‘Proving myself right’: With Vegas, Becky Hammon finally won her title

As Becky Hammon‘s prolific collegiate basketball career was nearing its end, a headline in the Denver Post proclaimed that “No one will underestimate Colorado State’s Becky Hammon ever again.”

A nice thought, but alas. Two months after that headline, Hammon would go undrafted in the 1999 WNBA Draft. And that certainly wasn’t the first time — nor the last — that Hammon wouldn’t be picked.

“I’m disappointed, but the battle’s not over,” Hammon told the Fort Collins Coloradoan after the WNBA Draft. “It’s not going to end up a sad story.”

It didn’t.

Hammon, who grew up in Rapid City, South Dakota, wasn’t highly recruited out of high school.

Tom Collen, then an assistant coach at Arkansas, recounted that after seeing Hammon compete at a camp in Terre Haute, Indiana, he wrote three words next to her name: average white girl.

“I made the same mistake a lot of other top-20 programs made,” Collen, who later became the head coach at Colorado State, told the Denver Post in 1999. “I underestimated what type of potential she had, and didn’t recruit her. I saw her, but I didn’t think she was good enough to put on my list. There were a lot of coaches who felt that way.”

Hammon eventually found a home at Colorado State. But even after arriving at a college that wanted her, Hammon wasn’t initially picked. She spent the first seven games coming off the bench before earning a starting spot. She went on to finish the season as the highest scoring freshman in the nation (19.2 points per game) and, more importantly, helped Colorado State qualify for the NCAA tournament for the first time in program history.

In the first round of the NCAA tournament, the CSU Rams tipped off against Nebraska, a program Hammon had attended for summer programs.

“W