Welcome back to the #HLWBB Starting Five, your sporadic offseason rundown of news and fun from around Horizon League women’s basketball.
1. Hello Again
Nearly everything about college sports is kind of temporary (as with a lot of things in life, I suppose), so I always welcome the idea of a recently-graduated Horizon League star joining the coaching ranks, therefore staying within my orbit, instead of doing whatever it is that normal people do with their lives. This past week brought a double dose of good news, as both Audra Emmerson and Jasmine Kondrakiewicz were hired as assistant coaches.
Kondrakiewicz will take on the role of “assistant coach/director of player development” on Kayla Karius’ staff at Green Bay, her alma mater, of course, while Emmerson is leaving the conference to head to Western Michigan. The Broncos are now led by former Detroit Mercy coach Kate Achter, who had to gameplan for Emmerson eight times with the Titans (for what it’s worth, Achter also coached a high school teammate of Emmerson’s, Katie Burton, at UDM).
The definition of a “core player” is flexible and subject to debate, but it would be difficult (if not impossible) to beat Emmerson and Kondrakiewicz in that category, when it comes to the top two teams in the Horizon League last season.
The latter, of course, was a heavily-underrated middle piece and leader of a massive Green Bay graduating class that not only spent four full seasons together (with the exception of Saint Louis transfer Natalie McNeal, who was “only” there for three), but constituted the Phoenix starting lineup for just about that entire time. Collectively, they boosted GB back to the Horizon League summit after a six-year pause, an unheard-of drought in Titletown, with back-to-back tournament wins in 2024 and 2025.
Emmerson, meanwhile, was a part of her own group of long-term players at Purdue Fort Wayne. She joined the likes of Amellia Bromenschenkel, Jazzy Linbo, and Shayla Sellers (herself now a coach at PFW) to lift the Mastodons from – let’s not mince words – among the worst programs in Division I to a premier mid-major, one that won a program-record 27 games and was an overtime away from a Horizon League regular season title. She and Achter, herself known for big turnarounds, will now try to resuscitate a WMU program that isn’t a complete disaster, but has been a couple steps behind the top of the conference in recent years.
2. Mamma Mia
On Monday, Wright State announced the signing of Maja Dilén, a 5-11 guard/forward who should offer the Raiders a healthy bit of size and athleticism. She’s also a good shooter and passer who can run the floor.
Dilén is from Sweden, which isn’t terribly remarkable in and of itself (10.5 million people live there, after all), but notably, both she and incoming Cleveland State freshman Hanna Medina Kajevic played for the same club team, the Norrköping Dolphins. I’m not sure that I’d bring that up if they were both from Fishers, IN (oh wait, I just did with Emmerson and Burton), but the Sweden-to-HL pipeline isn’t quite as wide, so it’s certainly a fun little coincidence.
Both Dilén and Kajevic were mostly role players for the Dolphins’ first team, which competes quite respectably in Basketligan dam, Sweden’s top professional league. Kajevic, for her part, played 15.2 minutes per game and averaged 3.3 points, which is certainly more than nothing, particularly against people significantly older than her. Dilén managed eight minutes per game while splitting time with the Dolphins’ second team.
Last season, the Dolphins made it to the league semifinals behind a big three of recent college graduates, including Asianae Johnson (Mississippi State), Laura Stockton (Gonzaga, and yes, she’s John’s daughter), and Miya Crump (Jackson State, Houston, and Lamar).
3. Radio Ga Ga
It slipped under the radar a little bit, but on Monday, Indianapolis radio show Query & Company interviewed a pair of Horizon League guests: commissioner Julie Roe Lach (whose segment begins at 1:30:45 of the video embedded below) and IU Indy athletic director Luke Bosso (2:34:25).
Both were there largely to talk about the House settlement and its ramifications, and both did a good job of breaking things down. Frankly, when you consume a lot of the coverage, it quickly becomes clear that most media people have no idea what they’re talking about, and generally speak or write in a deliberately-vague manner to conceal their ignorance.
