BOULDER – Basketball glory was buried so deep in Colorado’s past that when Buffaloes guard Frida Formann went digging to find it, she needed to summon the intrepid nature of Lara Croft, tomb raider.
“I’m a basketball nerd,” Formann told me Wednesday, when I inquired how a player who grew up in Denmark unearthed artifacts from the golden era of CU women’s basketball.
She went straight to the source.
“My freshman year, I did a whole interview project with coach Ceal Barry,” Formann said, while standing inside the Buffaloes’ home arena. Over her shoulder, the glorious achievements of this program’s past were righteously displayed on a banner, hanging so high in the rafters the glory could seem so distant as to be out of reach.
Contrary to rumors of its demise, the CU women’s basketball program never died.
But by the time Formann arrived in Boulder in 2020, the CU program had been left in the dust at the foot of the Flatirons, largely forgotten as a national powerhouse once lovingly built by Barry, who won 427 games during a brilliant career highlighted by NCAA tournament appearances at the Elite Eight in 2002 and Sweet 16 in 2003.
Jaylyn Sherrod, a senior guard whose feisty heartbeat is the emotional catalyst of this team, was a toddler in Alabama the last time the Buffs were among the last 16 teams standing in March Madness.
And that history lesson is not the only reason why we will all be witnesses to a little hoops miracle this Friday, when Sherrod leads her CU teammates into the Sweet 16 against Iowa and Caitlin Clark, who can fill an entire ESPN top 10 list by herself by doing Steph Curry things on the court.
Now they’re here, back in the national spotlight. These Buffs, however, started at the bottom.
During her first road trip on the Pacific-12 Conference trail with the Buffs as a freshman during the first week of 2020, Sherrod went to Oregon, committed five turnovers, missed 7 of 10 free throws and got crushed 104-56 by the mighty Ducks.
True grit, however, steadfastly refuses to be daunted by defeat.
“I always tell people we lost by 100,” CU coach JR Payne recalled. Sherrod “was there as freshman point guard, just lost a game by (58) points, and a reporter asked her what she thought about the Pac-12. The first words out of her mouth were: ‘They have to come to Boulder.’”
Before these Buffs could win big, they had to lose the fear of failure in the face of a challenge that dared them to quit.
It takes a special kind of stubborn optimism to do what Sherrod and the Buffs have achieved to put CU hoops back on the map, by adding new glorious chapters to the program’s history, from beating a top-ranked Stanford team to going on the road in the NCAA tourney and stunning Duke 61-53 in overtime earlier this week.
“We believed we could be special all along,” said Payne, granted the time by CU athletic director Rick George to slowly grow this program into an overnight sensation over the course of the seven long seasons. “I think it was everybody else that didn’t know it, until we started winning games, until we started beating people we hadn’t beaten before.”
How it has happened is what’s so cool. These Buffs, picked to finish eighth in their own conference before the season, genuinely are greater than the sum of their parts. Rather than a superstar, this team is infused with the power of hearts that yearn to be great, all beating as one.
“We weren’t five-star (recruits). We weren’t McDonald’s all-Americans. We weren’t guaranteed an NCAA tournament,” said Sherrod, who averages 11.3 points and 4.9 assists on a squad where there truly can be a different hero every night. “You have to dream and you have to believe in it, because we believed in it when nobody else did.”
Unflinching in the long shadow of a huge banner celebrating the distant past success of a storied CU women’s program, Sherrod and her teammates have intrepidly gone back 20 years to grab the basketball magic that has been there the whole time, waiting for Buffs brave enough to reclaim it.
“We’re finally back,” Formann said, “where we belong.”
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