Sue Bird - College

College

Bird was recruited by a number of teams, including Stanford and Vanderbilt. She considered UConn the favorite, but she began to waver when Kiersten Walters and Brianne Stepherson, both point guards, announced commitments to UConn. She worried that there might not be room for her to play. However, Stepherson changed her mind, and decided to go to Boston College, making the decision a bit easier, so Bird committed to UConn. In addition, she chose UConn because it was close to home, and the UConn program had a winning tradition like the one at Christ the King. She suffered a torn ACL eight games into her freshman season. She was not able to redshirt, because she had played in more than 20% of the team's games. In her sophomore season (1999–2000) she came back to lead the team to a 36–1 record and won the Big East Championship and the 2000 NCAA Women's Division I Basketball Tournament. The Huskies went 32–3 in her junior season. The last loss was to Big East rival Notre Dame in the Final Four. That was the last loss of Bird's college career, as the Huskies went an undefeated 39–0 in her 2002 senior season. In that season, she won the Wade Trophy and Naismith Award as College Player of the Year.

During her junior year, Bird played in a game against Notre Dame referred to as "the best women's basketball game ever played". The game was memorialized in a book, Bird at the Buzzer, in which Bird took the eponymous shot at the buzzer to win the game.

She finished her UConn career on many of the record lists. She currently ranks No. 24 on the 1,000 point list with 1,378 points, No. 2 in assists with 585, and seventh with 243 steals. She ranks number 1 in three point field goal percentage (45.9) and free throw percentage (89.2). She won two National Championships, three Big East Championships and Big East regular season titles. Bird was the inaugural winner of the Nancy Lieberman Award in 2000, given to the top point guard in the nation, and won the award in 2001 and 2002. Overall her record at UConn in games she played is a remarkable 114–4. Bird was a member of the inaugural class (2006) of inductees to the University of Connecticut women's basketball "Huskies of Honor" recognition program.

Statistics at University of Connecticut
Year	G	FG	FGA	PCT	3FG	3FGA	PCT	FT	FTA	PCT	REB	AVG	A	TO	B	S	MIN	PTS	AVG
1998–99	8	16	41	0.316	6	19	0.316	3	4	0.750	16	2.0	25	16	1	15	160	41	5.1
1999-00	37	140	279	0.502	72	145	0.497	53	59	0.898	94	2.5	160	80	1	69	1052	405	10.9
2000–01	34	137	309	0.443	60	139	0.432	35	45	0.778	89	2.6	169	88	4	63	941	369	10.9
2001–02	39	198	392	0.505	69	148	0.466	98	104	0.942	131	3.4	231	93	9	96	1168	563	14.4
Totals	118	491	1021	0.481	207	451	0.459	189	212	0.892	330	2.8	585	277	15	243	3321	1378	11.7

Famous quotes containing the word college:

“The mode of founding a college is, commonly, to get up a subscription of dollars and cents, and then, following blindly the principles of a division of labor to its extreme,—a principle which should never be followed but with circumspection,—to call in a contractor who makes this a subject of speculation,... and for these oversights successive generations have to pay.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

“I never feel so conscious of my race as I do when I stand before a class of twenty-five young men and women eager to learn about what it is to be black in America.”
—Claire Oberon Garcia, African American college professor. As quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education, p. B3 (July 27, 1994)

“If any proof were needed of the progress of the cause for which I have worked, it is here tonight. The presence on the stage of these college women, and in the audience of all those college girls who will some day be the nation’s greatest strength, will tell their own story to the world.”
—Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906)