Wooden Award candidates for the 2026 womens basketball season best players are not supposed to feel this alive in December. Not with finals week breath in the air, not with the band still learning the new fight song tempo, not with coaches talking in the careful language of “growth” and “identity.” And yet here it is, already loud.
At Notre Dame, the ball hit the hardwood and sounded like a dare. Hannah Hidalgo turned a routine passing lane into a trap door, and for a second the gym did that thing gyms do when they realize they are watching something a little unfair. Steal. Layup. Another steal. Another layup. At the other end, a guard tried to bring it up and looked like she was carrying groceries in a windstorm.
That was the moment the season started to explain itself. Not with a banner reveal or a preseason ranking, but with a player dictating the terms of reality, possession by possession, like she was tired of waiting for March Madness 2026 to anoint anybody.
So the question arrives early, the way it always does when the talent is undeniable. If there is no runaway, who becomes the consensus? Who turns “candidate” into inevitability?
A race built on absence and appetite
The Wooden Award preseason top fifty watchlist dropped in mid November, the annual reminder that the sport is now too deep for neat storylines. It was also a quiet acknowledgment of what is missing. JuJu Watkins, one of the sport’s most magnetic forces, will miss this season after tearing her ACL. That single fact does not just remove a name. It removes gravity, the kind that usually tilts the entire awards conversation toward one coastline.
And when the center of the room disappears, everybody else starts talking louder.
The sport has been building toward this moment for a while. The transfer portal has turned rosters into living documents. A star can change leagues, schemes, and expectations in a week, then spend December pretending it is all normal. Olivia Miles is doing that at TCU, with the casual confidence of someone who has never believed a new gym could make her smaller.
Ta’Niya Latson did it too, leaving Florida State as the nation’s leading scorer and landing at South Carolina with a two word announcement that felt like a wink and a warning.
Meanwhile, the teams at the top have their own argument. UConn is back at No. 1 in the national poll, Texas is right behind them, South Carolina is still South Carolina, UCLA looks like a machine with a conscience, and LSU can score in a way that makes coaches reach for aspirin.
This is what makes Wooden Award candidates for the 2026 womens basketball season best players so hard to pin down. The numbers will be huge. The teams will be loaded. The moments will be captured, clipped, shared, memed, and replayed in dorm rooms long after midnight. The award will still come down to something simpler.
Who owns the season.
The numbers that travel and the moments that stick
The Wooden Award rarely goes to the most interesting player. It usually goes to the player whose production survives context, whose impact shows up even when the shot is not falling, and whose team keeps winning so often that the conversation runs out of alternatives.
That is the quiet three part test voters apply, even when they insist they do not.
First: the nightly burden. Points, efficiency, usage, the kind of box score weight that turns every scouting report into a plea for mercy.
Second: the two way footprint. Steals that change a game’s rhythm, rim protection that makes layups feel like bad decisions, passes that create shots before the defense even realizes the possession has started.
Third: the signature. A stretch of plays that becomes shorthand. The kind of sequence broadcasters return to in March because it explains who you are without requiring a paragraph.
With that in mind, the watchlist is not a list of favorites. It is a list of possibilities. The ten names below are the ones most likely to turn possibility into a season long claim, the Wooden Award candidates most likely to end up standing alone when the ballots stop pretending this is complicated.
When conference play turns the lights up
December can lie. Blowouts pile up. Rotations stay experimental. Coaches hide things.
January does not do that.
This is where the season starts collecting fingerprints. Road games in packed gyms. Rivalries that feel personal even when the players swear they are not. The first time a team loses and has to explain itself. The first time a star has a bad night and still has to win the game anyway.
That is when Wooden Award candidates stop being preseason concepts and start becoming weekly obligations.
10 Ta’Niya Latson (South Carolina)
The defining moment is not complicated. It is a drive through contact that should be a miss, turning into an and one because she refuses to accept physics.
