Candace Parker, leader of the No. 1 seeded Tennessee Lady Volunteers, has returned to the Elite Eight for the seventh consecutive year and will face off against No. 2 seeded Texas A&M in Oklahoma City for a trip to the Final Four.
Parker, a 6-foot, 4-inch junior from Naperville, Illinois, has led her team in scoring in all three rounds of the tournament, scoring a total of 72 points in the NCAA tournament. Parker was also ranked eighth in the nation in points per game during the regular season with 21.1.
“She has the size, she has the skills, she has the mindset to take over a game,” Tennessee Head Coach Pat Summitt told the media Monday. “As a coach, you don’t always have that on your basketball team and when you do have it, you just hope that they have Candace’s mentality. She wants it and she’s willing to step up and make the plays for us.”
After leading her team to the 2006-2007 NCAA championship, Parker has become synonymous with women’s college basketball. She was nominated for Female Athlete of the Year and Collegiate Female Athlete of the Year for the 2007 ESPY Awards. She was the only college player named to the USA women’s national basketball team and will be playing in the 2008 Olympics. She also received four different Player of the Year awards following the season.
Parker did all this while earning a 3.35 grade point average in sport management, truly defining the term student athlete.
“An athletic career could end at a moment’s notice, but a solid education will last a lifetime,” Parker told the Lady Volunteers web site after she had been selected as an Academic All-American in February 2008.
One look at Parker’s bio page on the Lady Volunteers web site and even the sports illiterate can see that she is one of the top collegiate basketball players in the nation. Parker was named to nearly 40 different national, regional and university awards and set five different school records during the 2006-2007 season.
Parker will be returning to Oklahoma City for the first time since March 2004 when she won the McDonald’s High School All-American Slam Dunk contest as a 17-year-old. Parker out-dunked five other male competitors that included future NBA players JR Smith and Josh Smith.
The Elite Eight match-up will feature both the SEC tournament champions and the Big 12 tournament champions. The Lady Volunteers’ only conference loss was at the hands of Louisiana State during the regular season, though they would defeat the Tigers in the championship game of the SEC tournament.
However, the Aggies had a tougher time in conference play, dropping five games, four of them in their first five conference games. Texas A&M would win 10 of their next 11 and swept the Big 12 tournament with a title round victory over Oklahoma State, who the Aggies had lost to earlier in the season.
The last time the two schools met on the court, Parker was only 11-years old. A&M fell to Tennessee 105-81 in an invitational tournament in Anchorage, Alaska in December 1997. Ten years later, Summitt and Parker will be facing off against Texas A&M Head Coach Gary Blair.
“She’s won seven,” Blair said about Summitt’s career national championships on Monday. “I’m still trying to win one, and I want to do it, and I think I’ve got a great chance with this ball club right here.”