The first round of the 2012 NBA Playoffs are set and The Oklahoman is calling for an ENCORE of epic proportions, beginning Saturday at the Chesapeake Energy Arena.

Round 1 schedule (all times central):

Saturday, April 28 – 8:30 p.m. – OKC
Monday, April 30 – 8:30 p.m. – OKC

Thursday, May 3 – 8:30 p.m. – Dallas
Saturday, May 6 – 6:30 p.m. – Dallas

Games 5-7, if necessary (times TBD) -
Monday, May 7 – OKC
Thursday, May 10 – Dallas
Saturday, May 12 – OKC

Round of 64 – OSU 72, Central Arkansas 51

A game for the upperclassmen as a pair of juniors on the senior-less squad matriculated classes on the hardwood, right in front of our eyes. By the way, Toni Young likes the postseason. A lot.

Round of 32 – OSU 63, Wichita State 44

[I wasn't at the game, quite unfortunately. Instead I was in Norman covering the first and second rounds of the women's NCAA tournament.]

Round of 16 – OSU 70, Missouri State 57

Big 12 Freshman of the Year Liz Donohoe showed exactly why she received that award as she posted 25 points on 8-of-14 shooting and 14 rebounds. Oh yeah, and Toni Young still likes the postseason. A lot.

Quarterfinals – OSU 78, Colorado 70

This game was won in the trenches. And by the trenches, I’m talking about the paint. OSU outmuscled the Buffs 44-14 in the paint and made the triple-double by CU’s Chucky Jeffery go nearly unnoticed. Point guard Tiffany Bias led the way…even in the paint.

Semifinals – OSU 73, San Diego 57

The Toreros hadn’t a chance on the court of GIA. The defense was stout, the offense was deadly and, you guessed it, Toni Young really likes the postseason. But so do Tiffany Bias and Liz Donohoe. An all-around A game, to be sure.

Finals – OSU 75, James Madison 66

This time I missed the game yet again. I was on the road to Denver for the NCAA Women’s Final Four. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t cheer when I got to the Mile High City and got to watch the second half of action. What a season. What a championship. What a net-cutting ceremony. Kurt Budke and Miranda Serna, along with the Branstetters would be proud.

For more coverage of women’s basketball, by myself and my colleagues, check out www.swishappeal.com!

I haven’t been near a rugby field in quite a while. In fact, I think the last time was when my mother – yes, mother – was playing adult co-ed and I used to go watch some weekends. And like any good rugby squad, the matches were followed by rugby parties – at which I would be a server of adult beverages. (The statute of limitations runs out on things like a minor with alcohol, right? Besides, I wasn’t a consumer!) I digress.

Anyway, on Saturday at Stanford, I got to watch a little rugby, this time the USA Rugby Women’s Division I College Playoffs.

Host-team and No. 1-seed Stanford faced off with Chico State in their round of 16 match, and as I was told to expect Stanford beat up on the Wildcats early and often. The Cardinal got on the board first, not long after the start of the action. By halftime, Stanford had amassed a 26-0 lead over Chico State.

The Wildcats would not remain scoreless, however, and notched their first try about five minutes into the second. Stanford would go on to advance to the quarterfinals after the 45-12 win over the Wildcats. The Cardinal will face Cal tomorrow in Palo Alto after the Bears defeated UCLA 24-20 in the day’s second D1 game.

Despite leaving my SD card at home so only having the use of my phone camera, a fun time was had by all. Here are my general observations about the game:

1. Rugby players are tough. Hella tough. Tackling without pads and helmets? Yeah, I don’t see too many guys doing that. Unless they’re playing rugby, too. I heard one of the Stanford girls is basically playing without all the ligaments in her knee. But she’s a senior and wants to play, so she is. Wow.
2. The music player had some … interesting selections throughout the day. They made me feel right at home (or my former home) by playing “Thunderstruck” after the first Stanford try (Thunder Up!!) and playing “Should Have Been A Cowboy” at the conclusion of the game (Go Pokes!). There was also acoustic “Hey Ya!” by a guy named Obadiah and some sort of Spanish rap with Chico State in the lyrics (sorry, I’m new to this coast…no idea of the artist, etc.) mixed into the playlist. Nifty.
3. Women’s rugby is one of those sports – like women’s wrestling and rowing – that is not NCAA sanctioned. Are they better or worse for it, I don’t know. But you certainly have to admire any athletes that are willing to take a pounding doing something they love whilst playing a club sport.
4. Free to get in? On a bright, sunshiny day that I wanted to be outside for? Yes, please!

