Following a 13-0 start to the season, things went downhill quickly for the Colorado women’s basketball team, at least for a little bit. The Buffs’ first loss of the season came against Stanford on Jan. 14 and began an abysmal 1-6 stretch that would’ve been unimaginable just weeks earlier.
But fortunately, it’s a long season. Colorado has since won four of its last five, including a pair of 67-54 victories to secure its first ever road sweep of the LA schools.
The Buffs’ rollercoaster season is quickly heading upwards and for head coach JR Payne, a higher peak comes with higher accountability.
“Every team goes through ups and downs,” head coach JR Payne said follwing the Buffs’ win at USC on Sunday. “Sometimes it translates to more wins or losses, but every team goes through that a little bit. It’s all about how your veterans handle those ups and downs and I think our team was very self-reflective about, ‘What can ‘I‘ do better?’ In this day and age, sometimes that’s hard for people to do. A lot of people point fingers and our team chose not to do that. I think that’s a huge part of our ability to turn it around. Everybody said, ‘Okay, I can do better here, and I can do better there.’ I think when we bought into that is when we really started playing well again, and I do think we’re playing good basketball right now.”
Good basketball may be an understatement for how well the Buffs performed against USC. Led by Mya Hollinghsed (16 points) and Quay Miller (13), the Buffs shot an impressive 47% from the field while holding USC to just 30%. A 17% shooting differential will typically yield a good result, most would agree.
The win also pushed the Buffs to 18-7 and an even 7-7 in Pac-12 play. But more importantly, CU reaching its first NCAA Tournament since 2013 appears imminent, and should come with some decent seeding, too.
Both Oregon schools will come to Boulder this week to round out the regular season before the Pac-12 Tournament begins March 2.
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