Jackson says Stiles Trophy will not be renamed
WBB: The Valley's Player of the Year award honors the Missouri State legend

For the last 20 years, the Jackie Stiles Trophy has been given to the Missouri Valley Conference Women’s Player of the Year. Murray State’s Katelyn Young was on the short list of candidates in each of the last two seasons, before Drake’s Katie Dinnebier ultimately took home the award in both 2024 and 2025.
Stiles was the Missouri Valley’s Player of the Year in 1999, 2000 and 2001. In her final season at Southwest Missouri State (now Missouri State), Stiles led the #5-seed Lady Bears all the way to the Final Four. When she graduated, Stiles was the nation’s all-time leading scorer with 3,393 points. She is still fifth all-time behind Caitlin Clark, Kelsey Plum, Dyaisha Fair and Kelsey Mitchell.
In 2006, the conference began presenting the ‘Jackie Stiles Trophy’ to the Valley’s top player.

There’s only one potential problem with the Missouri State legend being tied to arguably the most prestigious honor the Missouri Valley Conference hands out in the women’s game: Missouri State isn’t in the Missouri Valley Conference anymore.
During Thursday’s annual preseason Media Day, Missouri Valley Conference Commissioner Jeff Jackson made it clear that if anybody has an issue with the award being named after somebody who played at a school that’s no longer in the Valley, he’s most certainly not one of those people.
“I hope so,” Jackson said emphatically, when asked if the award would keep its name. “She’s fantastic and she was an outstanding player for our conference. Conference realignment is just par for the course these days. We induct people to our Hall of Fame whose schools are playing in a plethora of different conferences, so I’m not sure that what an institution is doing now has any impact on what’s taken place in the past. We consider Jackie Stiles to be one of the most important and valued and treasured pieces of the Missouri Valley Conference. I don’t see any reason why we would change that name.”
The 2025-26 edition of the Jackie Stiles Trophy will be handed out prior to the start of the Missouri Valley Conference Tournament in mid-March.