MVP Ukari Figgs reflects on NCAA championship 20 years on

For Ukari Figgs (me’99), the 1999 NCAA Women’s Basketball Championship game got off to a rough start. She went 0–8 on her shots in the first half. Worse yet: Purdue trailed Duke by five. Figgs, however, was undeterred. She had been through too much in her four years on the court playing for Purdue to let herself be rattled.

Just three years earlier, the Boilermakers lost in the first round of the NCAA tournament against Notre Dame. After their early exit, most of the team graduated, leaving just a handful of underclassmen to rebuild under the leadership of a new coach.

“It was gonna be Steph (White) and I, and we had like three returning players, four or five freshmen,” shares Figgs.

To achieve a full roster, Figgs had to convince Corissa Yasen (P’98), a nine-time All-American in track, to join the team.

Figgs shook off the first half and got to work — not letting up when White (LA’99) sprained her ankle late in the game.

Hailing from Kentucky, attending Purdue wasn’t always an obvious choice. Figgs had just won the state high school championship and been named Kentucky’s Miss Basketball. White, her future cocaptain, had just been named Indiana’s Miss Basketball.

“When they were recruiting us, they tried to recruit us against each other,” says Figgs. “They would say, ‘You don’t want to go to Purdue because Stephanie’s going there, and she’s from Indiana. She’s going to get all the playing time.’”

Figgs and White had other plans.

“Stephanie and I decided instead of letting people recruit us against each other, that we wanted to come to Purdue together and win a national championship.” That March day back in 1999, they saw those plans through.

“There was nothing we hadn’t already faced,” says Figgs. “We had to face so much adversity and learned how to deal with it early. There wasn’t anything that was going to stop us.”

In the second half of the championship game, Figgs went on to score 18 points. Purdue beat Duke 62–45. Figgs was named the Final Four’s Most Outstanding Player, and in 2007, she was inducted to the Purdue Intercollegiate Athletics Hall of Fame.

Figgs didn’t leave the court after graduation. She spent five seasons playing in the WNBA — including winning the WNBA championship on the Los Angeles Sparks roster in 2001 — and later coached at Purdue and the University of Kentucky. Today, Figgs works at Toyota in her hometown of Georgetown, Kentucky.

“I walk into an interview, and people know that I went to Purdue,” says Figgs. “Then they’re like, ‘Wait a minute, you actually played basketball at the same time?’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, and I was the MVP, and I took a final during the Final Four. No big deal.’”