). And in their win over Boston earlier this week, CU came out sluggish before pouring it on the Terriers at the end to finish the game on a 38-5 run. Hence Payne’s call for more consistency.
“We need to have better starts in our games,” Vonleh said. “Right now, we’ve been waiting until the third or fourth quarter to turn it on, and just that’s not going to work in the Pac-12. That team we were in the fourth quarter versus Boston is the team that needs to start from the jump.”
If CU can do that, it’ll find success in a loaded conference that currently features five teams ranked within the top 12 in the country, led by No. 2 UCLA and No. 3 Stanford. The No. 7 Buffs, who are moving to the Big 12 next year, have never won the Pac-12.
Sherrod, irked by the blank space on the northwest side of the arena adjacent to a giant display honoring the CU men’s lone conference tournament title in 2012, believes the final year of the Pac-12 presents a prime opportunity for the Buffs.
“Up on that big black wall, the main goal is to have a picture of us up there, up next to the men as Pac-12 champions, and then go ahead and try for a natty,” Sherrod said. “It’s the last year of the Pac-12, so why not be the last team to win it?
“We just have to keep working on playing with and for each other, and incorporating the new players with the veterans. If we do that, I don’t think there’s a team in the country that can beat us when we’re playing together for all 40 minutes.”
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