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On Feb. 3, 1987, President Ronald Reagan signed Proclamation 5606, declaring Feb. 4, 1987, National Women in Sports Day.

Every year since, National Girls and Women in Sports Day (NGWSD) celebrates female athletes’ accomplishments and honors the progress women in sports have made toward equality in participation and access.

Wednesday, Feb. 4, was the 40th NGWSD.

A year ago, longtime high school sports writer René Ferrán unveiled for High School On SI a list of the 50 greatest girls athletes in Oregon high school sports history.

Headed up by St. Mary’s Academy legend Anna Maria Lopez through No. 50 Ashley Smith of Oregon City, the list celebrated the rich history of the state’s top female athletes on the 39th anniversary of the creation of NGWSD.

Now, with NGWSD turning 40 this month, The Oregonian/OregonLive tasked Ferrán with adding to the list another 50 athletes who have made significant contributions to the state’s high school sports scene.

We’ll be counting down all week, continuing today with No. 70 through No. 61. (The year listed beside each name is the year she graduated from high school.)

Let’s celebrate together the best of the best and their many achievements in their favorite sports.

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70. Caroline Inglis, Churchill, 2012 (golf)

Inglis has the distinction of finishing atop the 5A state leaderboard four consecutive years as a high school golfer.

But she did not win four titles. Instead, she lost out in her bid to become the state’s first four-time state champion when she signed an incorrect scoreboard after the final round at Trysting Tree as a senior.

She shot a 3-under 69, which would have secured a nine-stroke win. She mistakenly signed for a 68 after her playing partner recorded a par-4 on the 18th hole rather than the bogey-5 she scored — which under the USGA rules at the time led to her disqualification.

In a cruel twist of fate, her father, Bill, also signed for an incorrect score at the 1971 state tournament, costing South Eugene a chance to win a team trophy.

Inglis had to rally from three shots down as a freshman for her first title, shooting the best round of the tournament — a 4-over 76 — for a two-shot win.

She won by one stroke as a sophomore, finishing as the only golfer under par after two rounds. The next year required another comeback — albeit from only a one-shot deficit — to win by two.

She played collegiately down the road at the University of Oregon, where she won the program’s first Pac-10 individual title in 2015 and led the Ducks to a tie for fifth in the team standings at the NCAA Championships as a senior, when she tied for 16th with an even-par 288 total.

She played nine years on the LPGA Tour, making 124 starts with 17 top-25 finishes, including a tie for ninth at the 2024 Women’s PGA Championship. She retired at the end of the 2025 season in part because of recurring back injuries and took a job with the Oregon Golf Association.

69. Kiana Brown, Triangle Lake, 2014 (basketball, volleyball, track and field)

As Brown approached becoming the state’s all-time basketball scoring leader, she told her father and coach, Chad, that she didn’t want to chase the points.

She just wanted to play.

It turned out she could do both. A couple days after scoring a personal-high 53 points against Mohawk, she made a 3-pointer midway through the second quarter against Siletz Valley to pass Trisha Stevens atop the all-time Oregon list.

Brown kept pouring in points the rest of the season, which ended with the Lakers placing fifth at the 1A state tournament and Brown having scored 2,894 points. She scored 835 points as a senior and 833 as a junior, the second- and third-most points in a season in state history, and she made a state-record 590 free throws in 733 attempts to go with a 1A-record 413 assists.

She was a 1A co-player of the year as a junior and a first-team all-state selection as a senior. She was a second-team all-state selection in volleyball as a sophomore and a district champion in the 200 meters and high jump as a freshman.

Brown played basketball for Eastern Washington, Humboldt State and Portland State, averaging 11.8 points as a redshirt junior for the Vikings in 2017-18 and finishing seventh in the nation in free throw percentage (.898).

68. Haley Vann, Cleveland, 2023 (wrestling)

Growing up, Vann got into jiu-jitsu, which eventually led her to take up wrestling heading into high school.

She placed third at the OSAA state championships as a freshman, when she went 23-4. After suffering an early-season loss during the COVID-19 spring 2021 campaign, she became indestructible, winning 77 consecutive matches to finish as a three-time state champion with a 101-5 record.

“I think after freshman year, I just really started to love the sport,” Vann said after winning title No. 3 with a 10-0 major decision over Forest Grove’s Renae Cook. “I really wanted to get better at it and just like pursue it like I did.”

Vann decided to wrestle for North Central College in Illinois, where as a freshman she placed fifth at 59 kilograms at the U20 Women’s Nationals.

67. Kara Braxton, Westview, 2001 (basketball)

Braxton and her twin sister, Kim, lived in Beaverton as infants before the family moved to Michigan. When their mother, Chris Brown, moved back to the Portland area in the summer of 1998, the fortunes of the Westview program changed.

