Women’s basketball senior Maya Dodson announced today on her personal Twitter and Instagram that she intends to transfer to Notre Dame to finish her college basketball career during the 2021-22 season.
Dodson is the third Cardinal women’s basketball player in the last four years to transfer to the Fighting Irish, joining Lili Thompson and Marta Sniezek, who transferred to Notre Dame during the 2017-18 and 2019-20 seasons, respectively. Cormac Ryan, who played his freshman year at Stanford, also transferred to Notre Dame after last season.
The forward from Alpharetta, Georgia missed a cumulative 34 games between her sophomore and junior seasons due to a lingering foot injury, but racked up 24 starts over three years when she was healthy. She opted out of the 2020-2021 season due to concerns about the COVID-19 pandemic, also citing the impact of the Black Lives Matter movement as influential to her decision. Outside of basketball, Dodson is one of the founding members of CardinalBLCK, an organization founded by Black student-athletes that aims to support and lift the voices of Black student-athletes at Stanford.
A five-star prospect out of St. Francis High School in Milton, Georgia, ESPN HoopGurlz rated Dodson as the 11th best player overall in the nation in the Class of 2017. She committed to Stanford over Notre Dame and Tennessee in the same class as senior guard Kiana Williams and senior forward Alyssa Jerome.
Despite not putting up eye-popping scoring numbers during her three years on the Farm, she ranks tenth overall in Stanford history in overall field goal percentage since 2007; she made 49.7% of her attempts with the Cardinal. In addition, her 78 career blocks and her average of 1.1 blocked shots per game rank tenth and seventh, respectively, in Stanford history.
Dodson is the third Cardinal in the last two years to transfer elsewhere. Last season, DiJonai Carrington ’20 transferred to Baylor after missing all but five games of her senior season at Stanford, and Estella Moschkau ’20 left the Cardinal to return home to Wisconsin to play out her final year of eligibility with the Badgers.
The last time Stanford played Notre Dame was April 2019, when the Fighting Irish knocked the Cardinal out of the NCAA Tournament in the Elite Eight round.
Contact Sofia Scekic at sscekic ‘at’ stanford.edu.