The John R. Wooden Award will celebrate it’s 50th anniversary this season. Leading up to the award ceremony on April 10, 2026, The Sporting Tribune in partnership with the Wooden Award and the Los Angeles Athletic Club will highlight past winners of the Wooden Award and the Legends of Coaching Award.
While women's college basketball fans are marveling about the latest core of talent ushering in a new era, it would be a disservice to forget those who laid the foundation.
That includes two-time WNBA champion and 2022 All-Star MVP Kelsey Plum, easily one of the greatest college basketball players ever.
Plum, the 2017 Wooden Award winner, was the sharpshooter everyone aspired to be - long before Sabrina Ionescu emerged on the scene, Paige Bueckers electrified the nation in just her freshman year and Caitlin Clark starred at Iowa.
Plum finished her career at Washington (2013–2017) with 3,527 points, which was the all-time NCAA Division I scoring record - men’s or women’s - when she graduated.
Her relentlessness in four years in the Pacific Northwest was evident immediately, as she helped the USA basketball team to win gold in Lithuania and then flew directly to Seattle to begin her collegiate career. And that was at the beginning of the summer, so she could enroll early and begin acclimating to the campus where her star would rise the next four years.
Her coming-out moment might have been on Feb. 9, 2024, when she led the Huskies to an 87-82 victory over the fourth-ranked team in the country, Stanford, by turning in a game-high 23 points.
One of the most feared scorers in NCAA history, Plum averaged 25.4 points per game for her career and 31.7 points per game as a senior. Her senior-season scoring average remains one of the most explosive in modern college basketball history.
That year, she not only won the Wooden Award but was also named the Naismith Player of the Year and Associated Press Player of the Year.
But Plum wasn’t just a volume scorer, as she had displayed her 3-point range, had an elite shot creation, established a strong finishing ability, brought a high basketball IQ to every game and possessed the clutch gene many players before and after couldn't find.
Opposing defenses built their entire game plans around stopping her, and yet she still dropped 30 or more regularly.
Though Washington was never considered a traditional powerhouse like South Carolina, UConn or Tennessee, Plum elevated the Huskies to a Final Four in 2016 and national relevance. That's significant historically, as she didn’t just dominate during her time in Seattle, she transformed a program.
Beyond her meteoric senior campaign, it was her entire career that put Plum's name in the same all-time conversation as the likes of Maya Moore, Breanna Stewart, Cheryl Miller and Diana Taurasi.=
Though some of those players have more championships, few scorers in college history were as relentless as Plum, who is now second all-time in scoring behind Clark, who eclipsed the record during her senior year in 2024 and finished with 3,951 points.
When talking about pure scoring dominance, individual awards, program impact, national recognition, Plum is undeniably one of the greatest college basketball players ever.
