Nation’s Best Shooting Guard – Vanderbilt University Athletics – Official Athletics Website
SPRINGFIELD, Mass. – The Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame and Women’s Basketball Coaches Association (WBCA) introduced Saturday that Vanderbilt ladies’s basketball sophomore Mikayla Blakes received the 2026 Ann Meyers Drysdale Shooting Guard of the Year Award, a part of the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame Starting 5.
Blakes turns into the primary Vanderbilt ladies’s basketball participant in program historical past to win a Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame Starting 5 award. The Anne Meyers Drysdale Award, named after the trailblazing Hall of Famer from UCLA, goes to the nation’s prime capturing guard. The Selection Committee consists of prime ladies’s faculty basketball personnel, together with media members, head coaches, sports activities data administrators, and Hall of Famers. Blakes turns into the eighth participant to win the Anne Meyers Drysdale Shooting Guard of the Year award, which has been given yearly since 2018.
The sophomore guard averaged 27.0 factors, 4.5 assists and a pair of.9 steals per sport this season. Her 27.0 factors per sport led NCAA Division I in scoring and set the Vanderbilt single-season scoring report. Her 918 factors are probably the most scored in a season in SEC historical past and set the NCAA’s all-time sophomore scoring report. Blakes had 13 video games with 30 or extra factors, which led the nation and is probably the most 30-point performances by an SEC participant this century.
The guard has been racking up the awards through the 2025-26 postseason. Blakes has been chosen as a first-team All-American by the WBCA, Associated Press, the US Basketball Writers Association, TheAthleticUSA Today, ESPN and The Sporting News. The sophomore guard was named the 2025-26 SEC Player of the Year by each the league’s coaches and USA Todayand All-SEC first group by each retailers. Additionally, she has been named a finalist for the Wooden Award and the honda awardwhereas she was additionally a finalist for the Naismith Trophy Player of the Year and the Wade Trophy.
The Anchored for Her Campaign
Vanderbilt launched the Anchored for Her campaign to honor its pioneering feminine student-athletes and cement the college’s place because the premier vacation spot for ladies’s sports activities forward of subsequent 12 months’s fiftieth anniversary of its varsity ladies’s groups. Bolstered by lead items from Vanderbilt Board of Trust members Nina Kohler and Kathleen Justice-Moore, JD’91, Anchored for Her’s preliminary $50 million purpose will gas funding in sustainable success for a brand new period of collegiate athletics by facility enhancements, endowed scholarships, teaching and employees positions, capital assist and naming alternatives, team-specific Excellence Funds, the Women’s Athletics General Fund and the Competitive Excellence Fund.
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