Shaq-like Sooner rules women’s game

Roy Williams took one look at Courtney Paris and reached for the phone.

The North Carolina men’s basketball coach had just seen the then-freshman leader of the Oklahoma women’s team chew up another overmatched opponent and wanted to tell her coach that he was envious.

“He left me a voice mail after he’d seen us play on television,” Oklahoma Coach Sherri Coale says, laughing as she recalls the message left on her phone last December. “He said, ‘You are lucky, my friend. If you coached men’s basketball, you would be saying goodbye to her at the end of the year.’

“And I left him a return voice mail saying, ‘Thank you so much, Coach Williams, but this is not men’s basketball, it’s women’s basketball, and I’m going to have her for three more years, thank goodness. So eat your heart out.’ ”

Fortunately for Coale and the Sooners, WNBA rules prohibit players from leaving school early to join the professional league.

Otherwise, this Sooner might easily have said, “Later.”

At 6 feet 4 and about 230 pounds, Paris looms large over the women’s game, her Shaq-like presence combining power and finesse. The lane-clogging, space-eating center from Piedmont, Calif., broke 74 records as a freshman, among them 55 school marks, while averaging 21.9 points, 15 rebounds and 3.3 blocks.

Daughter of Bubba Paris, a former NFL offensive lineman who won three Super Bowl rings with the San Francisco 49ers, and twin sister of Oklahoma reserve Ashley Paris, who is one inch shorter and two minutes older, she was the first player in NCAA history to exceed 700 points, 500 rebounds and 100 blocked shots in a season. She is on pace to become the NCAA’s all-time scoring leader.

“I don’t like being called Baby Shaq,” says Paris, who will lead the No. 3-ranked Sooners against No. 21-ranked UCLA tonight in Pauley Pavilion, “but I like the comparison. Our family watched a lot of Orlando Magic games when I was little and I remember loving the way Shaq dominated games with his size and aggressiveness -- and his attitude. He used everything to his advantage and just dominated. And I remember thinking, ‘I want to dominate. I want to be unstoppable.’ ”

Her father says she was in junior high school when she started talking about the WNBA. He told her that WNBA jobs were limited.

“And so she adopted a view that, she’s not competing against the people she sees around her, she’s competing against everybody in the world that wants to do what she wants to do,” he says. “And once she looked at life that way and started competing in that manner, it seems that every set of goals and challenges that she’s had in front of her, she’s just knocked them out of the box.”

Paris, 19, led Piedmont High to consecutive state championships and, after choosing Oklahoma over Texas and California, helped the grateful Sooners to a 31-5 record last season, including an unprecedented 19-0 run through the Big 12 regular season and tournament. But the season ended in disappointment, the Sooners losing to Stanford in a regional semifinal and falling short of the Final Four.

Along the way, though, they turned some heads.

“Attendance has gone through the roof, and there’s a fervor surrounding the program like never before -- even greater and more resounding than when we went to the Final Four,” says Coale, whose team reached the NCAA final in 2002 but slipped to 17-13 two seasons ago. “In Oklahoma, what’s on the sports page in the spring is, ‘Who’s going to be the starting quarterback?’ Last spring, that was shared with Courtney Paris and women’s basketball.

“That’s unheard of.”

Average attendance at home games last season was 7,630. About 7,000 season tickets have been sold this season, Coale says, nearly doubling the previous high of 4,013, set last season. Last week’s opener, a 105-71 rout of then-No. 20 DePaul in which Paris had 23 points and 11 rebounds, drew 10,448.

“On a Sunday afternoon in football season,” Coale marvels.

Paris, of course, is the draw.

Which is fine with Paris.

“It’s cool if people have their eyes on us,” she says. “I don’t live and die by it, but I think it’s great. It’s good for our sport.”

As is Paris.

“She’s extraordinary,” Coale says.

And she’ll be staying put for three more seasons.

jerry.crowe@latimes.com