You were having a back and forth with
Perhaps it was presumptuous of me, but I was expecting a "thank you" for taking the time (over an hour) to do this research and present it here, instead of the "And your point is?" response.
Apologies for coming off churlish - when I first read your post, I didn't even notice that you weren't the earlier poster (read this on my phone); when I noticed, I had deleted it once I realized (before you posted). Genuinely, thank you for doing it.
This subject just makes me testy because Stanford's biggest hurdle has
always been recruiting. It isn't about making a pitch for why Stanford is great that's the problem - it's that only about 5-10 Top 100 players per season are eligible to be admitted. Indeed, to our fans' knowledge, we have lost only
three recruits to other schools who were
admitted to Stanford in the past decade: KLS to UConn, Mikayla Pivec to OSU, and Skylar Diggins to Notre Dame (and it's not clear whether KLS was actually admitted or if it was just so clear she would have been but committed to UConn before that could have happened).
So the insinuation that Tara is rolling in top ten talent that she's squandering is not only kind of insulting to her, but also the complete opposite of the problem we have: we're generally able to admit maybe one or two top ten players in any given year (at best), and it's super rare the #1 recruit is admissible, so that's why having KLS go to UConn burned so many Stanford fans (esp. given her sisters both went to the Farm); it fundamentally altered the trajectory of our program for the subsequent four seasons. Throw KLS into our starting lineup for the past four years and I suspect we'd have been to more than one final four.
Tara has had to coach up players who weren't top recruits, and she's done a pretty amazing job of it. Any insinuation to the contrary is going to bring out the angry tree in me!
