The 2023 season presented a new challenge for coach Audra Cohen and Oklahoma tennis.
The Sooners didn’t lose much talent but had to follow the best season in program history.
The previous season, the Sooners finished 32-3 and were the runner-up for the national championship.
For Cohen, last season wasn’t a fluke but a giant step in the direction she wants her program to go and not the end goal.
“It means we’ve arrived a little bit,” Cohen told the OU Daily. “But also it means we have to keep competing. We have to keep competing and keep getting better and find ways to get better and never be settled at any point.”
OU started out inconsistent in 2023. The Sooners dominated at home, finishing 14-0 in Norman, but struggled on the road. Most of their losses were against ranked opponents. The competitive spirit was still there, but no big ‘Wow’ factor that made the Sooners imposing during their runner-up season. Their first victory on the road didn’t come until midway through the season against Baylor 6-1.
Approaching April, OU was 14-8 and still struggling to take down heavy competition. However, Cohen and the Sooners didn’t settle with being a one-year wonder.
The Sooners are back in the NCAA tournament and face Hawaii at 3 p.m. Friday in Norman. The team appears to have overcome their early season struggles and has fought their way back into prominence.
The 2023 season wasn’t the first time Cohen was challenged to overcome adversity. It’s part of a long line dating back to her college days at Northwestern.
As a freshman in 2005, Cohen finished with a 51-7 record in singles and earned the title of Intercollegiate Tennis Association National Rookie of the Year. However, Cohen would not have a future as a Wildcat. Cohen, homesick and dealing with a back injury, was left disappointed..
Then she decided her best option was to transfer closer to her home in Florida. She ended up landing at Miami (FL) under coach Paige Yaroshuk-Tews.
Yaroshuk-Tews was in her fifth year with the Hurricanes and in the midst of building a monster. The problem was Miami kept falling short in the tournament. When Cohen recovered from back surgery in time for the 2006 season, Yaroshuk-Tews realized how valuable Cohen was to the U.
“I didn’t really know how tough she was,” Yaroshuk-Tews told the Daily. “in terms of on the court, off the court, She was very stubborn, very stubborn. So,there was a little bit of budding heads at times. But there was also a side of her that was incredibly intelligent, incredibly intellectual, like (Cohen) understood the game of tennis. Audra was probably one of the best competitors I ever coached, and she’s a huge reason why our program catapulted and took off.”
With the help of Cohen, the Hurricanes finished 24-6 and punched their ticket to the championship game which they got bested by Stanford 4-1. A monumental season still for the Hurricanes.
Six years later, Cohen was offered her first head coaching job at North Florida. The Ospreys were a Division I program but were lacking in notoriety before Cohen’s arrival, which eventual put them on the map
While the Ospreys were a virtually unrecognizable entity, Cohen helped turn the program into a force to be reckoned with. In five seasons under Cohen, North Florida dominated the ASUN conference and snagged a few NCAA Tournament appearances.
Following the 2016 season, Cohen was offered the OU job by athletic director Joe Castiglione. This came with a third challenge, rebuilding a long-time dormant program in a Power Five Conference full of notable adversaries.
Prior to Cohen’s arrival in Norman, OU wasn’t usually consistent or formidable. The Sooners’ previous coach, David Mullins, had some success, including two consecutive 18+ win seasons with the Sooners in 2010 and 2011.
OU head women's tennis coach Audra Cohen during the match against Arizona State University in the second round of NCAA women's tennis regionals on May 7.
However, the Sooners lacked a heavy punch in big games. Never going too far beyond the first round of the tournament and only setting a program-best third place position in the Big 12 in 2011,Mullins ultimately called it quits in 2016 after an underwhelming 9-14 campaign.
Cohen showed prowess at North Florida but now she had to prove she could win at the power five level. Luckily for OU, she didn’t find the challenge nerve-wracking.
“I think it’s definitely a bigger challenge and a bigger task,” Cohen told the Daily. “But you have more support and, I think, the hardest part was leaning on the support pieces and getting all the right pieces in place. It took a little longer than I would’ve liked, but overall it’s the same job just at a different place and at a different level.”
Cohen slowly but surely started building a true contender and started seeing results when she acquired Ivana Corley.
According to Ivana, she was swayed to come to OU by an assistant who was in between jobs at OU and New Mexico. However, she was also drawn by the idea of being the underdog.
“I really wanted to be a part of something special and something new.” Ivana told the Daily. “Some of the other schools I was looking at were pretty high in the rankings and that was very tempting. But I thought I could get better here and I liked the challenge of being the underdog.”
One year later, OU gained another support piece in the form of Ivana’s sister, Carmen Corley.
“I think the culture of excellence is very real here.” Carmen told the Daily when asked about coming to OU. “On the pro list was that my sister was at the school, but I went to really high establishments on different visits and OU definitely had the nicest facilities out of every school I visited.”
The Corleys’ energy and competitiveness instantly clicked with Cohen. In their first season in Norman in 2020, Cohen decided to assign the two the top court. The Corleys finished 91-10 together in the next three seasons. No other duo in OU program history has ever matched the intensity the two sisters bring to the court.
“Audra Cohen is a winner, I’ll just say it like that,” Carmen told the Daily. “For someone who has won so much, she’s really big on the progress and getting better. Not just in tennis but in life. Trying to teach us all to be like powerful women.”
“I think we really trust her with our game,” Ivana added. “We really trust her as a person and she has pushed us both at different times when we didn’t even know we needed it. There’s a lot of coaches out there who don’t care as much as she does.”
The 2022 Sooners were a competitive buzzsaw in the NCAA tennis world as they finished undefeated at home and away and ranked as high as No. 2 in the nation. It was a year of firsts for the program. First ever appearance in the ITA Indoor Championship, first ever Big 12 Regular Season Championship, and first ever season to go beyond 20 wins.
An ensemble composed of the No. 1 Corleys and other heavy hitters such as Layne Sleeth, Alexandra Pisareva, Dana Guzman and Emma Staker, tore through competition. Even with the loss in the Big 12 title game to Texas, OU easily found a top spot in the tournament.
The Sooners rode their momentum past regionals and into Champaign, Illinois. After defeating No. 7 Texas A&M in the Elite Eight, the Sooners faced No. 3 Duke in the Final Four. A hotly contested game from beginning to end, then-freshman Emma Staker took court six to win the match, securing OU’s first ever national championship appearance.
On that fateful day on May 22, 2022, the giant tidal wave of momentum the Sooners had been riding on all season had finally died down and crashed upon the shore. Texas walked away with a 4-1 victory and the National Championship. Though disappointing, it wasn’t an entirely bitter ending for the 2022 season. No other team in program history had accomplished as much as they did that year.
“Last year is something nobody will ever take away from us,” Ivana Corley told the Daily. “All my years here will stay with me, but last year specifically will stay in my heart forever.”
OU Tennis could have been just a one-year fluke. A story of a team rising from the ashes and leaving their mark, only to then fade back into obscurity. Instead, they rallied and fought their way to a 20-9 season and a fourth consecutive appearance in the NCAA Tournament.
“Every piece of the program you’re building this big ship,” Cohen said. “You just have to keep steering it in the right direction and eventually you’ll get to your destination.”
This story was edited by Colton Sulley, Jason Batacao and Louis Raser.