Anyway, I had a great time and expect that I’ll have to take in more women’s rugby at some point to re-remember how the game is played and enjoy even more of this California sunshine. And I’ll even be lucky enough to get that opportunity again in the next few weeks. After the field of 16 is whittled down to four by the conclusion of the weekend, these four will convene again at Stanford to face one another. The semis and finals for this year’s national title will be taking place at Steuber Rugby Stadium May 11-12.

One Bay Area team will be there to represent. Will it be Stanford? Or Cal? We’ll see tomorrow!

The 2012 Baylor Lady Bears took the 2012 NCAA women’s national championship title with resounding fashion. But the weekend wasn’t just about one game, or one singular moment.

There was sun and there was snow. There was tears of sadness and tears of joy. There were pioneers of the game next to students of the game. There were current collegians playing in their last contest and there were high schoolers excited to take the next step.

Denver 2012 was more than just the green and gold of Baylor, but there was some of that too. Congratulations to the national champs!

I cannot deny that I fully support the point guard of the Oklahoma City Thunder – and always have. I do, however, know some folks that do not. And some don’t even think he has any business playing in tonight’s All-Star Game. Most frequently, Russell Wesbrook’s less-than-good numbers when it comes to assist-to-turnover ratio are used to prove his unworthiness. But. There are more numbers than one. And if you compare Westbrook to tonight’s other All-Stars, I see a pretty dang good (and well-deserving) player, if I say so myself.

Oh. And the first half stats for Mr. Westbrook? 17 points on 8-of-11 shooting and four rebounds in 12 minutes. Just saying.

Sharane Campbell felt responsible for the outcome of Bedlam Part 1 on Jan. 14 in Stillwater. The Cowgirls won that meeting in come-from-behind fashion after Jenni Bryan drilled the game-winning 3-pointer with 28 seconds to play.

“Cried the whole way back,” Campbell said of her first trip to Gallagher-Iba Arena and the first OSU win in the series since 2008.

You see, Campbell was defending Bryan when the basket swished through the net and gave the Pokes the victory.

“Well, after that game I felt responsible for that,” Campbell said. “The person I was guarding hit the three. We went over that play, we said no threes when we came out of the huddle and my girl hit the three.”

Campbell’s memory of the end of the game was vivid and tinged with the voice of a player who wished she could have the moment back and determined to not recreate the scene again – or at least not with the same outcome for the Sooners.

“I just felt I had to come with something,” Campbell reflected. “I had to play defense, I’ve just got to do something. And I just felt the need to – I just really can’t explain it – I just felt the need to play good.”

So on Saturday, Bedlam Part 2 commenced on the floor of the Lloyd Noble Center in Norman. And Campbell played good. So good that she can now say she was a difference-maker in the 80-71 OU victory.

Campbell poured in a team-high 20 points on 6-of-9 shooting from the field and a 7-for-12 day from the stripe. She pulled down 12 rebounds for the first double-double of her young OU career. Campbell entered the game at the 12:07 mark of the first half and made her presence known early and often.

She sliced to the basket for layups, she took the ball away from OSU point guard Tiffany Bias, she dished the ball down low to Jelena Cerina for second half lay ins, she crashed the boards with ease showing a knack for being in the right place at the right time in the most unexpected situations, she sunk a 3-pointer with 6:14 on the clock to ignite the crowd of 9,154 rowdy fans.

Whitney Hand sees the role the freshmen are playing and the positive impact players like Campbell are having for the 15-6 Sooners.

“We all have seen this from day one. We’ve known they were going to have to play,” Hand said of her underclassmen teammates. “I don’t think we knew that they were going to have to really, really, really play and play well for us to do well, but I think that they’ve kind of, they’ve just morphed into what our team needs, and they’ve really done a great job of growing up quickly and not being scared.”

Coach Sherri Coale has seen a dramatic change in the woman who cried her way home on the bus ride to Stillwater and the woman who sat next to her on the podium after knocking off her Bedlam rivals.

“Her growth over the last – between the Bedlam games – exponential. I can’t even tell you,” Coale said with a shake of the head and a smile.

“It’s a personal sense of excellence that Sharane has so when you have that they’re really easy to coach and you ache for them when bad things happen,” Coale recalled the Bedlam tears, “because sometimes even when it’s not so bad, they stick daggers in their eyes and you have to kind of save them from themselves, but Sharane has been steady in her growth.

“She comes back and says it won’t happen again. Instead of wallowing in it and saying woe is me she says it won’t happen again. That makes her really fun to coach.”

It didn’t happen again. Not this day. Oklahoma stopped a streak of nine consecutive Oklahoma State Bedlam wins across all sports that dated back to 2011 spring baseball.

