Reversing The Trend Women's Basketball Captain Maddie Campbell '15
A year ago, Cornell’s Shonn Miller and Harvard’s Temi Fagbenle were two of the biggest names in Ivy League men’s and women’s basketball. This year, both are using their final year of eligibility as graduate student transfers for high profile programs, with Miller and Fagbenle starting for UConn and USC, respectively.
The graduate transfer is not new, but it seems to be a recent trend in NCAA basketball, and the Ivy League is fertile recruiting ground as the conference does not allow students to participate in athletics once they have completed their undergraduate degree. That means a student-athlete who has lost a year of eligibility due to injury (like Miller) or has the ability to graduate early is unable to continue participating in athletics.
A far less frequent sight is that of a student transferring from a four-year institution into the Ivy League for the purpose of athletics. In fact, current senior women’s basketball player Maddie Campbell is the first to do so in Dayna Smith’s 14-year tenure as the Rebecca Quinn Morgan ’60 Head Coach of Women’s Basketball.
“When it comes to transfers, the make-up of your team is really important in deciding if the player can help you or not,” says Smith. “We’ve had other players interested over the years and we’ve not followed through with them because they wouldn’t fit with the dynamic of the team. But with Maddie, as soon as we met her, it was a no-brainer.”
Campbell came to the Big Red after playing two seasons at UC Santa Barbara. During her time with the Gauchos, she saw action in 49 games, making five starts. But it wasn’t just her play at UCSB that intrigued Coach Smith when Campbell contacted her about transferring. It was her maturity and sincere desire to become an Ivy League student-athlete.
“We saw that this was something she really wanted,” says Smith. “I remember her saying to me ‘I want to be challenged in the classroom. I want to experience diversity on campus. There were so many things I thought I could experience at UCSB and it was a mistake, and I don’t want to continue to make that mistake.’ And she believed Cornell could give her the things that she wanted out of her education. And that’s not something we hear very often from the 16-year-olds we’re recruiting out of high school. So I felt confident that she understood the challenges and values of a Cornell education.”
Part of the reason Campbell was so well-versed in the Ivy League was because she had been recruited heavily by the Ancient Eight while in high school. When it was time to make her decision, the promise of a full-ride scholarship to play basketball proved too great to pass up. But after a coaching change at UCSB, Campbell began rethinking her decision.
In a leap of faith, she gave up her scholarship in order to be allowed by UCSB to contact schools about transferring and her first call was to the Ivy League.
“It was a completely different process going through recruiting the second time, because I knew exactly what I wanted,” explains Campbell. “I knew what I was looking for and it came down to Cornell, Dartmouth and Brown.”
On her visit, Campbell met with the coaches and felt an immediate connection, but it was the individual meetings with the team that solidified that Cornell was the place for her.
“When I visited, I knew exactly how much time each girl played, so I asked girls who didn’t play at all, ‘How do you like the coach?’ And I had the same response from everybody. They basically said, ‘I respect her. She’s a really good coach.’ And I thought that was great because if they said they loved her, I’d know they were lying. Nobody who sits the bench loves their coach. So that was huge to hear from a player that plays one minute, as well as the girls who have started four years saying the same thing down the line.”
Campbell transferred prior to the 2013-14 season but was not eligible to play as she fulfilled NCAA year-in-residence regulations.
“It was interesting for us as a staff, because we’ve never had a transfer that’s had to sit,” says Smith. “The first three weeks we were so angry because we knew she would help us if she were eligible to play. As time went on, she was really valuable on the scout team, and because she played with such an intense work ethic, others took notice. And she was such a leader in that regard that it didn’t matter that she wasn’t playing in the games.”
She was such a great leader during those workouts that the following season, before even playing a game for the Big Red, she was named team captain.
“People outside the program only see us 28 days – our games – but our season is nine months long,” explains Smith. “We’re together practicing, lifting, running, conditioning, watching film. And she was involved in all of that. Her presence was there every day. It’s almost like it was an injury that prevented her from participating on those 28 days. That’s how we looked at it. And that’s how the team saw it. That’s why her team named her captain. It wasn’t even a question. Everybody stepped up and voted for her and gave the right reasons why.”
This season has been Campbell’s most productive by far, starting all but one game and averaging career highs in points and rebounds for the Big Red. Off the court, the Industrial and Labor Relations student has been equally successful. Last spring, she won the school’s prestigious Stuart Linnick Memorial Prize, awarded to an ILR junior or senior who exemplifies the qualities and principles that earned Stuart the respect of his peers throughout the labor law community. She’s also secured a position in sales and trading at Barclays after an intensive nine-week internship this past summer.
“It was really risky for me to leave UCSB,” she says. “When I said I wanted to go to the Ivy League, people immediately told me, ‘All they care about is academics. They don’t care about athletics. They won’t let you take your redshirt year. They’ll make you graduate early.’ But I decided it was worth the chance to play for Coach Smith and to go to school here. I thought that if the worst that could happen is that I would have to graduate early, then it would stink to only play basketball for one year, but I’d have that Cornell degree. And I was really optimistic. I thought I could make it work, and I was sure there were staff members that wanted to help me, and that was true.
“It all worked out and I ended up getting a fantastic job that I never would have gotten if I’d stayed at UCSB. My dad called it a leap of faith, and it was, but it all worked out and I can’t imagine how it could have gone better.”
