[2006alum]

Also it wasn’t known that Iriafen was going to transfer. Betts could have been looking at playing behind Kiki last year and this year. So she could have thought she wouldn’t be the team leader until her senior year.

All true. The fact remains however , that we lost the number one recruit in the country; a recruit who has blosssomed at UCLA and will probably get them a national championship .  It is not important that , we, the unwashed understand why we lost her. It is vital and essential to having a quality program that Kate Paye, Bernard Muir and Stanford leadership do a dispassionate, no holds bar study of why we lost her and come to agreement on what must be changed to prevent it happening again. I assume and hope we have done that . We are not a quality program if we have not.

With all due respect to Betts, she's not the sun and the earth. She's also not the first 5 star recruit to transfer schools and flourish at her new destination. She said in her podcast interview with Haley Jones that she did all her "visits" remotely during COVID and committed without ever stepping foot on campus. Given how totally abberational everything about the past four years has been (COVID, Stanford's "hate fun" response to it, the dissolution of the Pac-12 and haphazard move to the ACC, NIL, the transfer portal, and the logjam of top posts immediately above Betts), I think losing Betts was both (a) something of an overdetermined outcome, and (b) not even the AD's top ten biggest issues it should be throwing attention at. We nabbed Somfai and retained Swain, and we have a top 3 recruiting class coming in. If we should be focusing on anything, it's how to retain Agara and Clardy when this season is over.

[2006alum]

Also it wasn’t known that Iriafen was going to transfer. Betts could have been looking at playing behind Kiki last year and this year. So she could have thought she wouldn’t be the team leader until her senior year.

All true. The fact remains however , that we lost the number one recruit in the country; a recruit who has blosssomed at UCLA and will probably get them a national championship .  It is not important that , we, the unwashed understand why we lost her. It is vital and essential to having a quality program that Kate Paye, Bernard Muir and Stanford leadership do a dispassionate, no holds bar study of why we lost her and come to agreement on what must be changed to prevent it happening again. I assume and hope we have done that . We are not a quality program if we have not.

With all due respect to Betts, she's not the sun and the earth. She's also not the first 5 star recruit to transfer schools and flourish at her new destination. She said in her podcast interview with Haley Jones that she did all her "visits" remotely during COVID and committed without ever stepping foot on campus. Given how totally abberational everything about the past four years has been (COVID, Stanford's "hate fun" response to it, the dissolution of the Pac-12 and haphazard move to the ACC, NIL, the transfer portal, and the logjam of top posts immediately above Betts), I think losing Betts was both (a) something of an overdetermined outcome, and (b) not even the AD's top ten biggest issues it should be throwing attention at. We nabbed Somfai and retained Swain, and we have a top 3 recruiting class coming in. If we should be focusing on anything, it's how to retain Agara and Clardy when this season is over.