If someone asks you to choose a Mount Rushmore for any type of sports organization, college or pro, there's often an overflow, a waiting list that creates anguish because you can't find an availability for several deserving athletes or coaches.
Good example: the Mount Rushmore of Tucson high school coaches, past and present. You start with Rollin Gridley, Dick McConnell, Vern Friedli, Mary Hines, Wolfgang Weber, Doc Van Horne, Ollie Mayfield, Hal Eustice, Hank Slagle, Ed Nymeyer, Bobby DeBerry, Richard Sanchez, Kelly Fowler and the list goes on and on. Who gets in? Who gets left out?
That's the sort of difficulty I imagined when the Star began its ongoing, eight-week series of the UA's Mount Rushmore of athletes and coaches. But this week's topic — the Mount Rushmore of UA women's basketball players — was the opposite.
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I couldn't legitimately fill the four spots.
Two are no-brainers: 1990s all-star Adia Barnes, who led the UA in scoring four years in succession, with a UA record 2,237 points. Later, of course, Barnes coached her alma mater to the 2021 Final Four.
The other automatic choice is point guard Aari McDonald, possibly the best women's basketball player in school history. She not only was a consensus All-American in 2021, leading the Wildcats to the Final Four, but the only player in school history, men or women, to score 2,000 points in just three seasons (2,041)
After Barnes and McDonald, I couldn't legitimately say that the Nos. 3 and 4 spots had no-doubt candidates.
Arizona's Davellyn Whyte scores a basket as Janae Fulcher, of Arizona State, stands behind in the first half during a game at McKale Center. ASU won in double overtime 81-77, Feb. 19, 2013.
Davellyn Whyte scored 2,059 points and was a terrific player. But she played during a dismal period of UA women's basketball in which coach Niya Butts went 34-110 in the Pac-12, a winning percentage of 23.6%. It just doesn't seem Mount Rushmore-worthy.
The late Shawntinice Polk was a first-team All Pac-10 center in 2003, 2004 and 2005, but the Wildcats won just two NCAA Tournament games, a sharp disappointment at the end of Joan Bonvicini’s rebuild of the UA women's basketball program. Polk finished 10th in scoring in school history. She died her senior year of a pulmonary embolism. I attended her funeral in Clovis, California, and came away thinking of "what may have been." Another season would surely have put her on the Mount Rushmore list.
Arizona's women's basketball program has mostly struggled, start to finish, the last 50 years.
Bonvicini, the school's top coach, didn't break .500 in Pac-10 games, going 152-162. Barnes went just 60-63 in Pac-12 games before self-destructing and leaving for SMU. The Wildcats finished in the AP Top 25 poll in just 10 of 45 seasons dating to the hire of Judy LeWinter as coach in 1981. Arizona is just 45-231 against Top 25 opponents and has won just 14 NCAA Tournament games over all those decades; five came in Barnes' historic 2021 Final Four season.
Arizona has produced an impressive string of all-conference players dating back to the 1980s, from Dee-Dee Wheeler and Kirsten Smith to Sam Thomas and Ify Ibekwe, but overall, the UA women's basketball program has struggled far more than it has been successful. I'll consider the Mount Rushmore spaces a work in progress until it produces someone worthy of joining Barnes and McDonald.
The Mount Rushmore of Arizona Wildcats women's basketball players
