Last week, a sold-out crowd at Broomfield High School got to see what the girls hoops hype is all about.
The Eagles boast three Division I college recruits, which would normally be plenty of firepower to win in the Sweet 16 of the CHSAA state basketball tournament. But it wasn’t enough to overcome the efforts of one of the top players in the nation — Riverdale Ridge blue-chip sensation Brihanna Crittendon, who led the Ravens to the Great 8.
Crittendon is one headliner of many this season in Colorado high school girls basketball, which is in the middle of a golden age in terms of high-level talent.
“It was tough to get it out of my players’ heads who they were playing,” Broomfield head coach Mike Croell said. “Bri’s already a legend, and they just couldn’t put her on a wavelength of going out and playing the game, and not being so worried about the accolades.
“Our crowd didn’t help things when they started chanting ‘over-rated’ and she went down the court and hit three buckets right in our face. I thought, ‘Good job guys. Way to poke the bear.’”
Croell, the second-winningest girls coach in Colorado history who has led Broomfield to six state titles, said Crittendon is just the tip of the iceberg of the state’s basketball talent.
Three players in the Top 100 of ESPN’s HoopGurlz national rankings will compete in this week’s Class 6A Final Four at Denver Coliseum. Crittendon is the No. 10 recruit in the Class of 2026 and will face a talented Legend High squad at 2:15 p.m. Thursday. In the other semifinal at 11 a.m., Grandview’s Sienna Betts (UCLA commit, No. 2 in 2025) faces off against close friend and club teammate Brooklyn Stewart (Oklahoma, No. 62 in 2025) of Pine Creek.
Add in lower-classification players like 4A Peak to Peak forward and Stanford commit Alexandra Eschmeyer (No. 31 in 2025), and Croell says it’s become clear that Colorado girls basketball has “superstar power across the landscape.”
“There’s top recruits mainly in 6A, but 5A has their share, 4A has their share,” Croell observed. “The amount of good players in 6A is over the top — every team across the 6A Sweet 16 had college basketball players, in some cases, 2 or 3 or 4, if not more. There’s girls who are very good, high-end Division I prospects who didn’t even make it to the Sweet 16, whereas traditionally those caliber of players could carry you deep into the tournament.”
So, are we amid the golden age of Colorado high school girls basketball?
While an argument can be made, the late 1990s and early 2000s also featured an embarrassment of basketball riches in the state. Names like Jamie Carey (Horizon), Jessika Stratton (Coronado), Ann Strother (Highlands Ranch) and Abby Waner (ThunderRidge) dominated the landscape and went on to become stars at premier college programs.
“Our state was as good as any state in the country at that time,” said Tanya Haave, a longtime college coach who was Colorado’s first major girls basketball star at Evergreen in the late 1970s. “I would definitely say that’s the golden era, but we might be coming close to getting back to that.
“These couple classes (of seniors and juniors) are as good of a group as we’ve seen in a long time.”
Title IX was passed in 1972, and the first CHSAA state girls basketball tournament was held in 1976. So the sport was just finding its footing when Haave graduated in ’80 and went on to play for Hall of Fame coach Pat Summitt at Tennessee.
Special players started to crop up throughout the 1980s. Diehard prep fans will recall Bishop Machebeuf’s Shelly Pennefather lighting up scoreboards, while Ridgway’s Tracy Hill set the state scoring record with 2,934 points and Bridget Turner was a Hinkley star who helped CU become nationally relevant.
But it was the 1990s when the sport truly took off in the Centennial State. By late in the decade, the top-level girls talent had become a talking point. Then-CHSAA commissioner Bob Ottewill told Westword in 1998 that the number of premier girls players in a state of Colorado’s size and population was “a phenomenon we can’t explain.”
The boys side will always have Chauncey Billups, a George Washington product who went on to become an NBA champion and Naismith Basketball Hall of Famer. But what the girls have on the boys is sheer numbers of top-end college players dating back three decades.
Even now, local coaches struggle to explain why and how Colorado became such a strong girls hoops state. Back around the turn of the century, there were two premier club teams, the Hoopsters and the Rockies. Now, there are about a half-dozen top-end clubs, and the state’s blue-chip recruits aren’t just concentrated within a few top high school programs.
“Across the board, you can find good basketball with top-level Division I talent, whereas back in the day it was just so top-heavy,” Abby Waner Bartolotta said. “… Plus, there’s a lot more technical focus now. And everybody can shoot. It’s the Steph Curry/Caitlin Clark era, whereas when I was playing my 3-point ability was somewhat unique.”
Waner recalled how the hype of her era compared with the hype of today.
During a game her freshman year, when Strother was a senior, ThunderRidge played a road game at Highlands Ranch during the regular season. The scene mimicked the atmosphere of Crittendon’s Sweet 16 visit to Broomfield last week, when Croell said the school had to turn people away at the door because the gym was so full.
“People were scalping tickets outside to get in,” Waner said with a laugh. “It was an unbelievable scene at Highlands Ranch High School. For a girls high school basketball player, it was the stuff of dreams.”
This week, both Betts and Crittendon have a chance to replicate that frenzy while continuing to cement their legacies as all-time Colorado hoopers.
Betts, who believes her class is “definitely one of the best there’s been in Colorado,” is chasing her third state championship.
She’s a two-time state Gatorade player of the year, Ms. Colorado Basketball, FIBA U18 AmeriCup gold medalist and McDonald’s All-American. She’s also the state’s all-time leading rebounder (1,484) regardless of gender. And with 17 more points this weekend, she’ll become the fourth girl in state history to accumulate 2,000 career points and 1,000 career rebounds. One of the other four: Peak to Peak’s Eschmeyer, who was also named a McDonald’s All-American earlier this winter.
“She’s played the national schedule, won all the honors,” Grandview head coach Josh Ulitzky said of Betts. “It’s fair to already have her be a part of the greatest-ever conversation, and this weekend will go a ways into making sure how much stronger the argument can get.”
Meanwhile, Crittendon enters the Ravens’ Final 4 game against Legend with 2,275 career points. That puts her on pace to break the 3,000-point barrier as a senior, which no Colorado player — girls or boys — has ever done.
Add in the fact that she has Riverdale Ridge in the mix for the 6A crown after the reigning 4A champions moved up two classifications this season, and Crittendon (who has dozens of Division I offers) has already staked her claim as one of the state’s all-time greats.
Should Grandview beat Pine Creek and Riverdale Ridge beat Legend, it would set up a showdown of Waner vs. Strother proportions, only this time with a state title on the line. It’d also be a rematch of when the teams played on Dec. 10, a 62-53 Grandview win in which Crittendon had 19 points but Betts topped that with a 26-point, 13-rebound double-double.
The Denver Coliseum is big enough that there surely won’t be any scalpers standing outside. But it would be a blue-chip showdown that encapsulates the current elite pulse of the sport.
For a sport in the middle of another incredible era in Colorado, Saturday could be a day for the history books.
“(The state’s blue-chips) keep inspiring the next generation to keep bringing out the best in girls basketball in this state,” observed Ann Strother, the Kent Denver coach now known as Ann Abromaitis. “I’ve seen Bri and Sienna both at the gym working out, and a bunch of little kids peeking in to watch them. … That’s ultimately what continues to happen (to keep the sport’s momentum going) in Colorado.”
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