STANFORD, Calif. – Maggie Steffens has been named a finalist for the Women's Sports Foundation Sportswoman of the Year award.
The award recognizes an individual sport athlete and team sport athlete whose performances over a 12-month time span have been exceptional. Past winners include Venus and Serena Williams, Abby Wambach, Meryl Davis, Simone Biles, Yani Tseng and Candace Parker. Fan voting is open now through Aug. 27 and can be accessed by clicking here.
The public and the Women's Sports Foundation's Awards Committee select the award winners by a 50-50 vote. The winner will be the athlete who receive the highest combined share of a public vote (50 percent of composite) and the Awards Committee vote (50 percent of the composite).
It was a banner senior year for Steffens. In addition to being named ACWPC and MPSF Player of the Year, she also was named a Pac-12 Tom Hansen Conference Medal winner, awarded an NCAA Postgraduate Scholarship and became the first Stanford women's water polo player to receive academic All-America recognition from CoSIDA. Steffens has also advanced from an original pool of 543 candidates and remains eligible for the 2017 NCAA Woman of the Year Award.
She earned her bachelor's from Stanford in science, technology and society with a concentration in innovations and organizations and will be on campus next year to pursue her master's in management science and engineering.
Steffens has twice been recognized as the world's best, winning FINA Women's Water Polo Athlete of the Year honors in 2012 and 2014 in addition to being named Olympic MVP in 2012 and 2016 after gold-medal winning performances with the United States. More recently, she played alongside seven other Cardinal and won her second FINA World Championship in Budapest, Hungary in late July.
Steffens collected her second ACWPC Player of the Year award this season after leading Stanford to its sixth NCAA championship in Indianapolis in mid-May. In the final against UCLA, she forced a Bruin turnover with 14 seconds left and scored the game winner with nine seconds remaining to power the Cardinal to its crown.
Also a two-time MPSF Player of the Year and two-time NCAA Tournament MVP, Steffens led Stanford with a career-high 65 goals this season, tied for the fifth-most in Stanford single-season history, and was third in the MPSF in goals per game (2.50).
Steffens, who is Stanford's only four-time, first-team All-American, finished her career third in program history and 20th in MPSF history in goals scored (229). In four seasons on The Farm, Steffens and the Cardinal went 102-9 overall, 23-1 in conference play and won three national championships.