My sister played for Theresa Becker, who preceded Bill so I say this with a ton of respect. It is time for Bill to retire.
Appreciation thread for the Women
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Looking at her stat line over the season is wild. 17 games where she shot over 50%, 8 games where she shot below 30%. 5 games where she played 10+ minutes and shot 0%.
Whether you agree or not, this thread is an appreciation thread, so if you feel the need to comment about coaching, please do it in another thread. It's getting annoying wanting to read the good things said about the players and just running into the same conversation.
I've had this same thought all year. You read the men's boards and the general consensus is that given the team we had a 3 seed and a round of 32 loss is a disappointment. You look on the women's board and going from pre-season top 10 to the play-in game and a first round loss is ok because they tried really hard.
For me, it was always a failure in player identification. It's painfully obvious they need more athleticism--especially in the back court. And Bill just wont address it. Instead he recruits, either as freshman or in the portal, guards with limited athleticism.
He has two really great players in Audi and Addi and he better figure out how he wants to build around them or they will be wasted.
No player is totally consistent from 3 point range. I watched Steph Curry go 1 for 10 from three( very disappointing with the cost of the ticket). I still believe he is one of the most consistent 3 pt shooters basketball has ever seen. From 15' and in shooting a good % daily can be reasonably expected, I have seen from 3 pt. range not so much. I would consider Addy a decent 3 pt shooter but you could see a time in the middle of the year when she questioned her shot. She started driving and using the rest of her abilities until her shot came back. I would hope that Sydney will do the same. Her overall game improved as her playing time increased. I loved watching this team even when things were not going as hoped. I hope we keep most if not all off our team.
Sydney Harris was an elite, 3-point shooter this year.
This whole thing about her being inconsistent is not based in good data.
I just compiled and compared the standard deviations of Iowa State's shooters. This was defined as the players that made more 3 pointers than games played, and they played in over half of the team's games for 2024-25.
The list is Sydney, Addy, Kelsey, AJ, and Emily.
The goal is to see which of our players were the best shooters, so I did this to weed out the obvious non-candidates.
Not only did Sydney make the most and shoot the highest percentage in 2024-25, her standard deviation was the closest to zero.
This is evidence that she was our most consistent shooter.
| Total 3 pointers | Total 3pt % | Standard Deviation | |
| Sydney Harris | 61 | 0.462 | 0.222 |
| Addy Brown | 46 | 0.362 | 0.336 |
| Arianna Jackson | 45 | 0.366 | 0.289 |
| Kelsey Joens | 39 | 0.438 | 0.292 |
| Emily Ryan | 35 | 0.372 | 0.365 |
Standard deviation is not a perfect way to look at the consistency of 3-point shooting. The sample sizes here are much too small to give an absolute and trustworthy answer, but it certainly gives a context and direction towards which players were our better shooters.
Also, it is not an indicator of a "good" value. It just means that the dataset has lower variance in its values from the mean.
Acoustimac, you gave an example of going 0-5 and then 5-5, and you're absolutely correct in saying that is not consistent.
Let's build on the hypothetical.
Player A will shoot 5 per game and make 0 half the time and 5 the other half.
Player B will shoot 5 per game and make 2 half the time and 3 the other half.
Player C will shoot 5 per game and make 2 every time.
Player A has a standard deviation of 3-point percentage of .5.
Player B has a standard deviation of 3-point percentage of .1.
Player C has a standard deviation of 3-point percentage of 0.
Over a season of play Players A and B should make a very similar amount of 3 pointers, and Player C should make a few less while being more consistent.
What is the best choice of player for a coach to have on their team? It depends what they want.
I've kind of been dancing around getting into the whole discussion of expected shooting results and sample sizes because that would bloat this post quite a lot.
Stripping it way down, 3-point shooting varies a lot. For everyone at every level. It is unreasonable to expect any player to be perfectly "consistent".
Westside Clone mentioned Steph Curry, and he is roundly accepted as the best shooter in NBA history. He's also an easy way to illustrate the shooting sample size difference we have here.
His sample size is huge compared to our players.
In the last 48 games Steph has 565 shots from 3-point land. That is the exact number that these five ladies combined to attempt this year. And, funnily enough, he made 8 less.
The standard deviation for this 48-game sample for Steph is at .158.
What this means is that on a game-to-game basis, we can expect him to shoot closer to his average shooting percentage than any of the individual ladies we charted out above.
This value is achieved by him shooting a lot. He took 13 or more shots more often than he took under 10. At the end of each of these 48 games he is quite likely to have shot close to the 38.6% rate that he had in this sample.
Ok, that's all the time we have for today. Next time we will build on this and introduce confidence intervals.
This has been Stat 226 in Carver Hall.
@JimDogRock Very informative about Harris and our shooters.
I don't think the lack of shooters was our problem this year. Our offence was the highest scoring in the Big 12 for conference play.
The fact that we were 10th in the Big 12 for points allowed per game played much more of a roll. Seeing as how we are a heavily offensively based team, the area I can see us improving to help defense is turning the ball over less.
I don't think the lack of shooters was our problem this year. Our offence was the highest scoring in the Big 12 for conference play.
The fact that we were 10th in the Big 12 for points allowed per game played much more of a roll. Seeing as how we are a heavily offensively based team, the area I can see us improving to help defense is turning the ball over less.
Did you ever think that maybe there are players who don't want to play in the Big 12 or come to Ames, Iowa? A coach can only get players who want to come here.
We also don't run the kind of system that would be that attractive to gals with a lot of speed and quickness. Up temp for us means shooting a quick three if we get a look. We've sort of been known as a guards school but that's guards that primarily shoot the three. It's hardly a free flowing system a lot of kids might like to play in. It's a system for workhorses, not thoroughbreds.
THIS!!!!!
The game has shifted a lot towards the speed and athleticism.
BF chose to run the system that he likes. It's not going to change. We'll never be that kind of team.
12K views · 721 reactions | An Unforgettable Five Years ❤️ Thank you for everything you gave to this program, university and community, Emily! | By Iowa State Women's Basketball | Facebook
An Unforgettable Five Years ❤️ Thank you for everything you gave to this program, university and community, Emily!
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Athletic Dept has been generating these images (AI generated I believe) for players in most sports. Here are some of the WBB players. It would be sweet if these actually existed.
