Stiles always saw something special in new recordholder Plum
Jackie Stiles, the former Southwest Missouri State guard who held the NCAA Division I women’s basketball scoring record for 16 years until it was broken Saturday, always saw something special in Washington guard Kelsey Plum.
It started with her jersey number, the same number Stiles wore during one of the most decorated careers in the sport’s history.
“Wherever I go, I always look to see who’s No. 10,” Stiles recently told USA TODAY Sports. “She was right away easy to spot. She stood out above everyone else.”
Plum, who reached 3,397 points for the Huskies on Saturday, still has the Pac-12 and NCAA tournaments to build on her record, so it’s impossible to pinpoint how far she will extend it. But if scoring trends since Stiles’ mark hold, the composition of the top NCAA career scoring list will continue to change rapidly.
Six of the 11 women who have scored 3,000 or more points in NCAA Division I history have completed their careers since 2011. Five played as recently as the 2013 season. Stiles, who considers herself one of Plum’s biggest fans and made multiple congratulatory comments over the weekend, has a theory about why the game has seen so many transcendent scorers in the last decade.
“I think one of the reasons is the visibility of the women’s game and the opportunities we now have,” she said. “I remember I told my second-grade teacher I wanted to play professional basketball when I grow up, but we did not even have professional basketball. It did not exist in America. But now young girls can say I want to play in the WNBA.
“I didn’t play on my first AAU team until I was 12, and I had to beg my way onto a team that was four hours away. My dad drove me every weekend. Now there are bitty basketball teams all over the place, and just the opportunities that young people have now have really grown. And with every single game being nationally televised in the NCAA tournament, you can see all of the opportunities you can have, (and) I think it’s just helped players develop really quickly.”