Sooners Seek End to Tournament Curse

Originally Published: May 25, 2010 10:17 PM CDT

Corey DeMoss
Oklahoma Sports Staff Writer

OKLAHOMA CITY – The OU baseball team will enter the Big 12 Tournament Wednesday on a hot streak, but will have to overcome recent history to win its first championship in more than a decade.

The Sooners took home Big 12 championship rings in the conference’s inaugural tournament in 1997, but have been shut out ever since. They have spent much of that time in the shadow of the dominant Texas Longhorns, who have won five of the last eight conference titles.

“The fact that we haven’t been able to put rings on our fingers in the past decade or so ? that almost blows my mind,” sophomore Garrett Buechele said.

The fact that those championship rings have eluded the Sooners for so long has made them even more hungry for a championship.

“For a baseball player, the Big 12 Tournament ranks really high and I’ll tell you why,” said head coach Sunny Golloway. “There’s three opportunities to win a ring, and baseball players get big hang-ups about winning those rings.”

The Sooners earned the No. 2 seed in this year’s tournament, but Golloway will not be happy with simply taking second place.

“We need to go back and we need to win championships,” he said. “We talk about being a championship program, and we’ve got to start hanging championship things and sliding on championship rings.”

OU is peaking at the right time, riding a seven-game winning streak into the tournament. The final three wins came over Kansas, which will also be the Sooners’ first tournament opponent Wednesday.

“They’re playing with a lot of swagger; they’re playing with great confidence,” KU coach Ritch Price said. “The weekend we played them, they were playing as good as anybody we’ve played all year.”

The Sooners are hoping that their recent run will carry into the postseason, and junior pitcher Zach Neal summed up the reason why expectations are high.

“We’re supposed to win because that’s what OU does.”