Sports Reference Blog

Huge Update to Historical Women’s College Basketball Stats

Posted by Mike Lynch on November 13, 2024

We are thrilled to announce that we have released a huge update to the women's college basketball statistics appearing on College Basketball Reference. With this update, we now have player, team and opponent statistics going all the way back to 1981-82, which was the first season of NCAA-sanctioned women's basketball. This exciting update now gives us statistics for legends such as Cheryl Miller, Anne Donovan, Yolanda Laney, Teresa Edwards, Katrina McClain, Wanda Ford, Cynthia Cooper and Doris Burke.

The last major update to the site, back in February, featured expanded player and team statistics back to 1987-88. This update tacks an additional six seasons of statistics for players and teams, while also adding over 20 seasons of new opponent statistics. It includes coverage of games played, points, rebounds, assists, field goals made and attempted, and free throws made and attempted. Additionally, it includes biographical data such as height, class and position. This update does not include minutes played, games started, personal fouls, turnovers, offensive/defensive rebounds, blocks or steals. NCAA women's basketball did not officially track blocks or steals before 1987-88, but we have a lot of this data directly from schools that we hope to add in the future. Similarly, assists were not officially tracked in NCAA women's basketball before 1985-86, but we hope to add more of this data, directly from the schools, in the future. In fact, our assists coverage is already comprehensive back to 1984-85, one season before the NCAA considers it official. 1987-88 was the first season in which all NCAA women's basketball games had a 3-point shot. Most team scoring sheets from before 1987-88 inconsistently handled how experimental 3-pt shots were handled, but we have done our best to include all of the made 3-pointers we were able to tease out.

The coverage map of our player statistics by season can be seen here. The same map for schools by season can be seen here. And coverage for opponents by season can be seen here.

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

We have acquired most of this data from Sports Data Research. The source material is generally the scans that schools sent to the NCAA after their seasons, which can now be found on NCAA.org. There are often issues with these scans: difficult to decipher numbers, typos, handwritten errors, smudges, missing players, missing games, etc. We have been able to correct almost all of these issues, 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. 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 Reference will be working to improve and expand this data over time.

We would also like to thanks Jessica Gelman, Daryl Morey and the great folks over at 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 for their generous gift to support us in this mission.

We would also like to give a huge shoutout to our Summer 2024 intern Maddy Brown. This is very tough data to work with. She did an incredible job helping us work through the many discrepancies that you find in an imperfect dataset such as 1980's college basketball statistics. Please be sure to check out her TikTok channel for fascinating dives into women's basketball. Maddy's description of some of the data issues follows:

For the majority of the players, field goals and free throws made correlated perfectly with their points scored, meaning that player 2*(field goals made) + (free throws made) + (3pt field goals made) was exactly equal to points scored. However, about 140 out of the nearly 18,000 rows of player data returned errors for this calculation, even after cross-referencing the school stat sheets on the official NCAA stats site.  

In many cases, we found that these gaps in calculated points vs recorded points was due to the experimental three-point line in the 1986-87 season, which wasn't officially recognized by the NCAA for the women's game until the 1987-88 season. Approximately 60 of the 298 schools in the 1981-82 to 1986-87 data set contained evidence of three-point erasure, in the form of crossing out the team point total and revising it to a lower value. Using the discrepancy in the points scored by the players and the total points that were subtracted from their teams, we were able to infer when a player had made a certain amount of three-point field goals. It is Sports Reference's policy to record statistics as they occurred in-game, not necessarily by how the NCAA records them, thus we have reinstated these three-point field goals and their points where possible.

We generally do not have statistics for three-point field goals attempted in these years, except in some specific cases where school scorekeepers specifically kept track.  There are also cases in which there is evidence of team point adjustment but no indication of player point adjustment, meaning that we were able to add the points presumably scored from three point field goals back to the team point totals so that it is equal to the sum of game points scored, but these points are not attributed to any specific player.

Our work here is far from done. Please keep your eyes peeled for future updates with things like expanded school schedules/results, all-time NCAA Tournament box scores, women's NCAA Tournament buzzer-beaters, and hopefully one day even AIAW-era statistics.

One Response to “Huge Update to Historical Women’s College Basketball Stats”

  1. pilight Says:

    Hope you get schedules and game scores going all the way back!

    Love the stats!