With overhauled roster and conference move, it’s a new era for Colorado

Almost everything will be different for the Buffaloes as they begin their 51st season. Head coach JR Payne is back for her ninth season to lead an ascendant program that has reached two straight Sweet 16s — something that hadn’t happened in Boulder in 21 years.

And Frida Formann, a sharpshooter from Denmark, will be back for a fifth year at Colorado to lead the Buffs both on and off the floor.

But everything else this season will be new, different and maybe even a little strange.  

For starters, all the starters from last season except for Formann are gone, lost to graduation or the transfer portal. In fact, only four players from Colorado’s entire roster in 2023-24 returned to Boulder for the 2024-25 campaign, causing Payne and her staff to work overtime during the offseason to bring in 10 new players.  

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Four of the new players are freshmen while six are transfers, including Lior Garzon, a 6’1 graduate student forward from Israel. Garzon is an experienced player who scored 1,257 points in four years at Villanova and Oklahoma State. Last season, she averaged 9.0 points and 1.8 assists per game for the Cowgirls.

“Ten new players is probably double what I’ve ever had,” Payne told reporters before the first official practice. “Fortunately for us, it’s a good mix of transfers and freshmen and great kids and great chemistry so far, and it’s been all good.”  

Payne will have to rely on Formann to carry a large load in terms of providing direction and on-court stability, not to mention scoring.  

“We graduated a bunch of players and then we also had, going into last season, a couple of fifth-year kids who decided to come back, which was fantastic,” Payne said. “It held us in the top 10 most of the season in large part due to that. But it [meant] that a lot of young players [didn’t get] to play very much, so I think nowadays kids want to play and they have an expectation of playing.”  

Payne also lost a potential superstar when Aaronette Vonleh, a 6’3 center who averaged 14.0 points and 5.1 rebounds per game for Colorado last season, transferred to Baylor for her senior year. Vonleh will be remembered for her astonishing seven steals in Colorado’s second-round upset of Kansas State in the 2024 NCAA Tournament.

This much roster churn could intimidate many coaches, but Payne seems unfazed by the challenge of starting nearly from scratch. If anything, she’s excited about it.

“I don’t think anybody is really retaining their entire roster anymore,” said Payne. “And it’s OK. I’m going to choose not to see it as a negative and choose to just see it as it is what it is. We’ll just keep rolling with the changes as they come.”

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Indeed, the changes are coming. In August, Colorado officially rejoined the Big 12 after spending the past 13 seasons in the Pac-12. Of course, that’s a sort of homecoming for Colorado as an institution. The Buffaloes were members of the Big 12 for nearly three decades before bolting for the Pac-12 in 2011.

Payne readily admits she doesn’t have in-depth knowledge of most of her new conference opponents. The exceptions are three other former Pac-12 teams who also joined the Big 12 this year: Arizona, Arizona State and Utah.

But, as with her revamped roster, Payne welcomes the challenge.

“I’m actually really excited,” Payne told The Next on Sept. 24. “It’s weird to say I’m excited for more work, because it takes more work to scout the teams you don’t know. But I’m very excited for the intellectual challenge of a new team every night.”

The expectations for success are lofty in Boulder these days after three straight NCAA Tournament berths, including two consecutive runs to the Sweet 16.  

Last March, the Buffaloes made a statement after the selection committee shipped them to Manhattan, Kansas, for first- and second-round games. The Buffs had squandered an opportunity to earn home-court advantage by losing six of their final eight games heading into March Madness.

That dampened what had otherwise been one of the most sensational seasons in program history. The Buffaloes won 20 of their first 23 games, including victories over No. 1 LSU, No. 6 USC, No. 8 Stanford and No. 12 Utah. They were ranked as high as No. 3 in the AP Top 25 and were in line for a No. 1 seed in mid-February, when the NCAA Division I Women’s Basketball Committee released its top 16 seeds at the time.  

But Colorado’s uneven finish to the regular season dropped the Buffs out of the top 16, which forced them to hit the road for the NCAA Tournament. Payne’s squad responded with renewed focus, beating No. 12 seed Drake and then defeating No. 4 seed Kansas State, 63-50.

The Buffaloes fell in the Sweet 16 to Caitlin Clark and the Iowa Hawkeyes, just as they had in 2023. Meeting Clark and Company two years in a row was a bad break for Colorado. Had their path through the bracket avoided Iowa in either of the past two seasons, the Buffaloes might have made a run all the way to the Final Four.  

