Oklahoma coach Sherri Coale retires

After 25 years — the last three out of the NCAA Tournament — the person who saved Oklahoma women's basketball and took it to unprecedented heights is stepping down

Sherri Coale, who saved the Oklahoma women’s basketball program when she was hired in 1996 — and then took it to unforeseen heights — announced her retirement on Wednesday.

Coale, 56, won 513 career victories in her 25 seasons at the OU helm, a figure that ranks 72nd all-time among Division I coaches, and is tied for 31st among active coaches.

Coale, 56, has coached 28 of the 37 players in OU’s 1,000-point club.

Three straight years of poor basketball — and three straight years outside the NCAA Tournament — eventually caught up. Her last game was an overtime loss to Oklahoma State in the Big 12 Tournament on Friday night, and Coale, perhaps knowing it was the end, answered several questions with a tear in her eye.

SI Sooners asked Coale what she learned about herself during a season in which a short-handed team — so often battling with just six players in the middle of a pandemic and still fighting to get to a 12-12 record for the season.

“So much,” Coale said. “That less is more. That the process really is more important than the outcome. I think — there’s so much — that a united group, and I don’t know if this learning about myself or not, but from a program administration standpoint, we can’t sell ourselves short. There’s a lot of stuff that we can do and may not think that we can, that we don’t have enough help or enough of this or that. It’s not about the bells and whistles. It’s about mindset. It’s about perspective.

“So probably, if you want to boil what could be a 30-minute answer to that question down to maybe a line or two, I think more than ever I’ve been reminded that basketball has to stay on the right shelf. And when it stays on the right shelf, not only do you enjoy it more, but it’s better. You do it better. And so as coaches, we have a responsibility I think to help our athletes keep that on the right shelf, because the world doesn’t want it to be there.”

OU athletic director Joe Castiglione will now begin the search for a women’s basketball coach — for the first time in his tenure. Coale was hired by Donnie Duncan.

“Sherri Coale has encouraged everyone from players to peers to 'Leave your story better than you found it,’ ” Castiglione said. “She walked her talk. Her transformational impact on women's basketball at OU which, in turn, inspired generations of young girls throughout our state to play the sport is nearly impossible to measure.”

Last June, Coale agreed to a contract extension through June 30, 2024. Her most recent salary was $1.33 million.

OU went 8-22 two years ago and 12-18 last year. Coale said she was “an optimist” that this year’s team would make the NCAA Tournament field as an at-large bid, but the Sooners were not invited to the Big Dance and were not among the 32-team WNIT field.

The Sooners played much of the season with just six players and often had no more than seven. Yet after starting 1-4 overall and 0-3 in conference play, OU won four of its last five games and six of its last eight to finish with its best record in three years and a 9-9 record in Big 12 play.

“What we’ve done in the month of February, we’ve put ourselves in the conversation, that’s for sure,” Coale said in her postgame video press conference. “So whatever happens, happens moving forward. But right now, I have nothing but pride and admiration for the work that this team has done.”

It wasn’t how a Hall of Fame coach wanted to go out.

Coale’s teams made it to 19 consecutive NCAA Tournaments, including three Final Fours behind spectacular players like Stacey Dales and Courtney Paris.

Coale, a member of the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame who will be inducted into the Oklahoma Sports Hall of Fame this summer, grew up in Healdton, OK, and played at Oklahoma Christian University. Coale’s first job out of college was at Edmond Memorial High School for two years as an assistant coach, and then took over the head coaching job at Norman High School, where she rebuilt the Tigers from 1990-96.

Coale replaced Burl Plunkett, who had two successful years but then went 12-15 and retired at the end of the 1995-96 season. With dwindling attendance and the athletic department consistently in the red, the school had decided to pull the plug on the women’s basketball program. That decision, however, was overturned, and Donnie Duncan hired Coale from Norman.

After Duncan went on to an administrative role in the Big 12 Conference, OU hired Owens, the 1969 Heisman Trophy winner, and Owens and associate AD for women’s sports Marita Hynes shepherded Coale through her early days.

But administrators and regents saw something in Coale, whom they hired at a salary of $85,000.

“Every school kid that grows up in this great state wants to be an Oklahoma Sooner,” Coale said that day. “For me to make the career jump to the Division I level at this university, which I grew up loving, is absolutely phenomenal.”

On Wednesday, she reiterated her good fortune.

“Through much prayer and the gifts of a year that provided pockets of stillness most years never produce, I have amazing clarity,” Coale said. “Basketball was my first and deepest love and coaching has been this wonderfully amazing life that I can't believe they pay me for. But there have always been other things I want to do. I'm ready to explore those things and I'm ready to run toward unfettered days with my brand-new beautiful granddaughter. Twenty-five years just feels right in my bones and in my soul.

“It's never easy to leave no matter how great a thing you are running to, because something is always left behind. It's hard to leave these players. This seasoned bunch of gritty competitors who built their wings in the fiercest of winds clawed their way to the sacredness of team. This season will always be one tattooed on my heart. But that's the trick about sports and the magnificent gift of team — it gets in you and it never goes away. Lucky, lucky, lucky me.”