Welcome back to the #HLWBB Starting Five, your sporadic offseason rundown of news and fun from around Horizon League women’s basketball.
1. Morning Has Broken
On Friday, Green Bay received a 2026 commitment from Lillie Johnson, a versatile 6-1 small forward from Gladstone, MI, a tiny Upper Peninsula town about two hours from the Kress Center.
It didn’t take Johnson particularly long to decide – Kayla Karius only extended her offer on May 22nd – with North Dakota State, St. Thomas, Grand Valley State, and Michigan Tech (a school notable as a former employer of another Yooper, Kevin Borseth) also throwing their hats in the ring. Milwaukee was Johnson’s first offer, way back in 2023.
The ninth-ranked player in Michigan according to Prep Girls Hoops (but tops in the UP) reads like a typical Phoenix:
“The senior forward is a consistent 20-and-10 performer who combines power, skill, and versatility. She drives hard, finishes through contact, and has grown increasingly physical as her frame has filled out. A former regional standout, Johnson made the leap to the national EYBL circuit with Team Prime Nation to challenge herself against the best college-bound talent possible – and she’s more than held her own.”
These next couple years at Green Bay are going to be interesting, as Karius turns over the roster after inheriting about as finished of a product as possible from Borseth, but it’s pretty clear that some things aren’t going to change.
2. High Hopes
Last week, Cleveland State women’s golfer Brynna Mardis and Youngstown State swimmer Seth Thomas became two of the four student-athletes nationally to receive the NCAA’s Accelerating Academic Success Program (AASP) Student-Athlete Career Development Award. That distinction “provides student-athletes who are pursuing careers in intercollegiate athletics with direct access to select NCAA student-athlete professional development programming this year.”
The AASP’s broad function is to collect and distribute money to schools with limited financial resources (including most of Division I’s smaller outposts), in an effort to boost academic success rates among athletes. CSU was the last Horizon League school to receive an institutional AASP grant, which totaled $100,000 during the 2022-23 academic year.
Mardis is a sport and entertainment management major, while Thomas specializes in exercise science, so the fruits of their awards will certainly prove valuable as they each set up for life after graduation.
The duo was formally recognized at the NCAA’s recent Career in Sports forum, which brought together more than 150 student-athletes at the organization’s headquarters in Indianapolis. Incoming Vikings women’s basketball player Ella Van Weelden was also among the invitees.
3. Refugee
Mardis’ team, of course, was one of three cut by Cleveland State at the end of the 2024-25 season. That’s generally an undesirable and chaotic situation for all involved, and even in an era where student-athletes have grown accustomed to switching schools, it’s always nice to see those cast off from departing programs land on their feet.
Youngstown State has proven a massive help with that in softball, as the Penguins have scooped up human ball launcher Emma Gilkerson, as well as assistant coach Erin Pond. Gilkerson posted a 1.129 OPS on the way to all-conference first team honors in 2025, and was likely the top target of the departing Vikings for many.
Additionally, versatile Avery Robinson, who primarily served as one of the team’s two pitchers behind all-everything Melissa Holzopfel (though she also managed eight hits in 27 at bats), is headed to Presbyterian. Infielder Delaney Ellis, one of CSU’s better bats as a true freshman, landed at Buffalo.
Star women’s golfer Kaitlin Kormuth – a proud Solon High School graduate, as am I – isn’t straying far from home, as she recently signed with Akron. Kormuth frequently led Cleveland State’s lineup, including a 16th-place finish at the Horizon League Tournament as a freshman in 2024.
Several Viking wrestlers have also found new homes, including Tate Geiser (Edinboro), Dylan Layton (Rider), Ethan Mitchell (Glenville State), Connor Holm (Glenville State), and Peyton Costa (Clarion).
4. Baby Elephant Walk
Each of the Horizon League’s top three teams last season (we’re back on women’s basketball, try to keep up) has endured massive turnover, involving some of the longstanding stars in the conference. Green Bay saw the graduation of much of the core that led to its recent run of success, though Karius was quick to leverage the transfer portal and pull in the likes of Maddy Skorupski and Kamy Peppler (among others).
Cleveland State lost nine players to the portal, Destiny Leo and Jordana Reisma among them, along with Sara Guerreiro to graduation. Their replacements lack the obvious star power of the Phoenix newcomers, though that’s largely par for the course at CSU, which has a way of turning previously-unheralded players into all-conference talents.
Then there’s Purdue Fort Wayne. Players like Audra Emmerson, Amellia Bromenschenkel, and Jazzy Linbo, who were integral to the Mastodons’ rise from one-win seasons to HL contention (along with Shayla Sellers, who was a year ahead of that group and remains as an assistant coach) have all graduated. So have Lauren Ross and Sydney Freeman, who felt like they were Dons for a lot longer than a year. A handful of others, most notably Renna Schwieterman, transferred out.
At one point, PFW’s roster was essentially Jordan Reid and a couple of others who have barely (if at all) seen the floor in black and gold.
That’s now been corrected, thanks to a new class of rookies, and the school’s recent announcement of five incoming transfers.
There’s a lot to unpack with that latter group (I can’t believe I just used that expression, I hate it), but Maria Marchesano and her staff are extremely high on Alana Nelson, who averaged 21.6 points at NAIA school Spring Arbor last season. Nelson’s rebounding (10.6 per game) and three-point (36.8 percent) numbers are also outstanding.
“When you think of Mastodon type player, Alana really fits that bill,” Marchesano said in the PFW announcement. “She can score it in a number of ways, has a strong athletic build, shoots it efficiently from three, and has a grittiness to her game that we love to see. The fact that she’s a strong rebounder is icing on the cake as that’s an area we have struggled with in the past. She was a huge get for us and we are excited she is spending her last year with us!”
Other intriguing players in the class include 6-3 Hungarian Lili Krasovec, who spent the last two seasons at Boston College, and Nika Lokica, a bomber from Idaho State.
5. The Waiting
Sometimes I mentally drift for a few minutes and think about how tough life is for international student-athletes. Basically, take the usual, well-known struggles of playing a sport in college – the time crunch of trying to manage multiple high-commitment activities, the performance pressures, etc. – and throw in the fact that they’re doing all of that stuff in a culturally-unfamiliar place thousands of miles from their friends and family. And, oh yeah, most have to do everything in a second language. You think mechanical engineering is tough? Try learning it in Portuguese, basically the reverse equivalent of what Guerreiro did at Cleveland State.
To make matters worse, they’re generally unable to participate in NIL or revenue-sharing, as those activities are a violation of immigration law under their student visas.
Now, yet another difficulty has come along: the Trump administration’s heightened scrutiny of those visas, which now includes a pause on interviews for new applicants, ostensibly to vet their social media posts. Obviously, those who have already been attending school in the United States are unaffected, but it could certainly present issues for new recruits from overseas.
“The main guidance we’ve gotten is don’t freak out yet,” University of Tennessee-Martin men’s basketball coach Jeremy Shulman told ESPN. “But that ‘yet’ has been the key word.”
A brief pause likely won’t cause much disruption, but if it stretches late into the summer, it could certainly throw a wrench into offseason workouts and possibly even the availability of international players at the start of the season.
Of course, even after a visa is granted, it can abruptly be taken away for any number of petty and arbitrary reasons, including demonstrating support for Palestine or simply being from China, but that’s a much longer conversation.
