Princeton University Athletics
Players Mentioned
Joining A Select Group
February 13, 2006 | Women's Basketball
Feb. 13, 2006
This feature story appeared in the Princeton women's basketball game program on Feb. 10 & 11, 2006
Only two players in the history of Princeton women's basketball have scored more than 1,500 points. No one has passed that mark in the last 15 years.
But soon, perhaps during one of the seven remaining home games at Jadwin Gym, one more Tiger will join that exclusive group. Becky Brown, with 1,437 points in her three-plus seasons at Old Nassau, in one season has moved from 10th place to third on the all-time career scoring list.
The two players to precede her in the 1,500-plus stratus were from two vastly different eras in women's basketball and have become successes off the court as well. The first, Claire Tomasiewicz, played here from 1975-79 and finished her career with 1,622 points. The second came a decade later when Sandi Bittler surpassed that mark with 1,683 points in a career that spanned from 1986-90. And now Brown, who scored her first point in the fall of 2002, is poised to join them.
The stories of these accomplished players demonstrate what will be celebrated this weekend at Princeton, National Girls and Women in Sports Day. When Tomasiewicz played, there was no such thing as an NCAA Tournament for women. When Bittler played, the national title was still in the grasp of just a handful of schools like Louisiana Tech, Tennessee and Stanford, all in the South and West. Since then, women's college basketball has seen the emergence of programs such as Connecticut, Purdue and Notre Dame, all first-time champions since the Orange and Black's last 1,500-point scorer. In that time, the Ivy League won its first post-season game when Harvard upset Stanford in 1998.
"In the mid-1970s, the recruiting of women athletes was in its infancy and only the very highest profile players in a given state would be sought after and generally only by local colleges," remembered Tomasiewicz, now Claire Nogay. "I grew up in Connecticut and was actively recruited by Yale, but I became interested in Princeton because the area alumni recruiter lived in my town." The opposite couldn't be more true these days, with Princeton players hailing from Hawaii to California to Tennessee. Only one player on the 2005-06 team, rookie Julia Berger, is from the northeast. Sports have also moved from an occasional pastime to the focus of many young girls and their families, who understand that being an exceptional athlete can help a youngster advance her education as well.
"Today we see very early specialization into single-sport athletes," said Tomasiewicz. Like many current Tiger athletes across all sports, Tomasiewicz was a multi-sport athlete in high school. But while she played competitive softball off-campus before Princeton had a program, multi-sport female athletes in college are almost unheard of today. "High school coaches are demanding year-round commitments from their athletes in off-season leagues and select teams." The more time spent practicing one sport, naturally, lessens the chance of playing another at an elite collegiate level.
But while the game has grown, the object remains the same: putting the ball in the basket. That only two players so far in 35 seasons of Princeton basketball have scored 1,500 points, despite the winning seasons scattered throughout Tiger history, shows what kind of player it takes to be that good for that long. Meagan Cowher scored 32 points against Columbia last month, the most by any Princeton player since 1989 when Bittler had 35 against Rider. But as her second season roars down the stretch, she has 493 points in her career. It may make her the 17th member of Princeton's 1,000-point club two seasons from now, but threatening the school record could be a tough task.
Senior Katy O'Brien, known for her three-point talents, has 689 career points. Why was Brown able to top 1,500 but talents like Cowher and O'Brien will likely come up short? Injuries, for one, and the competition for minutes among the rest of the team. It doesn't take much from either one to put the pursuit of such an amazing individual accomplishment on hold.
Last season, Cowher missed only six games while still averaging 11.1 points per contest. This season, her average is a bit higher and she's been healthy. O'Brien, despite having her name appear in Princeton's top-10 all-time three-point list, played only 17 games her rookie year. And that's with O'Brien playing every game the last two-and-a-half seasons and averaging nearly 10 points per game.