Latson’s numbers at South Carolina are already steady: 17.4 points a night with efficient shooting, plus the passing responsibility that comes with sharing the floor with other talent.
The cultural note is the way she arrived. The nation’s leading scorer leaving Florida State, then posting “Feeling Cocky” like she was naming the era. It was a recruiting announcement that read like a slogan. At South Carolina, where banners hang like punctuation, she is now trying to prove she is not just portable production. She is portable belief.
9 Flau’jae Johnson (LSU)
A defining highlight for Johnson is how quickly she can flip the temperature. Against Duke, LSU stumbled into an early hole and looked rattled, then Johnson started landing threes, one after another, until the game stopped feeling like an upset alert and started feeling like LSU again.
Her production sits in that do everything range that voters love: 16.5 points, 6.2 rebounds, 2.4 assists. The numbers do not scream takeover. They whisper control.
The cultural legacy note, even mid season, is that she is not just an athlete cashing in on NIL. She is one of the faces of the new economy, with headline deals that include equity in Unrivaled, the kind of arrangement that used to be reserved for retirees and legends. She is also a working musician, the rare star whose postgame isn’t always treatment and film. Sometimes it is a studio.
8 Azzi Fudd (UConn)
The defining moment came in a showcase setting, with a blue blood across the way and a crowd that wanted a story. Fudd gave them one, pouring in 27 points against Iowa in a game that felt like a reminder: the shot is still pure, and the stage still fits her.
Her season line reflects both skill and restraint: 18.5 points per game, elite shooting splits, and the quiet understanding that at UConn, scoring is never the only job.
The cultural note is the arc. Fudd has been famous in women’s basketball circles for so long that people forget she is still writing her college story. She arrived as a kind of prophecy, the next great UConn guard, then had to live inside the reality of injuries and expectation. When she gets rolling, the arena doesn’t just cheer. It exhales, like it was holding its breath for years.
7 Mikayla Blakes (Vanderbilt)
The defining highlight is the kind that makes you check whether it counts. Blakes scored 40 points in an exhibition against Memphis, a number that looked like a typo until you watched the clips and realized she just kept doing it.
Her regular season production has carried that same edge: 23.3 points per game early, the kind of output that forces the rest of the country to start learning how to pronounce Vanderbilt with urgency again.
The cultural note is what it means for a program like this. Vanderbilt is not supposed to have a player who bends scouting reports into apology letters. Yet there she is, turning neutral site games into personal stages, with every bucket making the SEC feel even more crowded at the top.
6 Joyce Edwards (South Carolina)
The defining moment is a run, the kind that happens so fast the other team calls timeout just to stop the bleeding. Edwards has had games where she looks like she is playing in fast forward, finishing through bodies like she’s tired of being treated like a freshman.
Her data point is clean: 15.0 points per game, plus the rebounding and interior touch that make her fit South Carolina’s identity without shrinking her own.
The cultural note is that she is doing this inside a machine. South Carolina has a way of turning stars into parts of a larger shape, then handing them the spotlight when they have earned it. Edwards is earning it quickly. When she drops 29 with 10 boards, the reaction is not surprise. It is recognition.
5 Olivia Miles (TCU)
The defining highlight is the triple double stretch, three straight, that made people stop talking about fit and start talking about ceiling. Miles posted three consecutive triple doubles, the sort of thing that belongs in a video game mode, not a real season.
Her season numbers support the eye test: 17.7 points and 7.4 assists per game, a blend of scoring and orchestration that makes TCU feel like it has a conductor, not just a point guard.
The cultural note is how quickly she has turned a transfer into a headline. The portal usually comes with awkward seams. Miles makes it look like a relocation. When she says she wanted the right environment, she sounds less like a traveler and more like someone choosing a stage.
4 Madison Booker (Texas)
The defining moment was a triple double, because triple doubles still carry a certain weight, even in an era where everyone can pass and rebound. Booker logged one against UTRGV, a performance that read like a résumé line but felt like a warning about what Texas becomes when she is fully in charge.
