In a 'surreal' new world, Arizona Wildcats basketball looks to make best of Big 12 opportunity

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — In one important way, at least, Jada Williams has her Arizona Wildcats teammates wired for life in the Big 12.

“We’re going to Jack Stack tonight,” the UA sophomore guard said Tuesday of the locally renown barbeque chain while finishing up interviews at Big 12 women’s basketball media day along with teammates Breya Cunningham and Skylar Jones. “Definitely, barbeque is a big one.”

A native of Kansas City, Williams is also well-absorbed in the strong local college basketball culture, which has helped keep the Big 12’s men’s basketball tournaments in K.C. nonstop since 2010 and the women’s tournament here for most of the past 27 years.

She couldn’t help that. Williams said she basically grew up going to any college basketball game held in Kansas City, men or women.

Now she’s going to be in some.

“It’s surreal,” Williams said. “Being from Kansas City, there’s not really a pro basketball team so we always came to the Big 12 basketball tournament every year. That’s what we looked up to.”

But for just about everyone else porting over from the Pac-12 to the Big 12 this season, the move can be surreal in different ways. Mostly because it's a reminder that what was once the highest-rated women's basketball conference has been blown up.

While UA coach Adia Barnes said she’s looking forward to visiting places such as TCU, Kansas State, West Virginia and UCF for the first time, she used the word "surreal" too.

Not only did Barnes play for Arizona in what was then the Pac-10, but she’s a San Diego native who spent parts of her pro playing and college coaching career in Seattle, all within the Pac-12's old footprint.

Now she’s in the Big 12.

That took a while to process.

“You heard that it could happen, but you never think it will actually happen,” Barnes said. “It reminded me of the COVID year (2019-20), when we couldn’t play in the NCAA Tournament. We were kind of like, `Yeah, OK, we're gonna pause. It’ll start in five days.’

“So we were thinking, `Someone's gonna build the conference out. It's gonna work.’ I didn't ever think that the (Pac-12 would break up), especially knowing how strong it was. It was one of the best in football and women's basketball. I didn't think it would happen.”

It happened in early August 2023, when Washington and Oregon bolted to join USC and UCLA in the Big Ten, prompting UA, ASU, Colorado and Utah to head to the Big 12.

Back to homepage

Subscriber Login

Keep reading with a digital access subscription.

Subscribe now

That gave Barnes a year to think about it and, eventually, develop a new perspective that she expressed consistently during interviews Tuesday.

It was the one that says UA is still playing in a power conference, if not the best one.

“When I look back at Washington State and Oregon State, that's really unfortunate for them to have so much success and then they don't have a conference,” Barnes said. “I think it kills you going into a mid-major conference. So I was glad that we found a great home. And I think the Big 12 is going to do some really great things.”

Barnes' former coach at UA, analyst Joan Bonvicini, noted that the Big 12 is formidable in both talent and environments. These aren’t good teams that play in heavily saturated sports markets, as many former Pac-12 teams did, but good teams that often play in communities where they command more attention.

“I think the fans in Tucson are going to see there's a lot of good players throughout the country at a lot of different schools,” Bonvicini said. “They're going to get familiar with TCU. West Virginia is really good. Baylor is really good. Iowa State's going to be really tough.

“It’s not only to play them (at McKale), but now going on the road, these places, a lot of them are small towns, where the home courts are a big advantage for them. When you go in there, it's going to be tough. Really tough.”

Even with the loss of powerhouse Texas this season, the Big 12 still has four teams among the top 16 in ESPN’s early Top 25 rankings. It also has enough strength overall that coaches picked Arizona to finish seventh out of 16 teams, a view that Barnes wasn’t arguing.

“We don’t have any all-conference players and we’re young... so that's probably about right,” Barnes said. “But I never really put much stock into that. It really doesn't matter. It's how we're gonna progress and get better.”

Barnes alluded to the fact that when she was an assistant at Washington in 2015-16, the Huskies finished in fifth place and yet still went to the Final Four.

But the Huskies were coming from the Pac-12, having honed themselves weekly against some of the best teams in the country.

Can a team finishing in fifth — or seventh — in the Big 12 do the same?

Barnes' team has no choice but to find out soon enough.