After considering a move to Oregon City and a chance for them to play for coach Brad Smith (who moved on to Vanderbilt University in the meantime), Brown decided to enroll her girls at Westview after hearing good things about coach Mark Neffendorf.

At Westview, the twins blossomed, with Kara achieving greater success.

She twice was named 4A player of the year and won Gatorade state player of the year honors after her junior season, when she led the Wildcats to their only state championship by averaging 15 points and 8.2 rebounds in four state tournament games. She finished the season averaging a double-double (17.8 points, 10 rebounds) and four blocked shots per game.

Kara and Kim signed with the University of Georgia in the fall of 2000, but their excitement was muted when they had to sit the first three months of their senior season because they were academically ineligible. They ended up playing just six games, with Westview unable to defend its state title by missing the playoffs by one game.

Kara finished with 1,198 points — the first Wildcat to reach the 1,000-point milestone.

At Georgia, Kara was named SEC Freshman of the Year in 2002 and twice earned first-team all-SEC honors before being dismissed from the team because of repeated team rules infractions. The WNBA’s Detroit Shock drafted her No. 7 overall in 2005, and she made the All-Rookie team that summer and the WNBA All-Star team in 2007 during her 10-year career.

66. Amy Nickerson, Coquille, 1999 (track and field, cross country)

Nickerson dominated the middle distances in the late 1990s, becoming the first runner at any classification (boy or girl) to win four state titles in the 800 and 1,500 meters.

She set 3A meet records in both events — she ran the 800 in 2 minutes, 14.09 seconds, as a junior in 1998 and the 1,500 in 4:34.93 as a sophomore in 1997 — that stood until Philomath’s Brianna Anderson-Gregg broke both in 2003.

Nickerson won three cross country state championships, including twice as she battled severe sideaches. A third-place finish as a sophomore denied her of being the first four-time champion.

She ran at the University of Oregon for one year, with her 11th-place showing at the NCAA West Regional Championships pacing the Ducks to a fifth-place finish and a spot at the NCAA Championships, where Nickerson finished 65th.

65. Laura Schott, Jesuit, 1999 (soccer, track and field)

Girls soccer was building statewide in the mid-1990s. Enough schools added the sport to split the state championships into two classifications in 1992, and two years later, Jesuit won the first of its 17 titles.

Two years after that, Schott arrived at the Southwest Portland campus and, as The Oregonian wrote, “took girls soccer to a new level in Oregon high school play.”

During her four seasons in the program, the Crusaders never lost to an in-state opponent — their only defeat was to Washington power Bellarmine Prep of Tacoma during her freshman season — as they went 72-1-4, including back-to-back 19-0 campaigns her junior and senior years. Schott won Gatorade state player of the year honors both seasons.

She scored 116 goals, which put her third on the all-time Oregon list behind Tiffeny Milbrett and Sarah Bagby (she’s since fallen to ninth), and received Parade All-American honors her senior year.

Schott starred at Cal-Berkeley, making the All-Pac-10 first team three times and earning All-American honors as a sophomore, when she tied the school record with 23 goals. She finished as the program’s all-time leader with 56 goals — a record that still stands — and went on to earn five caps with the U.S. national team and play for the Washington Freedom in the WUSA and the California Storm of the WPSL, winning titles with both.

After her playing career, she started a second act as a coach, assisting at Portland State for three years before starting a nine-year term as head coach, winning four Big Sky titles. She joined the Portland Thorns staff in 2017 as the academy director, and she led the George Fox program for six seasons before stepping down in December.

64. Kaitlyn Dobler, Aloha, 2020 (swimming)

There have been four-time state titlists and Olympians who have come through the OSAA swimming championships over the years.

But only one four-time champion and Olympic hopeful also holds a national high school record. Dobler set the mark in the 100-yard breaststroke her senior year at Tualatin Hills Aquatic Center in her final high school race, with her winning time of 58.35 seconds breaking the record by five-hundredths of a second — a record that still stood entering this season.

It was Dobler’s fourth state title in the 100 breast and came after she set a state record in the 50 freestyle — her third title in that event.

After her junior season, she joined Team USA at the World Junior Swimming Championships, swimming a leg on the gold medal-winning 4×100 medley relay and bringing home medals in the 50- (bronze) and 100-meter breaststroke (silver).

Dobler earned All-America status three times in high school before heading to USC, where she was the Pac-12 Freshman Swimmer of the Year and became the first Trojan to win five consecutive conference titles in the same event (the 100 breast) among her 11 career titles. She won NCAA and national championships in the 100 breast her sophomore year.

63. Lisa Gibson, Southridge, 2007 (water polo, swimming)

Gibson was born in Chichester, England, but moved to Beaverton in grade school, beginning to play water polo at age 12 for the Tualatin Hills Water Polo Club.

