The Nancy Lieberman Award, named for Basketball Hall of Fame legend Nancy Lieberman, was given annually by the Rotary Club of Detroit in the Award's first 14 years to the nation's top collegiate point guard in women's Division I basketball. Sue Bird won the inaugural award in 2000, making her the first of only two players to have won three Lieberman Awards. No freshman has ever won the award, and only two players have won as sophomores —Bird in 2000 and the other three-time winner, Sabrina Ionescu, in 2018. The award is given to a player who exemplifies "the floor leadership, play-making and ball-handling skills that personified Nancy Lieberman during her career". Originally, voting was performed exclusively by sportswriters. The announcement of the winner has coincided with the Final Four weekend, with an award ceremony the following Wednesday which was hosted by the Detroit Rotary Club at the Detroit Athletic Club through 2013. Beginning with the 2014 award to Odyssey Sims of Baylor University, the Nancy Lieberman Award has been presented by the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame as part of the Final Four proceedings, and is now presented at the annual convention of the Women's Basketball Coaches Association. The 2017–18 season started a new era for the award. Since that season, the WBCA has partnered with the Naismith Hall in the presentation of the award. The two bodies also incorporated the Lieberman Award into a new set of awards known as the "Naismith Starting Five", presented at the WBCA convention to players at each of the five traditional basketball positions. These awards parallel a previously existing set of men's basketball positional awards also presented by the Hall. The other four are:
The voting body for the Lieberman Award also changed upon its incorporation into the Naismith Starting Five. Each of the Starting Five awards is now determined by a selection committee consisting ofHall of Famers, WBCA coaching members, and media, and headed by the award's namesake. Fan voting through the Hall's website is also incorporated into the selection process. UConn is the only program that has produced more than one Lieberman Award recipient, having had four players combine for a total of eight awards. The only other programs with more than one award, Notre Dame and Oregon, have each had a single player win all of that program's awards, respectively Skylar Diggins and Ionescu.
