Roster data for women's college basketball teams
The wbb_rosters_2023_24.csv file in this repository contains information on more than 13,800 NCAA women's basketball players from more than 900 teams for the 2023-24 season. It is current as of Tuesday, November 14, 2023, although rosters do change frequently.
This data is a project of the JOUR479X class, Sports Data Analysis & Visualization, at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. Please credit the Sports Roster Data project at the University of Maryland.
The following students have contributed to this project:
- Ben Baruch
- Michael Charles
- Shane Connuck
- Ian Decker
- Jetson Ku
- Tanner Malinowski
- Varun Shankar
- Rina Torchinsky
- Dylan Manfre
This project was supervised and edited by Derek Willis, lecturer in data and computational journalism.
The original roster information is drawn from team websites, mostly obtained via scrapers written in Python. That information has been augmented by individual research and editing. For example, a transfer player's high school may not be noted on her current team, but it could be found on her previous team's roster. Team information comes from the NCAA.
The roster data in this repository has been cleaned and standardized by student contributors using R; a description of that process and the code is available in this RMarkdown Notebook. Some basic exploratory analysis can be seen in this notebook.
The specific information cleaned and parsed includes the following:
- Position (also standardized)
- Height (standardized and converted to total inches to make comparisons possible)
- Year (also standardized; because this information could refer to either academic or athletic eligibility, it may not be reflective of one of those - and COVID eligibility added more complexity)
- Hometown (parsed using the postmastr package, then separated into hometown, state and country-specific fields. For foreign countries, we started with the list of FIBA nations and added others, then standardized the results)
- Previous School (probably the least consistent column in this data because of the way it is presented in the original data; we did make an attempt to move high schools listed in this column to the high school field)
Recent additions to standardization (November 2025):
- High School - Partially standardized using automated duplicate resolution and manual curation. See HIGH_SCHOOL_STANDARDIZATION.md for details. Coverage: ~44% of US player-seasons, with ongoing work to expand via NCES data matching.
We have not completely standardized the following data:
- Hometown (parsed but not normalized)
- Previous School (inconsistent formatting remains)
We welcome comments, corrections and questions. Please use this repository's Issues to let us know about any errors or omissions, or submit a pull request with any changes.