Plenty was made of Caitlin Clark’s record-setting milestone when she dropped 49 points against Michigan on Feb. 15, and for good reason. The NCAA Division I women’s basketball scoring record is nothing to scoff at.
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But while basketball pioneer Lynette Woodard’s accomplishments weren’t the focus of that moment, Woodard remains a huge part of the sport’s history. Her decorated career is one that shouldn’t be lost to the passage of time or forgotten amid all the change that’s swept college sports in the years since.
How many points did Lynette Woodard score in her college career?
Woodard scored 3,649 total points over the course of her four-year college career at Kansas, leading Clark by 32 points entering Iowa’s Wednesday night matchup with Minnesota. Woodard played at Kansas from 1978-81, six years before the 3-point line came to the women’s game, so her scoring came entirely in the form of twos and free throws.
Why is Lynette Woodard’s career point total not the NCAA record?
Woodard doesn’t own the NCAA scoring record because until 1982 — the year after she left Kansas — women’s college sports fell under the purview of the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women, not the NCAA. The AIAW dissolved after the NCAA started hosting women’s championship events shortly after Woodard left.
Oddly, some of the stats from women’s college basketball’s AIAW days are included in the NCAA’s records — like coaching wins for Stanford’s Tara VanDerveer, whose wins in the AIAW at Idaho are counted among her NCAA high. Woodard’s stats are not.
“I want [the] NCAA governing body to know that they should respect the [AIAW] players. They should respect the history. Include us and our accomplishments,” Woodard said during ESPN’s broadcast of the Kansas vs. Kansas State game on Monday. “This is the era of diversity, equity and inclusion. They should include us. We deserve it.”
There are women other than Woodard who have tallied record point totals outside of the NCAA’s auspices, including Pearl Moore, whose 3,884 career points at Francis Marion University in the 1970s are the most by a woman in the pre-NCAA era. Moore’s accomplishments are even less-discussed than Woodard’s, since they came outside the spotlight of major basketball schools.
Lynette Woodard’s career biography
A Wichita, Kan. native, Woodard’s career accolades go far beyond her college career, which included the major-school women’s scoring record, four All-American nods and the 1981 Wade Trophy, given to the best player in women’s college basketball.
She’s also a member of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, a Women’s Basketball Hall of Famer, a two-time Olympic gold medalist and a former WNBA player.
Woodard captained the 1984 U.S. Olympic team that won gold in Los Angeles, four years after she made the 1980 team that would ultimately boycott the Games in Moscow.
A couple years after the L.A. gold medal, Woodard wrote another page into the history books by becoming the first woman to play for the Harlem Globetrotters. She was inducted into the Globetrotter Hall of Fame in 2004.
Interspersed between her Olympic and Globetrotter careers, Woodard had various stints playing professional basketball overseas, before there was a professional women’s basketball league in the United States (the WNBA formed in 1996). She had two two-year stints in the Italian Women’s Professional League and spent the 1990-93 seasons in Japan. Her basketball experience abroad, though, started in college: She and the U.S. won gold medals in the 1979 World University Games in the Soviet Union and 1983 Pan Am Games in Venezuela.
A few years after her Japan stint, Woodard played two seasons in the WNBA: one for the Cleveland Rockers, one for the Detroit Shock.
Clark will likely pass her scoring total soon, but it won’t diminish the impact Woodard had as a trailblazer in women’s basketball — an impact that extends far beyond her college days.
