[81alum]

Thanks for putting this together, 81! One amendment: I think ESPN had Pedersen at no. 4.

It will be really interesting to see what our team is like in two years' time, given that the raw talent is largely collected in the younger half of our team.

One other thought: do we think the expansion of the WNBA and the increasing prominence of women's pro basketball overseas affects things? At the margins, I think the more likely it is that a top recruit thinks she could make a career out of basketball (playing, coaching, commentating, etc.), the less likely she is to be swayed by the "40 year decision" pitch. I think that's part of why we have a really hard time landing top recruits in MBB - even if they could get admitted, the top ones have such high prospects in the NBA that they might not care as much about the benefits of Stanford, and they're unlikely to stay long enough to graduate anyway. Someone like KLS, for example, can probably craft a career entirely around basketball, so the tradeoff in going to UConn might not be much of one at all?

Thanks 2006.  I have fixed the typo. 

I have often wondered about that very theory--that the more Tara succeeds in bringing WBB into greater parity with MBB the less "special" Stanford might seem to recruits.  I don't know.  We have lost Katie Lou Samuelson and Mikaela Pivec and a few others rumored to have backed away, but the truth is none of us (with the possible exception of Bob) really knows to what extent players are turning down the 40 year offer vs. concluding that they won't make it past admissions.  2 did.  But this will provide fodder for speculation for a very long time.

I also think that female high school students have a lot of choices in sports these days, and I have wondered if the demographics of basketball is somehow different from the demography of women in volleyball and some other sports.  Sort of like Stanford is reputed to have an advantage in  recruiting OL and TE in men's football vs. other positions.  I think there is something to that.  Just looking at race in women's sports would show there a big differences between the demographic make up of soccer, volleyball, and basketball, and those differences could be relevant to recruiting. 

And WBB has simply become much more competitive.  It is possible that today's Stanford teams would have been national champions 15 years ago, but that while we continue to attract good talent on par with our history, the rest of the game has elevated and our players are no longer at the top of all the lists.  Maybe that is part of the answer.  For example, it used to be that anyone who wanted to stay on the west coast for an elite level of WBB had only one choice--Stanford.  These days there are always one or two or three other Pac 12 schools who can be competitive with us.

We seem to have one thread bemoaning the decline in our recruiting every year.  And then somehow we wind up in the Final Four yet again.  Frankly, it looks to me like our recruiting is improving the last couple of years, not declining.  And if someone like Amihere gets past admissions and comes our way, we will forget all about these threads.

[81alum]

Thanks for putting this together, 81! One amendment: I think ESPN had Pedersen at no. 4.

It will be really interesting to see what our team is like in two years' time, given that the raw talent is largely collected in the younger half of our team.

One other thought: do we think the expansion of the WNBA and the increasing prominence of women's pro basketball overseas affects things? At the margins, I think the more likely it is that a top recruit thinks she could make a career out of basketball (playing, coaching, commentating, etc.), the less likely she is to be swayed by the "40 year decision" pitch. I think that's part of why we have a really hard time landing top recruits in MBB - even if they could get admitted, the top ones have such high prospects in the NBA that they might not care as much about the benefits of Stanford, and they're unlikely to stay long enough to graduate anyway. Someone like KLS, for example, can probably craft a career entirely around basketball, so the tradeoff in going to UConn might not be much of one at all?

Thanks 2006.  I have fixed the typo. 

I have often wondered about that very theory--that the more Tara succeeds in bringing WBB into greater parity with MBB the less "special" Stanford might seem to recruits.  I don't know.  We have lost Katie Lou Samuelson and Mikaela Pivec and a few others rumored to have backed away, but the truth is none of us (with the possible exception of Bob) really knows to what extent players are turning down the 40 year offer vs. concluding that they won't make it past admissions.  2 did.  But this will provide fodder for speculation for a very long time.

I also think that female high school students have a lot of choices in sports these days, and I have wondered if the demographics of basketball is somehow different from the demography of women in volleyball and some other sports.  Sort of like Stanford is reputed to have an advantage in  recruiting OL and TE in men's football vs. other positions.  I think there is something to that.  Just looking at race in women's sports would show there a big differences between the demographic make up of soccer, volleyball, and basketball, and those differences could be relevant to recruiting. 

And WBB has simply become much more competitive.  It is possible that today's Stanford teams would have been national champions 15 years ago, but that while we continue to attract good talent on par with our history, the rest of the game has elevated and our players are no longer at the top of all the lists.  Maybe that is part of the answer.  For example, it used to be that anyone who wanted to stay on the west coast for an elite level of WBB had only one choice--Stanford.  These days there are always one or two or three other Pac 12 schools who can be competitive with us.

We seem to have one thread bemoaning the decline in our recruiting every year.  And then somehow we wind up in the Final Four yet again.  Frankly, it looks to me like our recruiting is improving the last couple of years, not declining.  And if someone like Amihere gets past admissions and comes our way, we will forget all about these threads.