It was a tough weekend at home for Arizona women’s basketball. They pushed Baylor to overtime only to come up just short. Then, they went into halftime against Iowa State only down by four but allowed the Cyclones to push that to nine in the early seconds of the second half and got blown out by 21.
Arizona head coach Adia Barnes and post player Breya Cunningham talked about some of the storylines this week on her radio show.
Post play in the Big 12
One thing that stands out in Big 12 play is that most teams have a dominant post. Hannah Gusters at UCF, Sedona Prince at TCU, and Cunningham are just some of the examples.
“The Pac-12 was a lot more…tactical, a lot more versatile,” Barnes said. “I felt like there was just more versatility in the game. I thought the coaches were really different, but I think the Big 12 was a lot more post play, a lot bigger. The post players aren’t as mobile, but they’re bigger, like girthier inside, and I’m glad we were a little bit bigger than before. But completely different. I would have never gone into the Pac-12 and said, ‘Oh, we need a really big body.’ ln the Big 12, you have to, because every team has a big body.”
Arizona just faced two great posts in Aaronette Vonleh and Audi Crooks. It was a long week for Cunningham, especially after doing battle with Crooks for over 30 minutes.
“I’m still tired,” Cunningham said.
It did have an effect, though. Cunningham held Crooks to her lowest point total since the Cyclones’ center scored 10 against Stanford in the NCAA Tournament last season. It was just the fourth time in Crooks’ career that she had scored 11 or fewer points.
Next up is the league’s best, Ayoka Lee. She’s just one of the challenges the Wildcats will face on their swing through the state of Kansas.
Lee is seventh in the Big 12 at 17.2 points per game, although that drops to 15.4 ppg and No. 15 in conference play. She is eighth with 7.2 rebounds per game in league play and 13th with 6.6 rpg overall. Her 2.1 blocks per game in 16 contests rank third. She’s still in third during Big 12 play, but her numbers have increased to 2.6 bpg.
Lee has something Vonleh, Prince, and Gusters share but Crooks and Cunningham don’t: a lot of experience. The entire K-State roster does. They have nine players who are at least redshirt sophomores (1 grad student, 5 seniors, 1 redshirt junior, 1 true junior, 1 redshirt sophomore). None of the other eight have as many years as the purple Wildcats’ star center.
Lee started college in 2018. While she missed the 2018-19 and the 2022-23 seasons with injuries, she is in her seventh year of college basketball. She has been training and learning in this system for longer than many players stay with WNBA teams.
On officiating
Cunningham fouled out of the Iowa State game, but she didn’t have any fouls in the first half. That might be the most important thing for Arizona because when she sits in the first half, the team struggles to score. From the sidelines, it seemed like the officials let a lot go inside during the first 20 minutes of the ISU game and during the Baylor game, as well.
Cunningham didn’t agree. She also doesn’t think things have improved since moving from the Pac-12.
“No, they both suck,” she said.
While some things have been corrected to ease the foul situation for her, Cunningham doesn’t understand why she’s getting some of the calls that go against her.
From the airwaves to your feed!
Some highlights from this week’s Radio Show w/ Breya! pic.twitter.com/INZtWpRITi— ADIA BARNES COPPA (@AdiaBarnes) January 15, 2025
“The UCF game, when Hannah came at me and I braced myself and I got the foul, like, I don’t know what you want me to do there,” Cunningham said. “I’m not. I didn’t push her at that San Diego game (when called for an intentional foul), either. She was just small.”
Cunningham also doesn’t agree with Barnes not arguing with officials over calls.
“I feel like we should be madder at the refs sometimes,” Cunningham said.
From where Barnes sits, she gets more from the refs by calmly talking to them. She also feels that Arizona has gotten its own breaks, especially with the ubiquitous offensive fouls that are called in women’s college basketball.
On overdribbling
In the past, it was almost a given at the ends of quarters that Arizona’s point guard would dribble the ball until about seven seconds on the clock, then drive to the basket to try to get a bucket or foul. While it may be because the negatives stand out more than the positives, it seldom seemed to work.
That tendency has become more common during other parts of the game. It’s not something Barnes loves, but she has not felt she had the experienced guard depth to sit a player when she falls into that habit.
It’s one reason she has been using Mailien Rolf as a starter in recent weeks, allowing Jada Williams to play off the ball more. The hope is that the guards get shots for each other rather than look for their own shots off the dribble.
Rolf has been a pass-first point guard with the German national program, often playing with two dominant scorers while she concentrates on passing and rebounding. The other Wildcat guards tend to look to create for themselves, especially when they can’t get the ball inside to Cunningham. That often results in poor shooting percentages, charges, or low assist numbers.
Barnes was pleased with how it worked at UCF, but some of those habits cropped up again against Baylor. Even when Williams and Paulina Paris began to score late in the game, it was often off the dribble. It led to the comeback and forced overtime, but the overdribbling earlier in the game helped build that deficit, too. The shots just started falling later.
“I don’t have one play where someone would dribble more than, like, three times,” Barnes said. “So there is not one play I have designed that would take seven dribbles and put up a shot—and put up a shop that’s contested. So offensively, our plan is called .5. So ideally you should have a half a second to pass, dribble, or shoot. If you hold the ball for two or three, it’s a problem. If you hold the ball two, three, four, five, it’s a major problem. And if we were better, you would sit on the bench next to Adia, but we don’t have that choice a lot. So that is never the plan. It is never planned, to get the ball and like, dribble, dribble, dribble and jack up a three. That’s not in any plan. I don’t have an offense called that. It’s not, so the ball should never stick.”
Big 12 travel
This year, travel has been via commercial flights, even when the flight is cross-country like last week’s trip to Orlando. The argument is that there are more flights into that major airport, so the cost of a charter there ($120,000 was the quoted number) outweighs the toll of taking connecting flights from Tucson to Orlando. Commercial flights won out.
That wasn’t possible for the trip to play Kansas State and Kansas this weekend. Both hotel space and flights were difficult to come by. Arizona took a charter to Manhattan, Kan. on Wednesday for their Thursday game.
The Manhattan Regional Airport has exactly five flights into town and five flights out each day. Connections must be made either in Dallas or Chicago O’Hare on the American Airlines affiliate American Eagle. When a large party is flying, there can be challenges. If there are delays, that makes it even more challenging. There just aren’t other airlines or many other flights to transfer to.
Hotels are an issue in several cities. Many of the smaller cities in the Big 12 do not offer much in the way of full-service hotels. That means getting food on-site is more difficult. Meeting space is basically nonexistent. Instead, the team is staying in mid-level chains.
This wasn’t the case when away games were played in former Pac-12 locales like Los Angeles, Seattle, and the Bay Area. The biggest challenges were Salt Lake City, Utah, where Barnes always said there was nowhere open on Sundays as they waited to fly out, and Pullman, Wash.
It’s an even bigger issue this week when Arizona goes to Lawrence. Kansas State’s men’s team takes on Kansas in Allen Fieldhouse on Saturday. That means hotel space was very limited in the city of 96,000 for the game between the Arizona and Kansas women on Sunday.
On opposing arenas
While the travel may not be ideal, Barnes is very impressed by some of the opposing arenas and athletic department staff in the Big 12. She singled out UCF and BYU as having especially professional operations.
“I can tell you, from my experience, BYU was one of the most professional places I’ve been in my career,” Barnes said, adding later, “And I thought, UCF….did a really good job. So, so far, my experience has been great. I felt like in the Pac, it was like that for most of the teams, but one of the teams that did it on like another level as far as professionalism was Oregon. I felt like BYU was that same level.”