Freeman ready to introduce Sooners to New Zealand

NORMAN — For the second time in the last few years, the Oklahoma men’s basketball team will have a built-in tour guide during a foreign trip.Two seasons ago, it was Buddy Hield showing the Sooners around during a regular-season trip to his native Bahamas.This week, sophomore Matt Freeman will be the one showing his teammates around when Oklahoma visits Freeman’s homeland of New Zealand during the first part of a trip that also includes Australia.The Sooners leave Thursday on the 11-day trip that includes four games, sightseeing in New Zealand and a trip to the Great Barrier Reef.But the first stop on the trip is in Freeman’s hometown of Auckland.“Usually when I go home it’s purely to see family and just relax and see people I haven’t seen in a year,” Freeman said. “But this time is a whole lot more special because not only do I get to do that, I get to bring the people who I care about here and the people who are close to me and show them my homeland, show them where I was brought up and get them to meet the people who are close to me back home.”Freeman is nervous about one thing that has nothing to do with basketball.

“I think I talk about food back home so much,” Freeman said. “I hope I can get them to experience what I really mean by how good our food is back home.”Two seasons ago, when the Sooners visited the Bahamas for the Battle 4 Atlantis, Hield’s family cooked up a Bahamian feast for the team.Freeman said he’s asked his mom, Louise, to cook a meal for the team during the trip.“Mom, you’ve got to make sure, we’ve got to have some roast lamb and some roast potatoes for the team,” Freeman told her.“I hope these guys won’t be picky because I know they’re picky eaters.”But the trip will be big for Freeman for other reasons.He arrived for the second semester of the 2016 Final Four season and expected to find quick playing time in Norman.He started two games early in the season and scored 15 points in his debut.But he averaged less than 2.25 points per game in the other 25 games he played in and fell out of the regular rotation early in Big 12 play.Freeman quickly realized his defense needed work to compete at the Division I level, but his shot, which was a big reason he’d drawn praise in New Zealand, also went away late in the season.

Freeman missed all 13 field goals he attempted over his final 12 games.

“That’s the hard thing — when there’s a lot of pressure on you to hit shots because that’s what you do and it’s not going your way, it gets hard on your mind,” Freeman said. “It’s frustrating when in consecutive games you’re not hitting shots. I think every shooter would be able to feel that. It just comes down to the fact that I needed to put more hours in. I’ve learned from my mistakes.”Last season, Freeman was 14 of 43 from behind the 3-point line. While it’s a long way from making them over a defender in a Big 12 game, Freeman recently hit 15 of 16 from behind the arc after one of the Sooners’ practices ended.“He’s a pick-and-pop guy, so making shots is a starting point,” Sooners coach Lon Kruger said. “He’s got good awareness though, good energy level, good enthusiasm. So all the intangibles are there. It’s just a matter of making shots at the Big 12 level, and he’s been doing a good job of that this summer.”