While Cowher battled an injury and O'Brien found her minutes here and there early in her career, Brown was a major contributor right away and has been fortunate enough to avoid significant injuries. She scored 417 points as a rookie, good for eighth all-time for a single season. This year, she's on pace to top 400 again.
"You have to shoot a lot to score more than 1,500 points and I'm not sure you'll find anyone who ever shot more than me in the history of Princeton women's basketball," joked Tomasiewicz.
"You have to have great teammates and great coaches who allow you to take all those shots," said Bittler, now Sandi Leland. Brown has certainly benefitted from that. All the assists that have put O'Brien on Princeton's Top 10 list for career assists have helped Brown. This season, freshman Jessica Berry assumed the point guard role, breaking into this year's Division I Top 25 in assists per game. Getting Brown the ball has been key to Princeton's success.
And all those points sometimes lead to winning. Though the Tigers are only a few games over .500 in games when Brown scores 20 or more points and just 42-58 overall, both of the current 1,500-point club members were part of seasons that accrued some of the highest win totals in Princeton history. As Brown nears 1,500, Princeton's 13-5 overall record is the best in 18 games since 1995-96.
Only the 21st-century Tigers know first-hand about playing basketball in the Internet age. Box scores have been around as long as the game, but when Tomasiewicz and Bittler played, there was no Princeton athletic Web site, of course. There were no extensive postgame recaps as there are now on the Web, only the handful of paragraphs at most that made it into local papers. That made word-of-mouth the popular mode of information.
"Not a whole lot was readily available back then other than individual points, rebounds, steals and assists in the scorebook," said Tomasiewicz. "By the time I began my senior season, I was already the career scoring leader. ... Someone did tell me at the end of the season, however, that of all the men and women who had ever played basketball at Princeton, only Bill Bradley had scored more points than me at that time.
After Brown scores her last point at Princeton, she'll have the chance to transition to a life outside of basketball just as Tomasiewicz and Bittler have done. The two have settled on separate coasts, both with families and with decades of service in their chosen fields. As then as today, Brown's Princeton degree will take her even further than her illustrious basketball career.
"The transition was easy because I was prepared," said Tomasiewicz. "I was very anxious to put a lot of theoretical learning into practical application in a real job." Tomasiewicz used her civil engineering degree for several years before taking a job in operations management at Verizon, where she works today as a senior vice president leading thousands of employees in the company's wholesale division.
"Playing a competitive team sport in college is great preparation for a career in business. Handling adversity and the importance of teamwork are two critical competencies that I found to be essential for success both on the court and in the workplace," said Tomasiewicz.
Bittler made her career in sports, sticking with her avocation rather than the biology background she gained in her studies. After working in the sports information office at Princeton, Bittler sent out resumes to some NBA teams and ended up with a position at the NBA league office in New York as a fan services assistant.
Six years later, after working for the league in marketing and operations capacities as well as the liaison for the 1992 Dream Team at the Barcelona Olympics, she changed coasts to work for Nike in Oregon. For three years at the Swoosh, she marketed shoes for the female athlete before getting the opportunity to work with Portland's startup WNBA franchise. The Portland Fire lasted another three years before Bittler put her career in sports on hold to focus on her family. While watching her two young children, Emma and Max, Bittler also works in real estate.
For her part, Brown still has some time to decide whether to follow her political science degree into the world down in Washington. But in the meantime, there is still basketball to be played. Bittler's record of 1,683 points may be out of reach, as Brown would have to score 246 points over the season's last nine regular-season games to reach it, but there are team goals ahead. Tomasiewicz's teams combined for a 61-34 record, Bittler's squads finished 63-40. And while Tomasiewicz led Princeton to three Ivy titles in the league's early days, the ending to Brown's career is still to be written. With the team at 4-1 in the Ivy League and the chance at Princeton's first outright Ivy title since 1978 still alive, the opportunity to extend the season, unavailable in the 1970s and just missed in the 1980s, remains within reach.