West Coast Conference Women's Basketball Player of the Year

The West Coast Conference (WCC) Women's Basketball Player of the Year is a basketball award given to the most outstanding women's basketball player in the West Coast Conference. The award has been given ever since the conference first sponsored women's basketball in the 1985–86 season, when it was known as the West Coast Athletic Conference. There has been one tie in the history of the award, in 2006–07 between Stephanie Hawk of Gonzaga and Amanda Rego of Santa Clara (coincidentally, players from the same two schools were involved in a tie for the WCC Men's Player of the Year Award that season^[1]). There have also been a total of three repeat winners, but only one—Courtney Vandersloot of Gonzaga—has been Player of the Year three times.

No one WCC school has dominated the total awards distribution over time. The overall leader is Gonzaga, with seven awards; Saint Mary's and Santa Clara are next, each with five awards. However, Gonzaga and BYU have dominated in recent years; Gonzaga has earned all of its awards since 2005, and BYU, which only joined the WCC in 2011, has won three awards in its first four seasons in the league. Each current WCC member except for Pacific has at least one award. Pacific had been a charter member of what is now the WCC, but left in 1971, long before the conference sponsored women's sports, and did not return until 2013. Of the schools that have played WCC women's basketball, only Nevada and Pacific never had a winner. Nevada only participated in the first two seasons of WCAC women's basketball (1985–86 and 1986–87), and Pacific played its first WCC women's basketball season in 2013–14.

Key

Winners

Gonzaga's Courtney Vandersloot, the only three-time winner, is also the first NCAA Division I player of either sex with 2,000 points and 1,000 assists in a career.

Winners by school

Note: Years of entry for each school are the actual calendar years they joined the WCC and first played women's basketball in the conference. Because the basketball season spans two calendar years, the award years reflect the years in which each season ended.

Footnotes

• ^a U.S. International joined the then-WCAC as an affiliate member in women's basketball when the conference began sponsoring the sport. It left the conference after the 1986–87 season. Within four years of its departure from the WCAC, the school went bankrupt and dropped intercollegiate athletics.
• ^b The University of Nevada, Reno (Nevada), which had left the then-WCAC in 1979 for the Big Sky Conference, rejoined the WCAC as a women's sports affiliate in 1985. The Wolf Pack left after the 1986–87 season for the Mountain West Athletic Conference, a now-defunct women's-only conference that is not to be confused with the Wolf Pack's current all-sports home, the Mountain West Conference.^[17]
• ^c The University of the Pacific was a founding member of the California Basketball Association, later the WCAC and now the WCC, in 1952. Pacific left the conference in 1971 to join its football team in the Pacific Coast Athletic Association, now the Big West Conference. After dropping football in 1995, Pacific rejoined the WCC in 2013.^[18][19]

References

General

• Names of winners through 2010–11: "Awards and Honors: WCC Honors by Year" (PDF). 2010–11 Women's Basketball Year in Review. West Coast Conference. p. 62. Retrieved March 11, 2013. 
• Class years of winners through 2010–11: "Awards and Honors: All-Conference Teams" (PDF). 2010–11 Women's Basketball Year in Review. West Coast Conference. p. 63. Retrieved March 11, 2013. 

Specific