Oklahoma basketball: Happy birthday to Lady Sooners’ Sherri Coale
By Chip Rouse
This is Sherri Coale’s 25th season as head coach of the women’s Oklahoma basketball program.
She has spent almost half of her life coaching the Lady Sooners, and today is her birthday.
Born Jan. 19, 1965, Coale’s 25-year run coaching women’s basketball at the University of Oklahoma is the longest of any men’s or women’s basketball coach in OU history. She also is the winningest with 505 career wins at Oklahoma.
A native Oklahoman, born in Healdton, near Ardmore in the far south central part of the state, Coale took over an OU program that several years before she arrived was going to be dropped after a number of years of disappointing performance and low attendance.
Coale became the eighth head coach of OU women’s basketball in 1996. At that point in time, the women’s program had been in existence 22 years. The Sooner women played their first varsity basketball game in 1974.
Coale came to the college ranks straight out of the local high school system. She had coached women’s basketball at Norman High School for six seasons (1990-96). She was 11-12 her first season there, but did not have a losing record thereafter. She led her high school team to two 6A state championships. In her final two seasons at NHS, her teams went 53-2.
Her first season at Oklahoma coincided with the first year of the newly formed Big 12 Conference. Her first Sooner team won just one of 16 games in the Big 12, and the second season wasn’t much better as Oklahoma finished 2-12 in league play. By Coale’s third season at the helm, though, the Lady Sooners finished above .500 overall (15-14) and were 8-8 in Big 12 play.
Sherri Coale has taken women’s Oklahoma basketball to national recognition
In 1999-2000, Coale led the Oklahoma women to a 25-8 record and a first-place tie in the Big 12 standings. That season the Sooners made only their second-ever NCAA appearance. And that was the first of 19 consecutive Oklahoma NCAA appearances, including a Final Four team in 2002, led by two-time All-American Stacey Dales, that was runner-up to national-champion Connecticut.
That same 2002-02 team produced the Sooners’ best overall record under Coale (32-4) and sent three first-round picks to the WNBA (Dales, LaNeishea Caufield and Rosalind Ross). Oklahoma has had two other 30-win seasons under Coale’s leadership (31-5 in 2005-06 and 32-5 in 2008-09). Fifteen of her 24 Sooner teams have won at least 20 games.
Oklahoma has been to three Final Fours under Coale (2002, 2009 and 2010).
In her 25 seasons at OU, Coale has won six Big 12 championships, four of them outright, and three Big 12 Tournament championships.
In addition to Dales, Coale also coached four-time All-American Courtney Paris, who set multiple NCAA and school records in her four seasons at Oklahoma. Paris is the only player in NCAA history, male of female, to score 700 points, collect 500 rebounds and have 100 blocks in a single season. She also was a first-round WNBA selection in 2009.
The Sooners are coming off a couple of disappointing seasons the past two years — only the third and fourth time in her 24 previous seasons that the Lady Sooners have finished under .500 — and they are off to a 4-5 start this season.
Sherri Coale was inducted into the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame in 2016, and in 2007 she was named to the Oklahoma Women’s Hall of Fame.
Happy birthday, coach Coale, and thank you for all you have done for women’s basketball at Oklahoma.