Welcome (back) to the Starting Five, your rundown of the key stories in #HLWBB since the last Starting Five post.
1. Here We Go Again
Last July, I led one of these posts with the news that Purdue Fort Wayne head coach Maria Marchesano had agreed to a contract extension. That lengthened contract, which ended in 2027-28, was well earned. After all, the Dons won a combined total of 27 Division I games in the seven years prior to her arrival Within two seasons, Marchesano had the team up to 14-19 and in the semifinals of the Horizon League tournament, after wins against Detroit Mercy and IUPUI (hey, you’re allowed to deadname both Twitter and universities).
Just over a year later, here I am to talk about another Marchesano contract extension, her second in three completed seasons at Purdue Fort Wayne, with this more recent deal running through 2030. Of course, re-re-upping wasn’t a particularly difficult decision for athletic director Kelley Hartley Hutton, as PFW found yet another gear in 2023-24 and was pretty definitively the third-best team in the Horizon League all year. Though the Dons fell in the HL semifinals for the second straight attempt, they won 23 games overall (equaling a program record set in 1995-96) and made a spirited run to the WNIT’s Super 16, including a shocking demolition of Cincinnati.
It might be worth mentioning that Marchesano’s previous job was at Mount St. Mary’s from 2017-21 and, so far, those Mountaineers (where’d they come up with that name) and these Mastodons have followed remarkably similar rebuilding trajectories. MSM won the Northeast Conference championship in year four, so…
2. Carousel
In other coaching news, Milwaukee recently added a pair of reinforcements to Kyle Rechlicz’s staff, as the Panthers retained only Stacy Cantley from their 2023-24 collection of assistants.
One is a name very familiar to the Horizon League: Malika Glover. Glover, of course, was at Youngstown State for four seasons, joining John Barnes’ staff in 2020-21 and serving as the position coach for Penguins stars like Megan Callahan, Mady Aulbach and Malia Magestro. She helped YSU to a share of the 2021-22 HL regular season title, as well as 24 wins that year, the program’s best total since 1997-98. Glover also played collegiately at both Oakland and Northern Kentucky – prior to those schools joining the HL – so it’s safe to say that she won’t have much of an issue finding the bathrooms in any of the conference’s gyms (shut up, it’s harder than you think).
The Panthers also hired Cassie Lastivka, who will take on recruiting coordinator responsibilities on top of coaching. Lastivka was at Division III’s Ohio Northern (where she also played from 2011-13) for the past two seasons, helping the Polar Bears to 44 wins and a pair of trips to the DIII national championship tournament.
Whenever I’m not hanging around a Horizon League game, I like to pop in and watch Baldwin Wallace, one of ONU’s Ohio Athletic Conference rivals because why not, they’re local and play quality ball. Anyway, late in the 2022-23 season No. 14 BW and No. 10 ONU played one of the better games I’ve seen in quite a while, with the offensively-challenged Yellow Jackets somehow getting hot enough to erase a 13-point fourth-quarter deficit before winning in overtime. Sorry for bringing that up, Cassie.
For a relatively young coach, Lastivka has seen an awful lot of different places, including Hocking College, Wilmington College (yet another OAC member), and a pair of Cincinnati high schools. She also holds advanced degrees from Ohio and Tiffin.
3. Dust in the Wind
Last Friday, Milwaukee dropped a series of tweets that seemed to indicate that they were about to start offering player jerseys for sale. Each had a few digital representations of white “MKE” jerseys with names and numbers from the 2024-25 Panthers roster with kinda-but-not-really cryptic messages like “Would you buy a Panthers jersey for the right price?” and “Which one would you buy?”
Not so fast, however, Jorey Buwalda and Kacee Baumhower fans! When I went to find those unusual posts to embed them here, I found that they’d been deleted. The only thing left of them, as far as I’m aware, are these remnants underneath my quote tweet.
What happened? I have no idea, to be clear, but my best guess is that someone in Milwaukee’s compliance department popped an artery. While the NIL era has ushered in the concurrent era of player-branded merchandise, the permissibility of schools directly promoting that merchandise is still a murky area – it was a hard no in the past, but has sort of evolved into a “yeah, that’s probably where things are headed, but do you really want to find out by being first?”
In the meantime, it seems likely that fans of the HL’s individual players will have to continue to rely on the school-logo-free t-shirts and sweatshirts produced by third parties like NIL Elite Gear and InfluenceTee, recently used by Cleveland State’s Paulina Hernandez and Detroit Mercy’s Addisen Mastriano, respectively.
4. Internet Killed the Video Star
Recently, I learned something that absolutely blew my mind. Back around the turn of the century, EA’s NCAA March Madness video game series (later known simply as “NCAA Basketball”) included women’s teams. Not all of them, not even a lot of them – usually, but not always, it was the previous season’s Sweet 16. Nevertheless, that’s a number greater than zero, a staggering fact, given the knowledge that the games in EA’s popular FIFA, NBA Live and NHL series didn’t include women’s teams until within the last decade. NCAA March Madness 98, in fact, was billed as including “the first women-only teams in an electronic sports game.”
Not unlike the present day, women’s sports were having A Moment in the late 20th century. Players like Sheryl Swoopes, Rebecca Lobo and, yes, Dawn Staley helped the U.S. win basketball gold at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, which turbocharged the WNBA’s highly-successful launch a year later. American women also won notable tournaments in hockey (the 1998 Olympics, the first with women’s teams) and soccer (the 1999 World Cup, immortalized by Brandi Chastain’s sports bra). In college basketball, the NCAA Tournament had emerged from its largely-anonymous early days as the Tennessee-UConn rivalry began to dominate the sport, headlined by legendary and charismatic coaches Pat Summitt and Geno Auriemma.
So, EA figured, the time was right to start including women’s teams in their college basketball games, and they did for the first four editions of NCAA March Madness, before cutting them out without explanation in 2002. Still, that was late enough to capture the video game likeness of a Wisconsin Badgers sniper named Kyle Black, who once led the Big Ten in three-point percentage. You may better know her as Milwaukee head coach Kyle Rechlicz.
5. Bitter Sweet Symphony
I don’t really like to get too deep into the scholarship offers extended by teams, even on my Cleveland State beat (I’ll typically retweet the offer, follow the player, and pretty much leave it there), for reasons that are probably obvious. In most cases, the prospects in question are years away from the college hardwood and well on their way to accumulating more interest, possibly including high major programs. Additionally, the coaching staff can always change their approach and stop recruiting an individual, even after making an offer. Or leave the school altogether.
So, to be brutally honest, there’s very little return on investment to devoting much of my extremely-limited time to paying too much attention to offers. The alternative is to become one of those people who constantly contacts high school kids to pry nuggets of information in order to dump them behind a paywall. And…no. That entire coverage area gives me the ick, full offense intended.
However, every once in a while, an offer comes along that’s worth observing, if nothing else. Here’s one: 2027 combo guard Hallie Schwieterman out of Jay County High School in Portland, IN. Schwieterman recently collected an offer from Northern Kentucky.
Of course, she also holds an offer from Purdue Fort Wayne, which makes a ton of sense since (if you somehow haven’t put 2 and 2 together yet) her older sister is Mastodons sophomore Renna Schwieterman, who played a notable role for PFW as a rookie last year. Renna’s eligibility clock and the realities of the current college basketball landscape make a reunion pretty unlikely, but it would be pretty schwiet to have another member of the family in the HL either way.
