Arizona Wildcats Boss Says Young Trio Ready to Make Leap as Sophomores
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Adia Barnes is drawing on the experience from earlier in her coaching career as a tool to calibrate expectations for this year’s Arizona Wildcats.
Coming off an 18-16 season in which Arizona went to the NCAA Tournament and won a First Four game, she wants to build on the sophomores that were “thrown in the fire” last year as freshmen, which included all three players that joined her at Big 12 media day.
Guards Jada Williams and Skylar Jones, along with forward Breya Cunningham, logged plenty of time as true freshmen out of necessity — the Wildcats were beset by injuries. As the season progressed, as that trio went, so went Arizona’s fortunes.
The trio may be sophomores in name, but in Barnes’ eyes she seems them almost as juniors. They even played some free basketball.
“You know, we played the most overtime games in the country last year,” she said. “We didn't always come on the winning end of that, but we gained tremendous experience.”
Arizona’s website lists four overtime games, which is a bit misleading. Two went double overtime and one went triple overtime. All were in Pac-12 action.
Barnes also admits that she over-scheduled last season, leading the Wildcats to have the nation’s toughest schedule until the Pac-12 Tournament when that ranking dropped to No. 2.
But, in that crucible, her young trio grew and all three were named All-Pac-12 honorable mention.
Williams, a Kansas City native, led the three with 9.4 points per game. Her 1,012 minutes was the third-most by a freshman in Arizona history. She moved straight into the point guard role and found that she had a group of holdover players willing to trust her.
“(They) put their arm around me and said, ‘We trust you, we believe in you. We want you to be our point guard,’” she said. “So that helped a lot.”
Cunningham averaged 7.4 points and 4.6 rebounds last season and was third in the Pac-12 with 61 blocked shots. She joins a league with two of the best-shot blockers in the country in Kansas State’s Ayoka Lee and TCU’s Sedona Prince. She sees playing among those players as a challenge and feels she’s up to it.
“We’re a very aggressive team defensively,” she said.
Jones averaged 7.2 points and 1.4 steals last season and saved her career-best 24 points for the NCAA Tournament against Syracuse.
She said he had a great end to her season, in part, because her teammates encouraged her and bolstered her confidence.
“My teammates told me that they needed me to step up because I didn't really have the confidence that I needed to begin in the season,” she said.
As for the past, well, sometimes it has a habit of repeating itself. Barnes isn’t worried about all of those overtime games — if it yields the same results it did back in 2021.
“My third year at Arizona, we lost a lot of overtime games, and the next year we went to the national championship,” Barnes said. “So I am going to lean on them very heavily. I think that they're ready.”
