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Stanford women's best all-time basketball teams, No. 7
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The No. 7 team on our all-time top-10 list of Stanford’s best women’s basketball teams in history represented the genesis of an outstanding three-year run for the Cardinal. This group matured into a squad that got even better over time.
The top six Stanford teams will be posted over the next few days, starting again on Monday, but now we focus on our No.7 squad, which played during the 1994-95 season. This Cardinal team had as great an array of talent as any Stanford team, although most of it was still young at the time.
No. 7: 1994-95
This squad went 30-3, finished the regular season ranked No. 4 and had nine players who easily could have started. It featured two of the best Cardinal players ever – Kristin Folkl and Kate Starbird – although neither had reached her prime yet. Starbird, then a sophomore who averaged a team-leading 16.0 points, and senior center Anita Kaplan (13.3 points) both were named to the all-Pac-10 team.
Folkl had spent the fall of her freshman year at Stanford starring in volleyball and did not join the basketball team until midseason. She was not a starter on the 1994-95 team, but she was still one of its most productive players, averaging 9.5 points and 5.5 rebounds in her first season.
Olympia Scott, a standout freshman that season, and junior co-captain Bobbie Kelsey started quite a few games, but during the postseason the starters were Starbird, Kaplan, senior Rachel Hemmer, senior guard Kate Paye (perhaps the best defender ever for Stanford) and sophomore point guard Jamila Wideman, who had been limited that season by a foot injury.
A good defensive team that limited opponents to 38.9 percent shooting, this Stanford team showed both its talent and its youth with its erratic play – well, erratic by Stanford’s standards.
On November 25, Stanford beat No. 6 Texas Tech by 19 points, then, six days later, it lost by 37 points on the road against No. 1 Tennessee.
A road loss to a pretty good Oregon State team was the only blemish on the conference record, and the Cardinal was impressive in winning its first four games of the NCAA Tournament, including a 10-point victory over No. 11 North Carolina and an 11-point win over No. 14 Purdue.
However, in the national semifinals against No. 1 and undefeated Connecticut, the Cardinal was overwhelmed 87-60. The Huskies’ 27-point victory in that Final Four game is the Cardinal’s largest margin of defeat for any postseason game under Tara VanDerveer, but it came against one of the best teams in college basketball history as UConn took care of a good Tennessee team in the final.
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