Women's Basketball
Alabama's women's basketball team competes in Foster Auditorium. The team played its first game in 1974 and has since been a varsity sport. The team has had eight head coaches, including Rick Moody, who guided the club to the 1994 NCAA Women's Final Four. Wendell Hudson was named head coach on March 15, 2008, replacing Stephany Smith.
The Crimson Tide has appeared in 10 post-season Tournaments for the NCAA Women's Division I Basketball Championship, including an eight-year streak of consecutive appearances in the tournament stretching from 1992 to 1999. In 10 NCAA tournament appearances, Alabama has advanced to the "Sweet Sixteen" six times and the "Elite Eight" and the "Final Four" in 1994. The most successful season was 1996-1997 when the Tide finished in second place in the Southeastern Conference (10-2 record) and had a mid-season national ranking of #2 in polls by the AP and USA Today (November 12, 1996), and finished with a 25-7 overall record. The University of Alabama Women's Basketball program shares the national record with Duke University for the most total points for both teams when Alabama defeated Duke 121-120 (in four overtimes) in 1995 in the NCAA Tournament, a game that ESPN has declared as one of the best all-time women's basketball tournament games. Seven former players for the University of Alabama have made rosters of teams of the WNBA. Alabama has had an active player in the WNBA through every year of its existence. The current head coach for the Crimson Tide is Wendell Hudson. The team played its first season of 1974–75 in Foster Auditorium, but moved to what is now Coleman Coliseum the following season. After Foster Auditorium was extensively renovated in a project that began in 2009, the Tide returned to their original home on February 13, 2011.
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Famous quotes containing the words women and/or basketball:
“If women were umpiring none of this [rowdyism] would happen. Do you suppose any ball player in the country would step up to a good-looking girl and say to her, “You color- blind, pickle-brained, cross-eyed idiot, if you don’t stop throwing the soup into me I’ll distribute your features all over you countenance!” Of course he wouldn’t.”
—Amanda Clement (1888–1971)
“Perhaps basketball and poetry have just a few things in common, but the most important is the possibility of transcendence. The opposite is labor. In writing, every writer knows when he or she is laboring to achieve an effect. You want to get from here to there, but find yourself willing it, forcing it. The equivalent in basketball is aiming your shot, a kind of strained and usually ineffective purposefulness. What you want is to be in some kind of flow, each next moment a discovery.”
—Stephen Dunn (b. 1939)