For my part, I try to stick to what I know and let the experts fill in the rest (though hopefully not to the level of the kinda-cringe “I’m an idiot” schtick of the host on this show). So what does House mean for the HL and mid-majors? Here’s JRL bottom-lining it:
“It’s going to be harder [to compete], because what I think is going to happen is these Power Five conferences will really start to stockpile, and they will be paying student-athletes to come, and they’re going to be offering them more money, obviously, than what we can at our level. Even if they don’t get a lot of playing time, they’re still going to be sitting on their rosters, instead of having a chance to really play and make a name for themselves at one of our schools.”
“I do think, at the end of the day, people want to play, so we’re going to continue to have people transferring both ways. The transfer portal’s a two-way portal, that’s a good thing, because we continue to generally have net gains.”
Roe Lach certainly noted some reasons for optimism beyond the playing time issue, including the idea that the newly-established NIL clearinghouse for third-party deals will restore some sanity to spending levels. She also cited the fact that the Horizon League has won an NCAA Tournament game in 40 of its 45 years of existence, spanning numerous and occasionally-substantial shifts of the playing field, including notable recent victories in men’s basketball (Oakland over Kentucky) and baseball (Wright State over top-seeded Vanderbilt).
Bosso followed up by re-iterating a lot of those same points, including the playing time argument, while pointing out that hey, things have never been balanced between high and mid-majors, so why is this any different? He also threw down a bit of a gauntlet concerning the Jaguars’ readiness for the new reality:
“I can 100 percent say that every student-athlete at IU Indy will be compensated for their NIL. Will it be the multi-million dollar deals? No. But will it be at a level we find fair for our student-athletes? Absolutely, and I don’t think that will be the case at every school.”
4. It’s All Good
Oakland produced one of the offseason’s major stories by hiring Keisha Newell back in March, but since then, the Golden Grizzlies have sort of flown under the radar a bit in assembling a team. That might be an exaggeration, though it’s hard to argue that OU has delivered the sort of bomb-drop news of a Green Bay, which yoinked their former superstar, Maddy Skorupski, or their MetroSeries rivals at Detroit Mercy, which landed a former All-HL selection, Kailee Davis.
Of course, things have been moving along off of I-75, including a pair of CSU-adjacent additions in Filippa Goula and Angelina Smith, the sister of former Vikings guard Gabriella.
More recently, Newell made a couple of extremely impressive additions to her staff in former West Virginia assistant Missa Anderson and up-and-coming Josh Lees, who brings plenty of local connections to the job.
The playing roster has steadily grown as well, including the announced signings of Aalyssa Rogers and Kyra Lawence this past week.
Rogers has taken a particularly interesting route to Rochester (or Auburn Hills, if you prefer). The 5-6 guard was at NCCAA school Virginia University of Lynchburg last season, but the Houston native has also spent time at NCAA Division III’s Rosemont College and, subsequent to that, Harcum College, a juco. Lawrence, meanwhile, was at Delaware State in 2024-25, but is a local product (Farmington Hills) who began her collegiate career in Michigan, at Schoolcraft College.
Interestingly enough, Rogers and Lawrence played against each other back on February 8th. Delaware State, the DI team, took the easy decision, though Rogers was among the contest’s better players with 15 points and four assists. Lawrence was saddled with foul trouble and only managed nine minutes on the floor.
5. Freeze-Frame
There are people out there who keep track of the NCAA Women’s Basketball Rules Committee meeting schedule and know to look out for the inevitable post-meeting announcements. I’m certainly not one of them, but I’m glad those people exist.
This year’s rule changes, announced by the NCAA on Tuesday, were headlined by the addition of a coach’s video review challenge for the following situations:
- Out-of-bounds plays
- Backcourt violations
- Whether a change in team possession occurred before the ruling of a foul where free throws would be involved
- Whether a foul was assessed to the correct player
You might be rolling your eyes at the idea of additional long review delays (I certainly did at first), but crucially, officials won’t be able to initiate reviews on any of those plays, other than determining whether a foul was assessed to the correct player. So the burden now falls entirely on the coaches for most of those situations – but beware, a failed challenge will result in a technical foul.
There were other changes as well, though it’s unlikely that most average fans will even notice the majority. Among them, jerseys no longer need to be tucked in, and the shot clock will now be reset to 20 seconds when the offense is awarded the ball in its frontcourt after a dead ball.
Interestingly, the committee also approved an experimental rule, to be used only during exhibition games, that allows for challenges on foul calls. Wish I had that in the driveway growing up, when my brother called a foul every time he missed a shot.
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