Between their highlight reel plays and hard-to-believe statistics, Aliyah Boston, Caitlin Clark and Paige Bueckers have become familiar not only to women’s college basketball fans but to many people with only a passing interest in sports.
But in this year’s N.C.A.A. Division I women’s basketball tournament, there will be dozens of other players who are ready to make the most of their moment on the national stage — players who have been putting up impressive numbers and making remarkable plays all season, just with a considerably smaller share of the spotlight.
Here are 10 players with a chance to make believers out of this year’s tournament fans. They range from All-Americans and likely first-round W.N.B.A. draft picks to midmajor upstarts looking for a taste of March glory.
NaLyssa Smith has a chance to be the top pick in this year’s W.N.B.A. draft. But it’s not just because, at 6 feet 4 inches, she has the size and strength of professional post players. A Baylor power forward, Smith has the finesse and skill to play with the best right now.
She moves around the court with the ease and speed of someone much smaller — and for an added advantage, she has been coached this season by Nicki Collen, who arrived at Baylor after three seasons leading the W.N.B.A.’s Atlanta Dream.
In the tournament, Smith, who won a national championship with Baylor in her freshman year, will work to lead the Bears to at least the round of 16 if not the Final Four. She has support but is undoubtedly Baylor’s centerpiece, ranking in the top 10 in Division I in scoring and rebounding while continuing to improve her gaudy stat lines. Smith reached a new career high in rebounding with 20 on Feb. 28 against Iowa State; in the next game, she hit her career high in scoring with 35 points. Fans have a chance not only to see Smith peaking at the right time but to scope out a potential future professional star.
Cameron Brink, Stanford
The scariest thing about Stanford isn’t that it’s the defending national champion — it’s that this championship team’s most prolific players are underclassmen: Haley Jones, a junior, and Cameron Brink, a sophomore.
In the Cardinal’s balanced offense, what makes Brink an asset is her efficiency: She has had the third most field-goal attempts on the team, but she’s the team’s leading scorer. Her dominance around the basket made her an integral part of Stanford’s championship run.
In last year’s N.C.A.A. tournament, Brink averaged four blocks per game, including six in Stanford’s Final Four defeat of South Carolina. Those teams appear to be on a collision course this year as well, and Brink is the Cardinal’s only potential answer to South Carolina’s Boston, who is likely to be the national player of the year.
If Stanford wants to repeat as champion, Brink’s assertive defense will be essential. Her ability to set screens and draw defenders away from her team’s sharpshooters while staying out of foul trouble, something she struggled with her freshman year, will also be important. It’s a long to-do list, but Brink has shown that she has the talent to check all those boxes.
Destanni Henderson, South Carolina
Running the floor for the team that has been ranked No. 1 in the country all season is no small task. Before Destanni Henderson most likely heads to the W.N.B.A. this summer (some projections suggest she will be a first-round pick), she would probably like to be rewarded for all that work with a trip to the national championship game.
The Gamecocks will certainly need her in order to get there. Henderson is a true point guard, running plays that help make Boston, the team’s leader, even more unstoppable. The team’s best offense is based around the two of them: Boston draws defenders to the basket and then passes to Henderson in the corner for an easy 3-point shot, or Boston grabs a rebound and tosses it to Henderson in transition to make an uncontested layup.
Henderson’s quickness makes her both South Carolina’s spark and the perfect counterpoint to Boston and her patient post play. In those rare moments when the South Carolina offense slumps, Henderson can usually cut to the basket and score, or nab the ball and sprint to the other end for a layup before her defender has even realized what’s happening. When South Carolina beat Stanford in a redemptive December victory, Henderson had seven steals — a key to the victory she may well try to replicate in this year’s tournament.
Almost 60 percent of Iowa’s offense comes from two players: Clark, whose relentless shooting catapulted her into the national spotlight, and Monika Czinano, a senior post player whose reliability gives the Hawkeyes a rock-solid foundation.
When Clark is having an off night (which for her means scoring less than 20 points), Czinano keeps the team steady, plugging away around the basket to keep the offense alive. Her shooting percentage is among the best in the country, thanks to her footwork and quick release: If Iowa is in rhythm, Clark can pass to her and Czinano will have the ball in the basket before opponents have a chance to react.
Czinano led the team in scoring when Iowa won its fourth Big Ten tournament title last weekend, further proving how crucial both she and Clark are to their team. “I just think we have really good chemistry,” Clark told reporters earlier this year.
Kierstan Bell, Florida Gulf Coast
Kierstan Bell is a matchup nightmare. At 6 feet 1 inch, she’s a crucial couple of inches taller than most of her fellow shooting guards — inches that she takes advantage of to shoot over opponents from basically anywhere on the court.
