Sports Reference Blog

We are excited to announce that Sports Reference's College Basketball site has added 14 new seasons worth of player and team statistics for Division I women's basketball. This takes our coverage all the way back to 1987-88, when a balanced Louisiana Tech squad featuring the likes of Teresa Weatherspoon, Venus Lacy and Erica Westbrooks won the National Championship, while Weatherspoon, Sue Wicks and Michelle Edwards shared the various national player of the year honors. Some of the most notable players in basketball history have had their statistics added to the site with this update. They include, among others: Lisa Leslie, Dawn Staley, Sheryl Swoopes, Rebecca Lobo, Chamique Holdsclaw and Tamika Catchings.

This dataset includes coverage of games played, points, rebounds, assists, blocks, steals, field goals made and attempted, 3-point field goals made and attempted, and free throws made and attempted. Among the statistics we are not including in this update (but which we hope to expand in the future) are minutes played, games started, personal fouls, turnovers and offensive/defensive rebounds. Without minutes played we are also unable to calculate most advanced statistics for these seasons at this time. However, we are able to calculate True Shooting Percentage and Effective Field Goal Percentage since we have the needed shooting statistics.

These new statistics can seen on player pages, school pages, conference season registers, conference leaderboards and national leaderboards.

We have acquired this data from Sports Data Research, which does excellent work and has provided us with similar historical college football data in the past. The current data is largely built off of the scans that schools sent to the NCAA after their seasons and were subsequently scanned to NCAA.org. There are often issues with these scans: difficult to decipher numbers, typos, handwritten errors, smudges, missing players, missing games, etc. For instance, on this sheet you'll notice players with FG percentages that don't make sense and a player with 2 points but no made FG or FT. We have been able to correct these, but it is sometimes not possible to do so. Additionally, It was common practice for the team's main rotation players to appear on these sheets and then other players would get blended into a row labeled 'others' with their statistics all combined. Some stat sheets list very players, such as this one. We have elected to not put these 'others' rows onto our site. Generally speaking, errors are the exception to the rule, but they can be difficult to correct without access to game-level data. Sports Data Research and Sports Reference will be working to improve this data over time.

We would also like to thank the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference for their grant which enabled us to purchase this data. We appreciate their common commitment to expanding access to women's sports data and thank them for their generous gift to support us in this mission.

As previously mentioned, we will be expanding this data in the future. This will go beyond things like cleaning and expanding data for the seasons we already have. We will also be adding player and team statistics back to the first year of NCAA involvement with women's college basketball (1981-82).  Once we get back that far, it would be great to add AIAW data, as well, but that will require some further planning. Currently, we have women's NCAA basketball schedules back to 2002-03. We will continue working with Sports Data Research and the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference to extend that coverage back to 1981-82, as well. We also plan to add opponent statistics (on a season level) back as far as possible. The existing data for the early and mid-80s is generally of a lesser quality compared to what you find today, but we are committed to unearthing and displaying as much of it as possible.

Lastly, we would like to mention that there are three schools that team stat sheets do not seem to exist for:

2000-01 Alabama A&M, 2000-01 Texas Southern and 1989-90 Bethune-Cookman. If you happen to have access to these statistics, we would love to add them, so please let us know.

About Sports Reference LLC:
Sports Reference’s family of websites is the internet's leading, easy to use resource for current and historical sports data, biographical information, and advanced statistics. It first launched with Baseball-Reference.com in April 2000 and Sports Reference LLC was then formed in December of 2007. Along with Baseball Reference, Sports Reference’s websites also includes Basketball Reference, Pro Football Reference, Hockey Reference, FBref (Soccer), Sports Reference College Basketball, Sports Reference College Football, and lastly, their subscription based suite of sports research tools, Stathead. Sports Reference aims to democratize data so that users can enjoy, understand, and share the sports they love.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 15th, 2024 at 10:56 am and is filed under Announcement, CBB at Sports Reference, Data, History. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.