Box Scores for Every Women’s NCAA Basketball Tournament Game Added

We are thrilled to announce that College Basketball Reference has significantly expanded its coverage of the Women's NCAA  Basketball Tournament and now has box scores with player statistics for every game in the history of the event since it began in 1982. We believe this to be the most comprehensive database of women's March Madness information ever compiled for public consumption. Before this update, we had box scores for all of the games from 2003 to present, so this update represents a near doubling of our Women's NCAA Tournament data.

Women's college basketball dates back to the 1890s, but the NCAA first became a sanctioning body for the 1981-82 season. In that first season, a previous sanctioning body, the AIAW, was still around and many top teams elected to play in the 1982 AIAW Tournament instead of the NCAA Tournament. By the time of the 1983 NCAA Tournament, however, the AIAW was no more and the NCAA Tournament has been indisputably the most prized treasure in women's college hoops ever since.

We have a page for each season's tournament, with links to the box scores for each game. Links to these boxes also appear on team season pages. Additionally, players who played in the NCAA Tournament will now have links to their NCAA Tournament gamelogs on their player pages. I highly recommend checking out our newly built gamelogs for legends such as Anne Donovan, Cheryl Miller, Dawn Staley, Sheryl Swoopes, Rebecca Lobo and Chamique Holdsclaw.

The new box scores have point totals for every player in every game, but are not 100% complete for any other statistical categories. The full details on our coverage is broken down season-by-season here. The high-level details are roughly as follows, though:

• • • FGA - 100% complete since 1987; over 95% complete from 1984-1986; over 60% complete in 1982 and 1983.
    • FTA - 100% complete for all seasons except 1982 (94%) and 1985 (97%).
    • TRB and AST: 100%+ complete since 1998; 94-98% complete in 1996 and 1997; 50-75% complete from 1982-95.
    • BLK, STL and PF: 100%+ complete since 1998; 94-98% complete in 1996 and 1997; 35-70% complete from 1982-95.
    • 3p - 100% complete since it was instituted for the 1988 Tournament (3PA is 100% except for 1989, where it is 98% complete)
    • MP - 100% complete since 2001; 94-100% complete from 1996-2000; 50-70% complete from 1982-95.

We encourage you to poke around and see what you might find. There's all sorts of fascinating data now at our fingertips. Here are some particularly impressive player performances now captured in our box scores:

Lorri Bauman's 50-point game (the only 50-pointer in women's NCAA Tournament history) against Maryland in Drake's 1982 Regional Final loss.

Sheryl Swoopes's dominant 47-point performance in Texas Tech's win over Ohio State in the 1993 National Championship Game. It remains the most points in NCAA Basketball championship history (women's or men's).

Charlotte Smith's 20-20 game for UNC against Louisiana Tech in the 1994 National Championship Game. She even hit a shot at the buzzer to win this game (buzzer-beaters are another dataset we hope to add in the near future).

Ticha Penicheiro's triple-double (with 14 steals!) in Old Dominion's 1998 First Round win over St. Francis (PA).

Jackie Stiles's 41 points to lead Missouri State to a Sweet 16 win over top-seeded Duke.

This information is now also baked into our pages for All-Tournament Teams and Most Outstanding Player award winners. The tables are sortable, so you can see, for instance, that Sheryl Swoopes had the best PPG average of a tourney MOP (35.4) and Michelle Marciniak had the lowest (12.5).

We would like to thank our former interns Tim Clay and Liam Smith for their work in compiling most of this data. We would also like to point out that this constitutes a foundation that we will build upon moving forward. We hope to continue to uncover new sources which will allow us to flesh out the information in the older box scores in this set as much as possible.

We would also like to point out that we hope to have this new information available to search in Stathead very soon.