She played for Southridge in high school, twice earning Metro League MVP honors — including her senior year, when the Skyhawks won the league title with an 11-0-1 record and reached their first (and only) state final, where they lost to Newberg 8-2 amidst the Tigers’ run of five consecutive championships.

At the same time, she was traveling back to England to play for the Great Britain junior team. She debuted for the senior national team at the 2007 European Championships at age 17, and she moved back to England to attend the University of Manchester, where she earned a degree in biomedical sciences while continuing to play for the British national team.

She competed at the London 2012 Olympic Games for the host team, and she played on the World Championships team in 2013. She returned to the Portland area for shoulder surgery and she got into coaching, eventually taking over the Lincoln program in 2014.

62. Jenny Mowe-Joseph, Powers, 1996 (basketball)

Mowe grew up on a 100-acre ranch in a house her parents, Patty and Jerry, built in the small town just outside the Siskiyou National Forest in Southern Oregon, and she took part in all the duties one would expect a farmhand would undertake.

At her tiny high school, considering no one else could match her 6-foot-5 frame, an assistant coach would hold up a broom on which the staff drew a head and added hair and nicknamed Jan the Broom to simulate a defender.

Jan had about as much success stopping Mowe as the overmatched opponents the Cruisers faced during Mowe’s four-year run, which ended with her scoring a then-1A-record 2,187 points, grabbing a still-1A record 1,155 rebounds and leading the team to back-to-back state finals. They won the school’s only title in 1995 during Mowe’s junior year, when she averaged 25 points, 16 rebounds and six blocked shots per game.

As a senior, she averaged 32.5 points in leading Powers back to the state final, where the Cruisers lost to Ione 60-46 (Mowe fouled out), and she earned Gatorade state player of the year honors — the only time a player outside the state’s top two classifications won the award.

She played for the University of Oregon, where she averaged 8.8 points and 5.6 rebounds per game during her five seasons that included a medical redshirt year. Her 222 blocked shots rank third in program history, as does her .573 field goal percentage.

Mowe became the first Ducks player drafted by a WNBA team when she was selected in the second round by the Portland Fire in 2001. She played with the team until it disbanded in 2003; she played two more seasons in China and South Korea before retiring from basketball.

She and her husband, Loran Joseph, moved to Baker City in 2007, where she operates her bakery, Sweet Wife Baking.

61. Kim Hill, Portland Christian, 2008 (volleyball, basketball)

Hill transcended being “just” a 2A wunderkind to become the best volleyball player in the state regardless of classification — just one stop on the road to Olympic stardom.

She made the 2A all-state team all four years with the Royals, earning third-team honors as a freshman before making the first team the next three seasons — including player of the year as a junior and senior.

During her final campaign, she amassed a state-record 952 kills with 137 blocks, 104 digs and 97 aces in leading Portland Christian to a 31-1 record and a second consecutive state title. Her achievements also led to her being named Gatorade state player of the year — the only time in the 30 years of the award that a 2A player won it.

Hill also starred on the hardwood for the Royals, winning 2A player of the year honors as a junior and senior and leading them to the 2007 state championship.

Based on her play at Portland Christian and with the national champion Nike Northwest Junior Air Elite club team, Hill signed with Pepperdine University, where she became the first college player to earn All-American honors in both indoor (2011) and beach (2012-13) volleyball. She played professionally in Poland, Italy and Turkey.

She started her national team career during that time, winning gold at the 2014 World Championships (where she was selected the tournament’s Most Valuable Player), bronze at the 2016 Rio Olympics and gold at the 2021 Tokyo Games, after which she retired from the U.S. National Team.

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The Oregonian/OregonLive will be counting down the state’s 100 greatest girls athletes throughout the week. Check back Friday for Part 5 of the series.

(Chris Samuels | The Salt Lake Tribune) Members of the Utah Supreme Court attend the State of the Judiciary at the Capitol in Salt Lake City, Tuesday, Jan. 20, 2026.

An open letter to the nominating commission and Gov. Cox:

As you consider what two new people to appoint to the Utah Supreme Court, please select attorneys who are as highly qualified as our current justices.

Two went to top-10 law schools (Harvard and Yale), the two University of Utah graduates were in the top 10% of their class, and the BYU graduate was magna cum laude. Four justices clerked for prestigious federal circuit or district courts. Four worked for major law firms, one in New York City. Two served in U.S. attorneys offices, one prosecuted war crimes in the Hague, and one served in the Utah attorney general’s office and a district attorney’s office. Four served either as Utah court of appeals or district court judges before being appointed to the Utah Supreme Court.

If you make the mistake of nominating individuals who are less stellar than the current bench, you will confirm the worst suspicions of the critics — that the expansion of the court was court packing, an attempt to manipulate the outcome of pending cases for political purposes.

Linda F. Smith, Salt Lake City

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