Katie Smith, 1993-1994

There’s been a lot of talk lately about Samantha Prahalis, the stand-out guard for the OSU Women’s Basketball team. And for good reason: The 5-foot-7 senior was just named Big Ten Player of the Year on Tuesday, just four days after she broke the scoring record for the team, with a 42-point run against Minnesota.

Still, she has a lot of accolades to accumulate to beat the previous record-setter: Katie Smith, OSU’s highest-achieving women’s basketball player ever.

Smith, who first played basketball in fifth grade on a boys’ team in Logan, played for the women’s team from 1992 to 1996. During that time, she racked up plenty of achievements, including:

  • Named to the academic All-Big Ten three times
  • Chosen Big Ten Player of the Year in 1996
  • Tallied an OSU single-season record of 745 points her senior year
  • Set a Big Ten career record of 2,578 points

With 10 career, six single-season and six single-game records under her belt, Smith was inducted into the OSU Athletic Hall of Fame in October 2001. Earlier that year, her jersey number – 30 – was retired. She is the only woman basketball player to have achieved that honor.

Smith, who graduated from OSU in 1996 with a bachelor’s degree in zoology, went on to play for three professional women’s basketball teams: the now-defunct Columbus Quest, the Minnesota Lynx and the then-Detroit Shock (now in Tulsa). She helped the Quest win both American Basketball League championships in its three years of existence, and she was named the Most Valuable Player of the 2008 WNBA Finals, when the Shock beat the San Antonio Silver Stars in a three-game sweep for the national championship. In 2005, she became the first women’s basketball player to reach 5,000 career points, then became the first to move past the 6,000-point mark in 2007.

Smith also was a three-time Olympic gold medalist as a member of the USA women’s basketball team in 2000, 2004 and 2008.

Now a member of the Seattle Storm, she participates in the WNBA Cares program, holding basketball clinics for children in India. She also has had a more local impact, having organized youth basketball camps in her hometown of Logan.

Filed by C.N.