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Regardless of the brackets, the travails of the transfer portal or any of the other changes in college sports, the perception today is that Colorado is a powerhouse program. Fans can thank Payne for that.  

Payne inherited a program after the 2015-16 season that had sunk to rock bottom, finishing last in the Pac-12 with a conference record of 2-16 and an overall record of 7-23. CU’s seven wins that season were the program’s fewest in over 30 years.

As soon as she came on board for the 2016-17 season, Payne overhauled everything in Boulder: the roster, the culture and the system. In her first year at the helm, the Buffaloes won their first 10 games and ended up advancing to the third round of the WNIT before losing to — you guessed it — Iowa.  

The next two years saw Payne’s squads struggle in the extremely competitive Pac-12, but by the beginning of the 2020-21 season, the rebuild was taking root. That season, Colorado took down No. 1-ranked Stanford in an overtime thriller in Boulder, 77-72. It was the first time that Colorado had ever defeated a No. 1-ranked team and the first time that Colorado had ever beaten Stanford in a Pac-12 contest.  

The win over Stanford sparked a rivalry, at least in Payne’s mind.

“If you were to ask us who our Pac-12 rival is, our whole team would say Stanford, which on paper makes no sense,” Payne said. “But every single year, even when we had no business playing with Stanford, it went down to the wire, overtime, last-minute buzzer beaters, so we felt that was our rival.”

The Buffaloes earned another WNIT berth in 2020-21, advancing to the quarterfinals before falling to Mississippi.

By the beginning of the 2021-22 season, Payne had built a program ready to contend on the national stage. Led by Mya Hollingshed, Quay Miller and Jaylyn Sherrod, Colorado posted a winning record in the Pac-12 for the first time since 2012-13 and earned its first NCAA Tournament bid in nine years.

During the past two seasons, the Buffaloes have been a juggernaut, winning a total of 47 games, including four in the NCAA Tournament.

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Payne has built a winning culture at Colorado by recruiting talented, well-rounded players and persuading them to buy into a system that squeezes the most out of their ability. She has installed elements of the Princeton offense, which makes her team tough to guard. She credits former Stanford coach Tara VanDerveer for inspiring that decision.   

“When we had to go against Stanford, who was so good at it, that’s when we started taking some little bits from it,” Payne said. “And eventually it was like, OK, we’ve got a team that can run Princeton now. So we’ve kind of been all-in for it the last few years.”

Payne recruits players that fit the system. A good example is Tabitha Benton, one of four freshmen this season.  

After observing Colorado’s opening week of practices, you can tell everyone associated with the program feels that Benton, a native of Melbourne, Australia, may be the prize of Colorado’s 2024 recruiting class.

At 6’2 with a solid, muscular frame, Benton bears the hallmarks of a classic center or power forward — someone you can count on to dominate in the paint. But that’s not necessarily how Benton sees herself.

“I think the strongest part of my game is my decision-making,” Benton told The Next. “I’m a good shooter for my position, so I can stretch the floor. I’m also very versatile. I would say offensively I can do a lot of things. I can play off the ball; I can play in the post; I can play on the perimeter and help stretch the floor.

“I also think I’m a good teammate. That’s something that’s special about me. It’s not even about communication, but also the way I play. I’m always trying to help other players.”

Benton’s description of herself nearly perfectly matches the qualities you would want in someone playing in the Princeton offense. Based on the way Benton carries herself and the way her teammates seem to be responding to her, she will likely thrive in Payne’s system, and probably right away. No one should be surprised if she cracks the starting lineup when the season opens on Nov. 4 against Wyoming.

So what should we expect from Colorado this season as a new roster travels back to the future in the Big 12?  

The result of this experiment will come down to one of the oldest academic disciplines: chemistry. That’s a word that CU’s players and coaches often mention these days.  

Payne and her players are aware of the challenges they face, yet they’re confident they have the necessary ingredients for success.  

“We believe that we can be as good or better as we’ve ever been,” said Payne, stressing the need to take it one day and one practice at a time. Payne’s system is based on working hard, paying attention to detail and doing your job well every day. It’s a recipe that has worked before at Colorado.  

I asked Payne whether she has any goals for the season, such as making the NCAA Tournament for a fourth straight year. She explained that she doesn’t set specific goals but quickly said that her team will make the tournament.

“The season will evolve and this team will be whatever they’re meant to be by the time we get to March,” she said. “I think we can be as good as we want.”

One thing is for sure: If Payne leads her team back to the NCAA Tournament this season, she should be invited to join the faculty of the chemistry department.