Marlowe Is NCAA’s Top Female Athlete

Missy Marlowe of the University of Utah, the only gymnast to earn perfect 10s in four events in an NCAA season, was named winner of the Honda Broderick Cup during an awards dinner at the NCAA’s annual convention Thursday night.

The award, which for the last 16 years has honored the top collegiate female athlete of the year, had never gone to a gymnast.

Marlowe led Utah to two NCAA gymnastics titles and one runner-up finish. Last season, as a senior, she won a record four individual events and set NCAA scoring records in three of the four. She was also a member of the 1988 U.S. Olympic team and won a gold medal in the ’87 Pan American Games.

A voting panel of coaches, administrators and media selected Marlowe from a field of 11 finalists that included Gina Carey, field hockey player at Trenton State; Lisa Fernandez, softball player at UCLA; Vicki Goetze, NCAA golf champion from Georgia; Kristine Lilly, soccer player at North Carolina; Kim Oden, track and field heptathlete at Nebraska Wesleyan; Sonia O’Sullivan, cross-country runner at Villanova; Lisa Raymond, the NCAA tennis champion from Florida; Summer Sanders, Olympic gold medal swimmer from Stanford; Dawn Staley, basketball player at Virginia, and Natalie Williams, volleyball and basketball player at UCLA, who was nominated from volleyball. Staley won the award last year.

Others honored at the dinner, attended by an estimated 1,200, were Division II winner Kristina Hand, a distance runner at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo; and Inspiration Award winner Heather Stepp of Georgia, a gymnast who broke her elbow so badly in a vaulting accident in 1991 that she was not expected to gain full range of motion in her arm, much less compete again. A season later, in the 1992 NCAA gymnastics meet, Steep won a gold medal in the event in which she had been injured.

Oden, the Nebraska Wesleyan heptathlete, was the Division III honoree, as well as the overall track and field winner, marking the first double honor in the 16 years of the women’s awards program.