Cicely Oaks is a living, breathing contradiction.
Oaks stands in the forefront of the women’s basketball media guide. Her face is a blank canvas. She stares straight ahead – an imposing figure – the kind of opponents shy away from and teammates swarm to.
“Once you crack the shell, she’s a big softie on the inside,” teammate Jessie Shetters said. “She’s one of the first to pick you up when you’ve fallen. She likes to put on a little show but it’s not for real. She’s not really that tough.”
“She comes off with this really gruff sort of exterior, but I think she’s one of the most sensitive young women we have on our team in terms of how she looks and then how she is,” coach Bev Smith said.
Oaks senior season signified her final opportunity to grab a spot in the rotation and hold onto it for the whole season. She showed flashes her junior year, but faded towards the end of Pacific-10 Conference play.
No matter what she does the rest of the season, Smith says Oaks has realized the potential she saw when she signed the 5-foot-7-inch senior guard out of Grant High in Portland.
“Sometimes you have to look at where you came from, not just where you have to go and I think she’s traveled an incredible distance,” Smith said. “I’m proud of her because it wasn’t easy – she had to really change some things and when you sit down and talk with Cis, she’s a very reasonable young woman and understands what’s right and wrong and tries to make things right.”
The two Portland natives on the roster, Oaks and Shetters, have emerged in their senior seasons with significant roles on Oregon’s senior-dominated team.
Oaks is a reliable scorer in Oregon’s starting lineup, with averages of 8.2 points on .426 from the field and .457 from three-point range. Shetters is scoring 5.7 points a game, while grabbing 8.4 rebounds, fourth in the Pac-10 through Jan. 21.
“We both kind of lost our confidence coming in and I think that you can see in her play that it’s really starting to come back and that of course comes with repetition and practice and being able to do it in practice and then transferring that to the game,” Shetters said.
Oaks and Shetters both share an offbeat sense of humor. The two former opponents in high school, who say they hated each other then, gravitated towards each other in college and became best friends.
The two lived separately last year, but looking to save money, and fond of each others company, moved in together this year.
“It’s good,” Oaks said. “I feel comfortable. You know sometimes you have to worry about your roommate or there’s something that irks you about them. I don’t really have that. We clean up when we clean up. If the dishes pile up, one of us will do it.”
The pair will eat dinner together, while also spending time alone to themselves. The friends enjoy their share of music and when one of the two plays it too loud, the other will send a text message to tell them to turn it down.
Oaks has been more of a supportive presence with Shetters out of the rest of the regular season with a stress fracture in her back. Shetters suffered the injury at USC, and Wednesday, in her first home game sitting out since the injury, she took her traditional spot on the court during the announcement of the starting lineups and did chest bumps with her teammates.
“(Shetters) acted like it was cool, but it set in and she was upset and she still, even now, she’ll go through walk throughs and be kind of upset because she can’t do anything but we just tell her that we need her to keep talking to us, like telling us defensive things and just be positive and she’s doing that,” Oaks said.
“She kind of keeps the mood light,” Shetters said of Oaks. “You’re feeling down or something like that (and) she’ll come up with some stupid joke that you have to laugh at.”
Fans can always point out Oaks on the court by her exuberant on-court behavior, whether it’s holding her shooting hand high on a made three-pointer or emphatically waving her finger on a three-point play.
The trait was born from growing up playing for an Amateur Athletic Union squad called the Pilots, out of Portland. The same “goofy” girls played together from fourth grade through college.
“That is how I’ve always been, just excited, because I liked playing with the people I was playing with and it was exciting, so I just carried over a little bit,” Oaks said.
Two weeks ago, Arizona’s Joy Hollingsworth was guarding Oaks close on the right wing, so the Oregon guard drove to the basket, absorbed the foul and flipped in the lay-up. She emphatically waved her finger and the crowd roared.
Oregon fans missed seeing it in person, but Oaks most impressive play may have come in a 21 point effort – 15 in the second half – of a 66-63 win at Drake in December.
Or there’s her performance at USC when Oaks had 14 points and made all four three-pointers in a 79-71 double overtime defeat.
For Oaks, Oregon’s 2-7 record in conference play is troubling considering how easily the team could have a winning record and be talking about a postseason berth, instead of what’s going wrong.
“Every game that we’ve lost, we’ve been in control of it at one point,” Oaks said. “We don’t let up, but we have a lead and we just (go) ‘OK, this lead is going to last for the rest of the game,’ instead of just keep going and keep scoring and stuff like that.”
Oaks remains open about her future plans. She is interested in playing professionally if the opportunity arises. Close friend and former teammate Brandi Davis made the jump last spring to the Los Angeles Sparks and has since played in Israel and Turkey.
“I came here almost totally out of my element so if I go somewhere else, it’ll just be another thing that’ll just help me grow as a person,” Oaks said.
[email protected]