Women's college basketball wasn't always dominated by UConn, Tennessee and South Carolina.
A half-century ago, tiny Immaculata won the first three national AIAW titles. Delta State soon followed before the likes of Louisiana Tech, Old Dominion and Rutgers started a slow trend of bigger programs becoming the backbone of a fledgling sport that many Americans were — and are — still learning to appreciate.
The women's basketball poll has been there for it all. Founded by the Philadelphia Inquirer's Mel Greenberg in 1976, it began six years before the first NCAA Tournament. The upcoming season marks the 50th year of the women's basketball poll with the AP rankings serving as a roadmap for fans, players and coaches navigating the sport's ups and downs.
This season opens at a critical moment, with basketball arguably the most popular women's sport at the collegiate and professional level, bringing the brand endorsements, big audiences and complications that can come with success.
But it wasn't always this way.
The poll's beginnings
When the poll started in 1976, women's games were almost never on national television and the internet wouldn't come along for another few decades. That made it hard for coaches and fans to quickly understand where teams stacked up. The poll, which only ranked the top 20 teams at the time, was a way to solve that problem.
In the early days, coaches voted in the poll until it shifted to journalists before the 1994-95 season. Compiling it was no simple task before cellphones and the internet, forcing Greenberg to track down the coaches and then tabulate the results by hand before releasing the results to the public.
“The rankings became a thing. Every time they came out you’d see what other teams were doing,” said Cathy Rush, the Hall of Fame coach who led Immaculata to those three consecutive titles in the early 1970s. “Names we’d never seen before — all of a sudden they were ranked. It was so exciting when we had a big win or we lost to see where we would be each week.”
Delta State was the first No. 1 team in the history of the poll. Langston Rogers was the sports information director for the team at the time and recalled how the ranking was a defining moment for both the school and coach Margaret Wade, whose teams won three straight national titles in a run that included a 51-game winning streak.
“When the poll came out, I told Coach Wade we were No. 1 and she said with a laugh ‘I would hope so,’” Rogers said.
Who has ranked the most?
No team has been ranked more in the poll than Tennessee, which has appeared in 794 of the 885 polls. While the Lady Vols under coach Pat Summitt set the standard, UConn and Geno Auriemma have been the flag-bearer for the past 30 years. The Huskies have been No. 1 more than anyone else, reaching that spot a whopping 251 times, starting with their first appearance back in 1995.
“That’s just another one of those statistics that blows my mind,” Auriemma said. “It’s amazing how everyone treats being No. 1 in the poll differently. It was for us, a validation that you guys are really good enough to be considered the best team in the country.”
The Huskies beat the Lady Vols on Martin Luther King Day in 1995 when the poll was held back for the first time because of a daytime matchup of the No. 1 and 2 teams. The Huskies won and became the new number one the next day.
“Obviously it was quite exciting for us when we won that game,” Auriemma said. “Maybe it wouldn’t have been as much for Tennessee since they’ve been there before. But it was a pretty amazing feat. That was a big, big deal for my players, our program and the university. We were No. 1 in The AP poll, this was our shot at the national limelight.”
The poll stays relevant through changing times
The technology has evolved over the years, allowing viewers to scan multiple games at a time on any number of screens at their fingertips. But the poll is as relevant as ever, playing a central role in everything from bragging rights to talent recruitment.
Rebecca Lobo, who led UConn to its first national championship in 1995, said that when she was being recruited by schools, they would send clippings of the poll with their team’s rank highlighted to show where they were on the national landscape.
Nikki Fargas, who was an assistant at Tennessee before becoming a head coach at LSU and UCLA, remembers sending faxes and mailings out to potential recruits that showed poll rankings.
“When you’re trying to bring in some of the top talent to your university to play, any nuggets you can provide to their families, their friends, that shows how consistent you’ve been how you’ve always been in the poll matters,” she said. "Whether you’re No. 1 for consecutive years or top five, those things matter when you’re telling a story of your university.”
More recently, Candace Parker said Summitt would remind her players at Tennessee of where they ranked and how some of their opponents were ahead of them. It was a motivation tactic — and one that apparently worked. Parker helped lead Tennessee to two consecutive national championships before launching a successful professional career.
“Pat knew how to light a fire,” Parker said. “If someone was ranked ahead of us in the poll, she’d make it known."
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