Her steady production looks like the kind voters circle: 19.1 points per game, with enough efficiency to keep her from being dismissed as volume.
The cultural note is Texas’s new posture. This program has stopped acting like it is waiting for permission. Booker embodies that. She is not loud about it. She just plays like she expects to be in the last weekend of March Madness 2026, and she expects you to adjust.
3 Audi Crooks (Iowa State)
The defining highlight is the kind that makes a big feel inevitable. Crooks dropped 41 points against Kansas, a score line that would be impressive for a guard, let alone a post player living in traffic.
The data point that separates her is not just volume, it is efficiency. Early in the season she was at 28.9 points per game with 71.6 percent shooting, which sounds impossible until you watch how she seals, pivots, and finishes like the rim owes her something.
The cultural note is the return of the center as spectacle. For a few years, the sport flirted with the idea that every great player needed to live outside the arc. Crooks is dragging the argument back into the paint, one bruising possession at a time, turning old school footwork into modern highlight content.
2 Lauren Betts (UCLA)
The defining moment can be a single block. A guard turns the corner, sees daylight, then sees Betts, and suddenly the layup becomes a bad idea. UCLA has been turning those moments into an identity.
Her stat line is strong, but it understates her value: 15.2 points and 7.5 rebounds per game, plus rim protection that does not always show up in the loudest numbers.
The cultural note is UCLA’s ascent. Betts helped push the Bruins into the top tier, and the sport noticed. She is not a viral personality in the way some guards are, she is something more old fashioned. She is the reason your game plan starts with fear.
1 Hannah Hidalgo (Notre Dame)
The defining highlight, right now, is that Bellarmine game, the one that looked like a glitch. Hidalgo put up 30 points, 10 assists, and 13 steals in 22 minutes, and Notre Dame finished with 28 steals as a team. That is not just production. That is a mood.
Her season data point reads like a player trying to lead multiple categories at once: 25.1 points per game and 6.1 steals per game, numbers that turn every possession into a potential fast break.
The cultural legacy note is the sound of the arena when she is hunting. Crowds do not usually roar for defense until March, when stakes make people honest. Hidalgo is getting those reactions in December. She is making defense feel like an event. If Wooden Award candidates for the 2026 womens basketball season best players are judged by who warps the sport around them, she is already doing it.
March Madness 2026 will crown the argument
The cleanest part of this conversation is that it will not stay clean.
Conference play will expose weak spots. Somebody on this list will have a cold week that turns into a cold month. Somebody not on this list will have a run that forces everyone to revise their vocabulary. A freshman will look fearless in a rivalry game. A veteran will get tired, then get angry, then get better.
By the time March Madness 2026 arrives, the argument will not be about who is talented. It will be about whose talent mattered most when the game stopped being polite.
The question that lingers is the one voters never admit they are asking, even as they ask it every year. When the ball got heavy, when the gym got quiet, when the season asked for a name that could hold the whole thing together, who answered first, and who kept answering?
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FAQs
Who is leading the Wooden Award race right now?
Hannah Hidalgo has grabbed the early spotlight with huge scoring and game changing defense, plus a historic triple double that felt like a season statement.
Why is JuJu Watkins out of this season’s award conversation?
She will miss the season after an ACL tear, and her absence has opened the race for everyone else on the watchlist.
What usually separates a Wooden Award winner from a finalist?
Voters lean toward big production, two way impact, and wins, plus one signature stretch that becomes the shorthand for the season.
Which transfers have changed the race the most?
Olivia Miles has transformed TCU fast, and Ta’Niya Latson has brought elite scoring into South Carolina’s system.
Can a post player win it in a guard driven era?
Yes. Players like Lauren Betts and Audi Crooks are forcing the sport to look back to the paint, where games still bend around size and touch.
