Missouri’s Sophie Cunningham bursts onto national scene

STANFORD, Calif. — She’s the most efficient scoring guard in the country, but she doesn’t get the same type of love as other stars in the Southeastern Conference.

More from NCAA

• Your Day in Women’s Basketball, April 6: Stanford defeats Arizona in a tightly contested matchup to win the national title
• Your Day in Women’s Basketball, March 30: UConn and Baylor deliver a classic battle of storied programs
• Your Day in Women’s Basketball, March 26: Louisville and Texas A&M survive and advance
• Your Day in Women’s Basketball, March 23: Highlights from the first round of the NCAA Tournament
• Your Day in Women’s Basketball, March 16: Tournament bracket released

But Missouri junior guard Sophie Cunningham may just force her way into the national conversation by the time the NCAA Tournament is done.

The hometown product has the Tigers on their best run of success as a program since the mid-1980s, and already has led the program to winning NCAA Tournament games in consecutive seasons for the first-time ever.

This year, she’s led the Tigers to 24 wins, the most for Missouri in a single season since 1983-84, and the 5-seed in the Lexington Regional, where they’ll take on the 12-seed Florida Gulf Coast at 3:30 p.m. ET on Saturday in Stanford, California.

“She’s really active, and to be 6-1 and be able to shoot the three so well with that kind of length is a challenge,” Florida Gulf Coast head coach Karl Smesko said, having watched multiple Missouri games to prepare for Saturday. “She’s always moving, she reads her screens, she’s really smart, and as you said, she’s a willing passer, she’s not the big-time scorer that doesn’t look to get other people involved, she moves the ball.

“She’s really good at drawing fouls and initiating and getting contact and getting the call her way, so she’s just a smart player who is really talented and can score in a variety of ways. They posted her up a lot this year as well, not just had her shoot 3s, and she scores in conversion a lot, too. She finds different ways to keep putting pressure on your defense.”

Cunningham was selected to the All-SEC First Team for the second year in a row after averaging 18 points per game for the Tigers. She’s already up to 1,528 points, good for ninth in Missouri’s all-time scoring list. She’s likely to become just the third Tiger to cross the 2,000-point threshold next season and could challenge for the school’s all-time scoring record of 2,126 points, set by Joni Davis in 1981-85.

And if anyone would understand the magnitude of their place in the Missouri record books, it’d be Cunningham, who is as close to a Missouri Tiger by blood as anyone could be. Raised in Columbia, her grandfather, father, mother, aunt, uncle and sister all played college athletics at Missouri, and she was a key part of a state championship-winning team in all four years at Rock Bridge (Columbia, Mo.) High School, a 2.5-mile drive down Providence Road from Mizzou Arena.

In her freshman year, the 6-1 guard made a huge statement in her fourth game for the Tigers by dropping 42 points against Wake Forest, shooting 13-of-18 from the field and 6-of-8 from deep. While she had some lulls in the middle of the season, she had a big NCAA Tournament, scoring 20 points to help the Tigers beat BYU and putting up 23 points in a second-round loss at Texas.

Even with understandable freshman struggles, she’s been the model for consistent offense in her time at Missouri, with nearly as many games with 25 points or more (15) as she does games scoring only single-digit points (19). In fact, she was dead even in those games in 2016-17 (five each) and has only had three games of single-digit points this season while dropping 25 points or more seven times.

In this season alone, Cunningham’s making more shots while shooting less, going 176-for-327 from the field. The 53.8-percent clip is 37th in the nation overall but is first amongst guards. As impressive as that is, she’s even better from deep, making 68-of-146 shots from behind the 3-point line to rank third in the nation in three-point percentage at 46.6 percent.

But in her last game, in the SEC quarterfinals against Georgia two weeks ago, Cunningham missed more shots in a single game than she ever has since joining the Tigers, only making 3-of-17 shots for seven points in a 55-41 loss. In looking at the film from that game and preparing for Florida Gulf Coast, Cunningham sees a lot of similarities.

“Georgia is a really good team and we consider this team like a mini Georgia, just not with the height,” Cunningham. “So, we have worked on our spacing and our motion and not collapsing on the ball. We did a lot to ourselves in the SEC tournament, but this team has bounced back. I think we’re in a good spot. We have watched film and digested some things and our team is learning, but I think we’re in a really good spot right now.”

And for Tigers head coach Robin Pingeton, even when Cunningham doesn’t shoot the ball well, that doesn’t necessarily mean she’s had an off night.

“I don’t know that I can think of too many games that Sophie has had a bad game. I think she does so much better than scoring,” Pingeton said. “[She’s] probably one of the most unselfish players in the game. I know she is not driven by how many points she has, she wants to help our team be as successful as she can.

“I know a lot of times we look at box scores and from a black and white standpoint we have certain standards when we think it’s a really good game and a lot of time it’s predicated on points, but I think it’s so much bigger than that.”

Cunningham has averaged about five rebounds and three assists per game throughout her career, but Pingeton says that her star junior has a bigger understanding now of the role she plays for this team.

“Where I have seen Sophie grow over the years is from a leadership standpoint — a tremendous leader for our team and I think she is really invested in those relationships,” Pingeton said. “The most important thing to her is the front of the jersey. She is a resilient kid. She impacts the game in a lot of different ways, and I’m just really proud that she represents our university.”

And, of perhaps all the players in the country, no one knows what that means better quite like Sophie Cunningham does at the University of Missouri. All that’s left is for the country to see her shine.