Oklahoma State women loaded with star transfers, picked to win the Big 12 championship

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — There are two big questions surrounding the Oklahoma State women’s basketball team this season.

Are there enough shots to go around? And can the No. 22 Cowgirls finally win a Big 12 Conference championship?

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After loading up with arguably the nation’s top transfer class, headlined by two-time All-American forward Audi Crooks and do-it-all sensation Liv McGill, Jacie Hoyt’s team was picked to win the league in its preseason poll of coaches. The Cowgirls earned seven first-place votes, one more than defending regular-season conference champion TCU.

“This is by far the most talented roster I’ve been privileged to coach,” Hoyt said Wednesday at the Big 12’s annual media summit. “I think just being around elite players every day that have a mindset of getting better, and ultimately winning at all costs — it doesn’t matter what that looks like for us. We have a lot of firepower. A lot of weapons. And our team understands that they might have to make sacrifices that they didn’t have to make before. But ultimately, they want to win.”

That hasn’t happened a whole lot around Stillwater. The Cowgirls haven’t won a conference championship since 1991, when they won the second of back-to-back Big 8 titles. That also was the only year they’ve won a postseason conference tournament.

Hoyt has turned around Oklahoma State’s fortunes, though, along with its expectations. The Cowgirls won 25 games two years ago and 24 last season, their most wins ever over a two-year span, and are coming off a second-round NCAA Tournament appearance.

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Yet sustaining success in an era of roster upheaval means constantly reinventing your team. And while Hoyt lost several players to graduation and the transfer portal — Amari Whiting to Iowa, Jadyn Wooten to the rival Horned Frogs — she replenished with a transfer class that is quite possibly the envy of the women’s college basketball world.

McGill was the first big catch.

The first-team All-SEC guard was the only…

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/oklahoma-state-women-loaded-star-195216343.html

Author : DAVE SKRETTA

Publish date : 2026-10-21 19:52:00

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