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AUSTIN (KXAN) — Two seniors will be honored Saturday at Moody Center as the Texas women’s basketball team will try to bounce back after a tough loss to Oklahoma. The Longhorns will face BYU in the Big 12 regular season finale, and for one of the seniors, it’ll mean a little bit more.
Shaylee Gonzales, who transferred to Texas after three seasons at BYU, will play her last regular season college basketball game against the school she started her career with. She was an All-American and West Coast Conference player of the year with the Cougars before coming to the 40 Acres before last season.
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“It was a big part of my college career,” she said. “I accomplished a lot there and checked off a lot of goals I wanted to accomplish, but I felt like I wanted more.”
Coincidentally, Gonzales will meet her old team in its first year in the Big 12 Conference while Texas will move to Southeastern Conference next season. Gonzales said she’ll be emotional for multiple reasons, but mainly because it’s her last ride at the Moody Center in Big 12 play. She’ll get at least one more home game assuming Texas hosts in the first and second rounds of the NCAA tournament.
“Texas has been a huge part of my college career as well. I’ve done a lot here in my last two years, but still have a lot left to do,” she said.
Recovering from the 71-70 loss to Oklahoma in Norman, especially with a very questionable traveling call on Madison Booker late in the game, won’t be easy. It gave the Sooners the No. 1 seed in the upcoming conference tournament, snapped the Longhorns’ 8-game winning streak and just left a bad feeling around the program. Longhorns head coach Vic Schaefer said how the end of the game folded didn’t make sense to him and he was disappointed that the officials didn’t confer about the call.
“It’s just so hard to understand how something like that can happen,” he said. “We weren’t perfect, but we made enough plays. That’s life on the road. We played pretty good defensively to hold them to 35% from the field, but I’ve just never seen anything like that.”
Texas tips off against BYU at 7 p.m. They’re the second game in a Moody Center doubleheader with men’s team taking on Oklahoma State at 1 p.m.
With a win over BYU, Texas will clinch the No. 2 seed in the Big 12 tournament and will begin play at 5:30 p.m. March 9 in the quarterfinals at the T-Mobile Center in Kansas City, Missouri. The tournament field will be set Sunday afternoon after the Oklahoma State/Baylor game that tips at 11 a.m. CT.
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