Welcome back to the #HLWBB Starting Five, your sporadic offseason rundown of news and fun from around Horizon League women’s basketball.
1. Jump
It would be hard for anyone but the most ardent of Purdue Fort Wayne or Horizon League watchers to remember former Mastodons guard Alaina Diaz. After all, she played a grand total of 18 minutes as a freshman in 2022-23 before leaving both PFW and the sport of basketball for Grand Valley State, her hometown school.
Those moves, however, allowed her to focus on her first athletic love, leading to stardom as a long jumper.
“I had the basketball season at [PFW] and I had a couple talks with my coach and they said I was great at this sport and I needed to choose to get the most out of myself,” Diaz told Dan D’Addona of the Holland Sentinel in a recent feature. “I knew GVSU had a great jump group here. After that talk, I told Coach I wanted to go to the Olympics and he said he could get me there.”
“Everyone was sad when I stopped playing basketball but I knew I could go further in track. I don’t know when the Olympic dream started, but transferring was the moment it became a reality. I will try to compete for Puerto Rico. My grandparents were born in Puerto Rico.”
Diaz was a state champion in the long jump as a high schooler in Michigan, and she followed that up by breaking, then re-breaking the Lakers’ school record. The latter jump, 6.41 meters, earned her a GLIAC title and a place in the NCAA championships last week, where she finished second.
It seems that between Isabella Geraci and Diaz, the 2028 Olympics could feature a pair of former Horizon League basketball players – neither of whom got there by hooping.
2. Johnny B. Goode
Johnny Montello has spent eight of the last nine years on Kate Bruce’s staff, at both IU Indianapolis and Walsh, but he’s always been something of a rising star who seemed destined to take over his own program eventually, a notion supported by a pair of WBCA 30 Under 30 nominations. He’ll finally get that chance in the coming season, when he returns to the Cavaliers as the head coach.
“I’m incredibly honored and excited to take over the Women’s Basketball Program at Walsh University, a place that has meant so much to me throughout my coaching journey,” Montello said in the school’s announcement. “I am motivated to help our athletes on and off the court become the best versions of themselves, who excel in the classroom, community, competition, and in life – and to create a culture that the entire Walsh University family can rally behind.”
The Walsh job underscores what a small world college basketball can often be. After all, the position came open in the first place because Mark Schwitzgable – the guy who replaced Bruce after she was hired by IU Indy in 2022 – joined the staff at future Horizon League member Northern Illinois. In other words, during Montello’s second season with the Cavs, his two immediate predecessors will clash at least twice in neighboring states.
The Bruce-Montello regime was quite successful in North Canton from 2016-22, including multiple conference championships and a trio of NCAA Division II Tournament bids, one of which ended in the Sweet 16. Undoubtedly, that went a long way towards Montello’s return to Northeast Ohio, a place he knows quite well, as an Aurora High School graduate who then played at both John Carroll and Hiram before beginning his coaching career.
3. Southern Accents
At this week’s SEC meetings, conference commissioner Greg Sankey said the following, according to reporting by Yahoo! Sports’ Ross Dellenger:
“I have people in my room asking ‘Why are we still in the NCAA?'”
Sankey’s comment spawned from ongoing debates over college football’s playoff format, and a feeling that the current system is unfair to his league (if one listens to Sankey’s bluster for long enough, it’s easy to get the sense that he believes any playoff that doesn’t include the entirety of the SEC membership is rigged in some way).
College football, thankfully, has little to do with the Horizon League, so it’s not worth diving into the merits of that argument. But that bubbling frustration that has resulted from it might prove highly consequential.
Would the SEC – and, presumably, the Big Ten – break from the NCAA because they’re mad about Boise State being allowed in the college football playoff? Would that split only involve football, or would other sports be sucked into this little ego-driven cash grab? Is it all that farfetched to think that a similar dispute arises over the NCAA’s basketball tournaments in the near future? From a mid-major standpoint, is it better to continue to fight within a clearly-broken system, or simply rip off the band-aid and start fresh, with the ability to sculpt an entirely different reality separate from whatever the big-money behemoths want to do?
I’m on record with my belief that the HL won’t be competing for the same national championships as schools like Texas A&M and Georgia at some point. Could we be on the verge of the fall of the first domino (well, hardly the first, but you know what I mean) towards that reality?
4. Every Day Is Exactly The Same
Youngstown State recently completed a quick update on the design of Rosselli Court in the Zidian Family Arena at the Beeghly Center. Though…if I’m being totally honest, I thought I was losing my mind over what a big deal people were making of it, relative to the scope of the changes made.
Essentially, they painted the keys red (they were stained dark brown previously), added the updated Horizon League logo on top of them, and removed the old women’s three-point line, which became unnecessary when it was finally matched up with the men’s line (which itself now aligns with the FIBA distance) in 2021. Additionally, the areas underneath those three-point arcs are lighter than the rest of the floor.
It looks nice. Then again, the substantially-similar previous design looked nice too.
Of course, that floor edit is just one of several recent upgrades to the 53-year-old bandbox. After some heavy modernization behind the scenes to the various team areas (including renovations to the women’s locker room in 2022), it received a much-needed $2 million seating facelift last summer.
5. Extraordinary
At one time, the Horizon League’s #MajorCities were fertile ground for the WNBA, the home of the world’s best women’s basketball. The Cleveland Rockers were one of the W’s original eight teams in 1997, and the Detroit Shock joined up as an expansion team the following year. Then, the Indiana Fever came along in 2000, followed by the Chicago Sky in 2006.
Of course, three years before the Sky was founded, the Rockers folded. The Shock moved to Tulsa in 2010 (before later moving to Dallas, where they remain). Then Butler, Loyola, Valparaiso, and UIC all left the HL between 2012 and 2022, taking the Chicago and Indianapolis markets with them. Naptown returned after a five-year absence in 2017, through IU Indy, but since UIC’s exit three years ago, the Fever has been the only WNBA franchise in the conference’s footprint.
There is good news, however: It seems like things might be headed back in the other direction. NIU joining the Horizon League next season will bring back Chicago (kinda?), and now, it appears that the return of a Cleveland WNBA team is imminent as well.
The latter story initially broke through a Sports Business Journal report in February. Then…it just kind of sat there for a few months, with the initial euphoria giving way to “wait, what’s going on” nervousness. However, according to Thomas Costello, through his new Lakefront Courtside project, that awkward wait is at its end: “according to sources,” Costello wrote, “the official announcement of the new WNBA Cleveland expansion from Rock Entertainment Group could come as early as this week.”
The Cleveland team, which may or may not use the Rockers name, would likely begin play in 2028, alongside the Fever and Sky, a group that represents three of the seven HL cities realistically capable of supporting a franchise.
Your move, Detroit. Or Milwaukee. Or Pittsburgh. Or Cincinnati. I’m not picky.