The Eagles get a higher percentage of their offense from behind the arc than any other team in Division I, and Bell certainly contributes on that front with nearly 10 attempts per game. But where Bell really shines is in shaking anyone who might try to prevent her from getting to the basket. Her size and strength are combined with incredible quickness, allowing her to spin and juke her way past almost anyone; she’s averaging 23.1 points per game. A meniscus injury in January threatened her W.N.B.A. draft stock and her chances to show off in the tournament, but she returned with immediate double-digit scoring after missing just a month.
Bell shines in big moments. She had 25 points in the first round of last year’s N.C.A.A. tournament, in which Florida Gulf Coast failed to upset Michigan, and 32 points and 10 rebounds earlier this season when her team earned a surprise victory over now No. 9-ranked Louisiana State.
Elissa Cunane, North Carolina State
The 6-foot-5 center Elissa Cunane has about as impressive a résumé as anyone in college basketball: three straight Atlantic Coast Conference titles, two straight conference tournament Most Valuable Player Awards and a slew of other individual honors. But the Wolfpack haven’t been able to capitalize on her talent at the N.C.A.A. tournament and haven’t made it past the round of 16 since 1998. Last year, Cunane’s good-but-not-good-enough performances in San Antonio contributed to top-seeded North Carolina State’s upset loss to fourth-seeded Indiana.
As a result, she enters this tournament with something to prove both to N.C. State fans and the W.N.B.A. teams that are evaluating her for the upcoming draft. The Wolfpack’s strength is their balance, and Cunane hasn’t been pushed to pad her statistics. But she’s capable of dominating around the basket and hitting crucial 3-point shots while also leading her team in rebounding. With N.C. State once again expected to be a No. 1 seed, anything less than a trip to the Final Four will be a disappointment — and it’s up to Cunane to get them there.
Rhyne Howard, Kentucky
There is very little that the 6-foot-2 guard Rhyne Howard does poorly, including rewriting the Kentucky record books. She is in the top 10 of almost every statistical category available and has scored the second most points in program history, including men and women. Yet beyond Kentucky and women’s college basketball fans, Howard has remained a relative unknown despite her prolific play and her many national honors or the fact that she’s likely to be a top-five pick in this year’s W.N.B.A. draft.
That started to change last week, when a switch seemed to flip in Howard as she led Kentucky to its first Southeastern Conference tournament title since 1982. The team, seeded seventh, became the second-lowest seed ever to win that title, beating the top three seeds along the way.
Though she didn’t hit the electrifying buzzer-beater that earned Kentucky the championship, Howard was a force throughout, scoring 88 points over four games for the third-highest point total in tournament history. Now, she just has to bring that splashy play — including a win over L.S.U. in which she made six of eight 3-point shots — to the next level.
Starr Jacobs, University of Texas at Arlington
Tournament viewers might get only one opportunity to see the redshirt junior forward Starr Jacobs, but chances are she’s going to make the most of it. Jacobs, a junior college transfer, has put on a show in her first year playing in Division I, earning a selection as the Sun Belt player of the year and leading the Lady Mavs to an upset victory for their first Sun Belt Conference title with 28 points, 11 rebounds and 3 steals.
She has already transformed her team by becoming the first player in U.T.A. history to average over 20 points per game for an entire regular season while shooting almost exclusively from inside the arc. Now armed with an automatic N.C.A.A. tournament bid, Jacobs and the Lady Mavs have an opportunity, albeit a slim one, to complete the forward’s unlikely journey into the spotlight by garnering the program’s first-ever tournament win.
Taylor Robertson, Oklahoma
Taylor Robertson is the sharpshooter behind one of Division I’s best offenses. She doesn’t just lead the nation in 3-point shots made, averaging 3.67 per game; she is vying for a spot in the history books as one of the best 3-point shooters in women’s college basketball lore. Robertson, a senior guard, is the only player in N.C.A.A. history who has both made more than 45 percent of her 3-point shots and averaged more than eight 3-point attempts per game.
In short, she’s shooting at an unprecedented rate even though the women’s 3-point line moved back a little over a foot (it’s now the same as the men’s) in the middle of her Oklahoma career. The Sooners will need her to get hot if they’re going to make the most of what could be their highest N.C.A.A. tournament seeding in over a decade. In the Sooners’ only national tournament game of her career so far, Robertson hit six 3s; this season, she has hit as many as nine in a game.
A top recruit when she enrolled early at Notre Dame last year, the freshman guard Olivia Miles has already recorded a triple-double and is among the Division I assists leaders, with 7.2 per game before tournament play. Miles plays with preternatural ease and reads defenses so quickly that at her best, she helps Notre Dame move with an almost professional-level efficiency.
In any given game, she can score 30 points, or grab 13 rebounds, or make 14 assists — but it’s her ability to fill in the blanks, to support her teammates in the way that’s most useful, that has helped the Fighting Irish exceed expectations this season.
This will be her first time playing in the N.C.A.A. tournament, and if the Irish faithful get their way, it will mark the beginning of a storied postseason career for the young guard — one that could bring Notre Dame back into the national championship conversation.
