For the first time in 2025, welcome to the #HLWBB Starting Five, your sporadic offseason rundown of news and fun from around Horizon League women’s basketball.
1. All Kinds of Time
Former Cleveland State hooper Isabella Geraci is a straight-up athlete. After four years with the Vikings (2018-22), including the 2021 Women’s Basketball Invitational championship, she spent her final collegiate season at USC Upstate, where she was also a high jumper on the Spartans’ track team.
Her first sports love, however, has always been football. She played at North Ridgeville High School then, after college, re-entered the gridiron through flag football. In just a couple years, she’s become one of the faces of the sport, particularly as she helped the U.S. National Team to gold at last summer’s world championships in Finland. Geraci logged a sparking stat line during that tournament: 39 catches, 469 yards, and five touchdowns.
It’s not particularly surprising, then, that she’s officially been selected for Team USA once again in 2025.
The headlining event for this year’s squad is their world championship defense in August, a competition that will take place in Chengdu, China. Somewhat anticlimactically, that tournament will be followed in September by the IFAF Americas Continental Flag Football Championship, featuring the best teams from North and South America.
Flag football will be a part of the Olympic schedule for the first time at the 2028 Games in Los Angeles. The NFL will likely send players to compete in the men’s tournament, but Geraci has an outstanding chance of becoming an Olympian on the women’s side.
2. School’s Out
The NCAA offered up its annual Academic Progress Rate (APR) data dump earlier this month. For those unfamiliar, the APR has become the NCAA’s go-to academic metric over the last 20 years. It’s a four-year rolling average that attempts to measure student-athletes’ progress towards a degree, in an effort to catch and diagnose issues before they’re reflected in a graduation rate.
The APR release is often uneventful for Horizon League schools. Outside of basketball, most teams generally post perfect or near-perfect scores – after all, they’re going pro in something other than sports, to quote the old commercial. In fact, 34 HL teams hit that magic 1000 number, led by a staggering nine at Northern Kentucky.
Even the basketball numbers are generally strong, even if slightly lower than the Olympic sports, especially on the women’s side. NKU, Oakland, and Green Bay tied for the conference lead in women’s hoops with 995 scores, but ten of the 11 schools hit a solid 974 or better.
The exception? Detroit Mercy.
The Titans’ latest APR score is 933, notable because it’s only three points above the NCAA’s cutoff for maintaining postseason eligibility.
Just four years ago, UDM’s APR was a robust 986. However, in 2020-21 – a season marked by the AnnMarie Gilbert fiasco – the number dropped all the way to 958 (thanks mostly to a single-year score of 911), and it’s been sliding ever since. As big of a task as new coach Kiefer Haffey has in front of him on the court, he’s also going to have to do what he can to reverse the trend and ensure that the Titans will be allowed to go to the NCAA Tournament, should they earn a bid in the near future.
3. Detroit Breakdown
One player who can certainly help with that issue at Detroit Mercy? Allison Basye, a name that has previously appeared on the Horizon League’s Academic Honor Roll. The former Northern Kentucky guard committed to the Titans on May 12th, joining another NKU-to-UDM backcourt transfer, Kailee Davis.
Basye has had something of a star-crossed career to this point. She played 51 total minutes as a rookie in 2022-23, then saw 13 per game the following year.
However, a closer look at that sophomore playing time shows that the Chillicothe, OH native was a centerpiece player early in the season, while the Norse were crushed with injuries. Those extended minutes paid off with a 15-point game against Chattanooga, followed by a career-high 18 against Cleveland State. However, she was pushed back to the bench shortly after that, and barely played down the stretch. By the time the rematch with the Vikings rolled around to end the regular season, Basye was on the floor for exactly 40 seconds, then not at all during Northern Kentucky’s HL tournament run.
Bad went to worse this past season, when she was forced to redshirt with a wonky ACL.
Still, her talent is undeniable. Basye was the OHSBCA Division III Player of the Year at Huntington High School, where she scored 2,000 career points…while also competing in volleyball, track, and softball.
Long story short, Detroit Mercy just might have a breakout candidate on their hands.
4. Midnight Train to Georgia
The WNBA season is underway, though that’s never particularly relevant to news about the Horizon League (or most mid-major leagues). Generally, discussing the WNBA in this corner is a matter of reaching for tangential connections through former opponents (hi, Rickea Jackson), two-generations-ago family ties (hi, Naz Hillmon), or those who have crossed paths with eventual HL players in some loose way (hi, Arike Ogunbowale). I once asked Maddy Siegrist a question at a press conference and walked past Kamilla Cardoso at Final Four media day, so I suppose they’re in my corner too.
There’s also the matter of that money I spent on a Phoenix Mercury hat in 2022, but that’s still a sore subject.
Long story short, you take what you can get when it comes to HLWBB x WNBA overlap, though Karl Smesko isn’t a bad pull as those things go.
Smesko, now the head coach of the Atlanta Dream, held the same job for Purdue Fort Wayne once upon a time, back when the school was known as IPFW. He left the Mastodons in 2001, after a two-year tenure, to do the thing he’s best known for: building Florida Gulf Coast’s program from literal zero into one of the nation’s consistently strong mid-majors.
That rise was helped along by forward Kate Schrader, who was a Division II All-American as FGCU made its first two NCAA Tournament appearances, including a national runner-up finish in 2007, an appropriate springboard into Division I the following season. Schrader later returned to the Eagles as an assistant coach from 2008-10, a stint that included an A-Sun regular season title and three WNIT bids.
Of course, you probably best know Kate Schrader as Kate Bruce, the head coach at IU Indy. And, as luck would have it, Smesko was in Naptown on Tuesday, as the Dream escaped with a 91-90 win over the Indiana Fever.
As long as we’re here, it’s worth mentioning that Atlanta’s roster includes the aforementioned Hillmon, whose grandmother played at Cleveland State, as well as Taylor Thierry, the twin sister of Youngstown State alumna Haley. Former Wright State player Emani Jefferson, who later played for Smesko at FGCU, served as a training camp body for the team. Shyanne Sellers, PFW alumna Shayla’s sister, was briefly with the Dream during preseason as well.
5. Red Bowling Ball Ruth
Scores of people, in Northeast Ohio and beyond, became huge bowling fans for the first time last month when Youngstown State took the 2025 national championship, thanks to a thrilling 4-3 best-of-seven match win over title holder Jacksonville State. Though not technically a Horizon League accomplishment – the Penguins compete in Conference USA for bowling – it certainly felt like one, given that YSU is obviously a full league member.
Three of the Guins’ best keglers, new graduates Jade Côté, Madyson Marx, and Kirsten Moore, competed at the USBC Queens tournament (one of the Professional Women’s Bowling Association’s majors) this past week in Las Vegas, the city that hosted their national title win. Though Marx and Moore didn’t make it out of qualifying, Côté advanced into the 64-player final bracket, then all the way to the round of 16, before being bounced by a player named Clara Guerrero (likely Sara Guerreiro in a wig and glasses).
Côté took home $4,250 for her 13th-place finish, which is certainly more than I make by writing about her, while Moore (75th) and Marx (128th) were a much-more-relatable out of the money.
