#Chillin4Charity

Two weeks ago, Arizona women's basketball issued a challenge to Pac-12 Coaches and Players to take part in a Cold Water Challenge to benefit the Kay Yow Cancer Fund. This is how it all started:

Lindsay Gottlieb and several of her players were called out and took their dousing together last week:

Lindsay called out Tara, assistant coach Kai Felton called out Amy and Brittany Boyd called out Amber. Here's the Nerd Nation dousing:

I assume that Tara stepped up to the challenge by donating to the Kay Yow fund, as Kelly Graves did (or so he intended), and that Amber donated community hours. Or perhaps they took their dousing separately with videos that haven't been published yet.

Now in its third week, the challenge has spread across the nation and beyond women's college basketball. There are now about 11,800 #chillin4charity videos on YouTube. Here are links to some videos that have a Cardinal connection:

Katy Steding

Chiney

E Payne

Bobbie Kelsey

Bonnie

RosGO

Jennifer Azzi

Summer basketball

If you haven't been going to Kezar for summer basketball the past couple of years because there were no Cardinal players, you'll be happy to hear that Amber and Briana and alum Markisha Coleman ('07) have signed up with the South Bay team.

League play begins tomorrow (Saturday, June 21), but South Bay has a bye. They'll play the following Saturday afternoon at 3:30.

Forgotten where Kezar Pavilion is? Here's the map and the SF Pro-Am website with the full schedule and all the rosters.

Awards for Chiney, Sara, Amber and Erica

The Stanford Athletic Board held its annual award ceremony last week in which they honored 57 student-athletes in 31 varsity sports.

Chiney was co-recipient (with Patrick Rodgers, men's golf) of the highest award — the Al Masters Award, which is presented to the Stanford athlete attaining the highest standards of athletic performance, leadership and academic achievement. This is the second time that Chiney has received this award. She was co-recipient last year with Mark Appel (baseball).

Chiney also received the Pac-12 Tom Hansen Conference Medal, which is awarded to each member institution's outstanding senior male and female student-athlete based on the exhibition of the greatest combination of performance and achievement in scholarship, athletics and leadership.

Chiney was also honored for her receipt in March of the Pac-12 Scholar-Athlete, women's basketball.

Sara was awarded a Pac-12 Postgraduate Scholarship, which the conference awards to student-athletes who have excelled academically and athletically and whose dedication and effort are reflective of those characteristics necessary to succeed and thrive through postgraduate study in an accredited graduate degree program.

Amber was honored as a Block S Outstanding Female Junior.

Erica was honored for her receipt in Nashville last March of the NCAA Elite 89 Award, which is presented to the student-athlete with the highest cumulative grade-point average participating at the finals site for each of the NCAA Division I championships.

Here is the awards ceremony program, which lists all the awards and honorees.

Tara and Amy attended the awards ceremony in Bing Hall, but none of the women's basketball honorees were present — at least, they didn't appear in any of the photos in this Stanford Photo gallery.

Why is the number of female coaches dwindling?

Jimmy Dykes, who has never coached women's basketball at any level, was recently named the head women's basketball coach at the University of Arkansas.

The appointment drew a good deal of criticism from Tara and other female coaches.

And it led Seth Davis (Sports Illustrated) to investigate why the percentage of women coaching women's college teams has dropped from about 9 of 10 to less than half in the 42 years since Title IX. Tara knows one reason, "When there was no money in it, there were no men in it."

Davis concludes with another quote from Tara, "The world we live in still has a long way to go in terms of sexism ..."

Read more in Davis's article and in “Women in Intercollegiate Sport. A Longitudinal, National Study, Thirty Five Year Update. 1977-2012”.