Though Cleveland State’s 2025-26 roster grew to five players with the recent addition of Ella Van Weelden, that group still had one notable deficiency: someone to play in the middle.
That has now been corrected, thanks to Laurel Rockwood, a 6-4 graduate transfer center who committed to the Vikings for her final year of eligibility on Sunday.
Rockwood has spent the last four seasons with UC Santa Barbara (including a redshirt in 2022-23), boosting a Gauchos program that consistently put up solid records during her run, including an 18-13 overall mark this past season. Though she played out UCSB’s entire schedule, Rockwood actually announced her intent to transfer on February 21st, taking advantage of a rule that allows grad transfers to enter the portal ahead of most others.
If nothing else, that gave her a few extra weeks of research, eventually finding a match with a CSU team that saw all three of its 2024-25 post players transfer, including Jordana Reisma (Missouri), Mya Moore (Xavier), and Paulina Hernandez (Youngstown State).
Rockwood, a Las Vegas-area native, seems like a good fit for reasons beyond opportunity. Her defensive metrics are comparable with Reisma’s, bolstered by 11.8 rebounds per 40 minutes, a number that ranked among the top 200 players nationally. On the other end of the floor, Rockwood offered a sturdy 46.2 percent success rate on her field goal attempts. That’s certainly well behind Reisma’s national-leading number, but still good enough to rank among the top ten players in the Big West conference.
None of that is meant to suggest that the newest Viking will be a one-for-one replacement for anyone on this past season’s squad, especially not someone who was consistently playing 35 minutes or more during close contests late in the year. Despite being the Gauchos’ regular starter, Rockwood saw the floor for just over 17 minutes per game, and she’s never averaged more than 20.
Instead, she will likely serve as half of a balanced post rotation – potentially, Chris Kielsmeier’s first since the 2022-23 season, given that neither Moore nor Brooklynn Fort-Davis commanded playing time of much substance out of the number two spot since then.
Rockwood, a sociology student, earned Academic All-Big West recognition this year, a distinction that requires a 3.00 grade point average, alongside residency and participation criteria. She will be Cleveland State’s first player from the Pacific Time Zone (and the Big West) since Long Beach, CA product Deja Williams, who transferred from Cal State Northridge in 2021, then won the Horizon League’s Sixth Player of the Year award and a conference tournament title during her two-year run with the Vikings.
Though both Rockwood and Van Weelden are encouraging additions to a roster that was thoroughly cleaned out by the transfer portal, the rebuilding work is far from finished, and there are certain to be plenty more announcements over the coming weeks.
