Yesterday morning, longtime reader of the newsletter Bob Mungovan (who’s an excellent BlueSky follow, BTW), asked how many of the 25 players cited in my latest newsletter actually played in the Conference of Champions.
Thanks to College Basketball Reference, we can answer that question, with 18 of the 25 WNBA players that are suiting up this year from the Pac-12 (or even the Pac-10, in one case) playing their entire NCAA careers within the Conference of Champions.
Of those 18, the elder stateswoman of the group is Phoenix Mercury guard Sami Whitcomb, who’s the only one of the lot to have played her entire NCAA career in the Pac-10.
Whitcomb averaged 10.8 points, 4.0 rebounds and 1.8 assists across 113 games in Seattle, making the 2009-10 All-Pac-10 team as a senior.
Other than Whitcomb, the closest we have to a player from the Pac-10 era is former No. 1 pick Nneka Ogwumike, who played three seasons for legendary head coach Tara VanDerveer in Palo Alto in the 10-team Pac, before closing out her college tenure as a first-team All-American in the Pac-12’s debut season (2011-12).
Interestingly, aside from the six UCLA players that were drafted in 2026 (who all started their career in the Bruins’ Pac-12 era), the other WNBA regular that only spent part of her NCAA tenure in the conference is USC’s lone representative on the list.
That player (Kiki Iriafen), starred for Stanford for three seasons from 2021-22 to 2023-24, before she finished her NCAA run with the Trojans in 2024-25 (during their first Big Ten campaign).
Stanford Stars Continue To Dominate WNBA
While VanDerveer’s run with the Cardinal ended back in 2024, her former stars inside Maples Pavilion shine bright in the WNBA’s 30th season of basketball.
That’s because Stanford has the most players that only suited up for the conference that Bill Walton commented on (eight), spanning the gamut of Pac-related lore from the first year of the Obama administration (Ogwumike) to the Cardinal’s final year as a member (Cameron Brink).
All told, Stanford has the best career win share total among the Cardinal’s legion of women’s basketball stars (97) out of the programs that have at least one player on an active roster this season.
That total puts VanDerveer’s acolytes well ahead of the next closest Pac-12 program (Oregon, with 37.8), illustrating how deep modern-day WNBA basketball’s ties are to the three-time national championship coach of the Cardinal.
Interestingly, Cori Close’s Bruins rank fourth, win share wise, with 31.1, though seven of UCLA’s WNBA players haven’t accumulated any thanks to either being rookies (or in their 2nd season, in Michaela Onyenwere’s case).
While there’s plenty of reason to believe that UCLA’s sextet of stars, led by Lauren Betts, will eventually erase some of the gap between the Bruins and their now-former conference rivals from the Bay Area, there’s still plenty of room to be made up.
That says more about the quality of coaching that VanDerveer established for the Cardinal than it does about the Bruins, as the OG Pac-12 will forever look up at the legacy left by the woman that won 27 conference titles in her 1,284-game run in Palo Alto.