And Campbell can now take responsibility for the outcome of both Bedlam ballgames this season, only this time ends with smiles instead of sniffles.

Game notes:

• Oklahoma won the rebounding battle 45-36, led by Hand’s 13 rebounds (five offensive) and Campbell’s 12 boards.
• Oklahoma outscored the Pokes 42-24 in the paint, with Cerina adding 16 points on 8-of-11 shooting. Cerina, a senior center from Vrsac, Serbia, opened up with a phrase in her native tongue to start her answer to the media, to which Coale ‘translated’, “she said her teammates were fantastic,” drawing laughter from everyone, Jelena included.
• The OU bench production was double that of the Pokes’, a 36-18 edge. OSU’s point production was heavily reliant on starters Liz Donohoe and Tiffany Bias, who finished with 20 each.
• Coale was most pleased with the assist to turnover ratio in the contest, with the Sooners finishing with 21 assists, including a career-high nine from Morgan Hook, to eight turnovers. OU forced the Cowgirls into 14 turnovers in the game and the Pokes were only credited with 10 assists on 28 made baskets.
• Both teams shot the ball well overall with OU finishing the game at 43.3 percent shooting. The Cowgirls were close behind, sinking 41.8 percent of their attempts. The closely contested game had eight lead changes and was tied 11 times, with the last knotted score coming with 7:05 to play in game and the score at 59 apiece.

Last season, Brittany Chambers emerged as a rising star for the Kansas State Wildcats. She led the team in scoring, putting up 514 points. She led the Big 12 in 3-pointers made per game with 2.8 as she finished with 88 long-range swishes (of 238 attempts). She started all 32 games and came away with 84 assists and 38 steals. Her successful sophomore season led to many accolades for her work on and off the court. Chambers was a unanimous first-team all-Big 12 selection for her work on the court complimented with academic all-Big 12 honors for her work in the classroom. She was even selected to the preseason all-Big 12 team on the honorable mention list, along with fellow ‘Cat Jalana Childs.

There have been highs on the season – a full 40-minute game against Northwestern Dec. 19 resulted in a season-high 29 points. Chambers was hot from the outside, sinking 8-of-14 3-point attempts to finish with a .500 field goal percentage (9-of-18). Saturday in Stillwater, Chambers matched that benchmark of the 2011-12 campaign again, finishing with 29 points on 9-of-19 shooting and 10 rebounds.

But there have been a few lows for the junior, too.

The season started with a 12-minute, 0-for-6, 1-point performance against Dartmouth. Later in non-conference play, Chambers posted a 9-point performance versus Hofstra after struggling to a 4-of-19 night from the floor to record her second single-digit scoring effort of the year. In a home loss against Iowa State on Jan. 25, Chambers could only muster six points in 35 minutes. But she just might have turned a corner on Saturday against the Cowgirls.

“I think that I quit running around like a chicken with my head cut off finally and that was big,” Chambers remarked after the Wildcats hung on for a 67-56 win at Gallagher-Iba Arena. The victory upped K-State’s record to 14-6, 5-3 and halted a three-game losing slide after opening Big 12 play with a 4-0 mark.

“I think that it was a definite monkey on our back a little bit and I think that especially at the end – of course we had to make it dramatic – and we are really glad that we could get this win over a great team,” Chambers said. “It’s a really really big win for us and we definitely needed it. We came out and performed.”

That’s not to say Chambers hasn’t been performing all season, but not quite at the clip she maintained last year. Before the Oklahoma State game, Chambers was averaging 15.4 points a night for her team after scoring 16.1 points per game as a sophomore. She sunk 42.9% of her shots last season, but had only been able to connect on 36.7% of her attempts prior to Saturday. She’s leading the team in scoring, rebounding and minutes per game. But in five of the Wildcats’ six losses this season, it’s been when Chambers has not led the team in scoring. To say her performance is paramount to the success or failure of K-State might be a bit of a stretch, but not by much.

The Wildcats are last in the league in scoring offense and field goal percentage, putting up an average of 59.8 points per game while connecting on just 38.9% of their shot attempts. Despite the fact that they have the second-best scoring defense (54.2 ppg), their scoring margin of +5.6 is second-worst in the Big 12. K-State also struggles with a negative rebounding margin (10th in the league), and the noticeable lack of assists (10th in the league). The importance of getting Chambers open shots that translate into positive scoring opportunities will be a defining factor for the Wildcats’ season as the second half of Big 12 play begins.

“I think that we played really well as a team,” Chambers said of the win against OSU. “Something that we haven’t been doing is we set screens well and we played well together. Instead of just running around, we took our time to notice where each person was on the court and play off of each other.”

