Princeton University Athletics
Bittler Named Women's Basketball Player Of The Century
January 07, 2000 | Women's Basketball
Jan. 7, 2000
She is a leader now, in a world that didn't even exist when she first made the long drive from her tiny hometown outside Pittsburgh to Princeton. What is it, almost 15 years now?
Could she have guessed then? Could anyone? Could she have seen what the future of women's basketball would be? And could she have guessed just how big a role she would play?
Did Sandi Bittler change the world? No. Did she help? Absolutely. It took an army of Sandi Bittlers, players who came along at a time when women's basketball wasn't a speck of what it is today and together changed a sporting conscience.
Sandi Bittler is the Princeton Athletic News women's basketball Player of the Century.
Her credentials are impeccable. Turning an awkward cross between a set shot and jump shot into the most lethal three-point weapon in Ivy League history, Bittler graduated as the NCAA's career leader in three-pointers made per game. Today, 11 seasons later, she still holds six Ivy League and eight Princeton University records. Her career represents more, though. She came along at a time when the women's game began to make a statement. The women could play. Sandi Bittler was one of them.
She scored 1,683 points, more than any Princeton player, man or woman, except for Bill Bradley. She made 246 career three-pointers. Only Brian Earl has ever made more at Princeton, and he took 141 more attempts than Bittler.
Bittler made 10 three-pointers in one game, a feat that went unmatched until Spencer Gloger did so earlier this season. She had six career games with at least seven three-pointers, no men's player has ever had more than one, and every men's player combined has five.
As a sophomore she was a first-team All-Ivy selection, something she repeated her senior year. She led a program that had one winning season in its previous eight years to a four-year record of 63-40.
There was no women's professional basketball in this country at that time. Bittler went from Princeton to a position at the NBA, where she worked her way from the public relations office to a high-ranking marketing position. She then moved to Nike to work in women's sports marketing, and she continues to work in basketball today as the Vice President for the Portland expansion franchise of the WNBA, a league that didn't exist all that long ago.
It does today, thanks largely to the efforts of women like Sandi Bittler, yesterday and today.