This is something that will have to continue to keep the Wildcats in their spot near the top of the conference standings. K-State’s week will be a telling one as they travel to Texas, host Baylor, and head to College Station to face off with the defending-champion Texas A&M Aggies.

And Chambers’ stat line might just be the tale of the week.

Have you ever been to a sporting event that makes you smile ear to ear after the fact remembering what you witnessed? Well, on Wednesday in Stillwater the Oklahoma State men knocked of the No. 2 Missouri Tigers. And I’m still smiling about it.

Loyal and True – Go Pokes!

Coach Gary Blair’s final appearance at Gallagher-Iba Arena, a building Blair had lost in but once before, went down to the wire for the Texas A&M Aggies.

After digging themselves into a 10-point deficit early in the second half, the defending national champions crawled back into the game one shot, one steal, one turnover at a time. A&M tied it up at 36 all with 11:54 to play with a layup by Kelsey Assarian, Blair’s “linebacker”. From that point, the game was back and forth down to the final seconds. With 44 seconds to play and the Cowgirls up by two, Oklahoma State’s own “linebacker”, Lindsey Keller, had the inbounds play bounce off her chest and give OSU their 28^th and final turnover of the night.

“When we ran the inbounds play on the press break and we threw it to Lindsey and it went off her chest and went out of bounds, I thought we were in trouble,” OSU coach Jim Littell said. “But there’s just no quit to them.”

Sydney Carter sunk a shot on the ensuing A&M possession to tie the score at 53 apiece causing that trouble the coach mentioned. But you can’t be in too much trouble when you have the wheels and ability of Tiffany Bias to speed down the court for the go-ahead basket. Carter tried to make some magic of her own after a tough shooting night, but her jumper off the left side screen missed the mark with seven seconds to play.

It was only fitting that Keller, the evening’s workhorse, closed out the game with a defensive rebound and two made free throws to give the Cowgirls the ugly – but effective – win. That’s what middle linebackers do on the hardwood – just ask Coach Blair.

“She’s physical, that’s the way the Big 12 is,” Blair said after the loss. “I wish I had one as physical as she is, like a ‘Little Country’ in there.

“It’s not what she scores on the field goals, it’s the mindset that she brings to the game, the intensity, the whatever it takes type of attitude and that’s what you’ve got to do to be able to win at this level … You’ve got to have people just hard-nosed, carry your lunch pail to work, find a way to get the job done.”

The OSU upperclassman, one of only two juniors on the team, wasn’t looking for points, necessarily – though she did make seven of her nine tries at the line – she was looking to get herself a gold star for defense.

“I’ve worked on my game to be a lot more physical because some of the girls, they’re a little bigger than me,” the 6-2 Keller remarked with a smile, “and you just have to be stronger, be solid. Defense is a big part of that and as long as you can shut people down and they don’t score – if you score two points, you win. I just feel like defense is a really big part of my game and if I can shut them down it’s a little star by my name.”

Blair was asked about his own linebacker, Assarian, who hit the deck hard with 2:14 to play and came up holding her head after a few minutes down on the court.

“She’s just like Keller. They’re middle linebackers, they just know how to play. Don’t worry about her. Don’t worry about Lindsey and just let them play. Those type of players is what the Big 12 is all about. It’s a very physical conference.”

Physical, indeed. Though OSU’s Littell might have another descriptor for his Cowgirls after the game.

“We’re interesting, I’ll say that. We’re interesting,” Littell shook his head as he continued to look at the final box score. “We turn it over 28 times and find a way to win. We can blow a 10 point lead quicker than anybody, but these kids are pretty resilient.

“We only got up 41 shots and you don’t usually win when you get up 41 shots and turn it over 28 times, but I thought we made a lot of good plays and we forced them into 26 turnovers as well. So I just thought the defense was outstanding tonight.”

That outstanding defensive effort by the Cowgirls was not only seen in the turnovers. A&M only connected on eight shots in the first half, with a 28.6% field goal percentage. Senior Sydney Carter could only muster seven points despite her 14 attempts from the field. She connected but twice in the game, and missed when it counted most. Adaora Elonu fouled out for the Aggies and was one of the contributors to the 21 trips to the line that OSU was able to take in the game. But good defense can also mean gritty – not pretty – basketball.

“For all those teams that want that little pretty ball, you’re not going to have that when A&M is playing or Oklahoma State’s playing because neither one of us are pretty teams,” Gary Blair said of the two foes in their first meeting of the last season. “We just get the job done and we play hard and we’re on the floor, we make decisions and that’s the way it should be.

“I’m going to hate not coming back to this place.”