Welcome back to the #HLWBB Starting Five, your sporadic offseason rundown of news and fun from around Horizon League women’s basketball.
1. Hustlin’
It speaks well for Maria Marchesano that so many of her former players, after anywhere from one to four years of exposure to the Purdue Fort Wayne boss, end up saying “yeah, I want to do what she does” following graduation. The first former Mastodons star from the program’s recent run to make her way into coaching was Shayla Sellers, of course, as the former All-Horizon pick finished her first season on the Dons bench in 2024-25. Then, a couple weeks ago, Audra Emmerson officially added her name to the list by linking up with former Detroit Mercy coach Kate Achter at Western Michigan.
On Wednesday, Zach Groth, the outgoing sports director at Fort Wayne’s ABC affiliate, broke the news of yet another: former Dons sniper Lauren Ross, who is also joining Marchesano’s staff.
Ross shouldn’t need a ton of introduction, given her performance at PFW last season, following four years at WMU and Michigan State. The Muskegon, MI native was, arguably, the Horizon League’s best player (in fact, Ross was our pick for Player of the Year, for whatever that might be worth), as she averaged 15.1 points per game on ridiculous efficiency numbers, including a 46.6 percent clip from three-point range. Ross also averaged 5.1 rebounds and 2.1 assists per game, and collected a bevy of (official) awards, including the HL’s Newcomer of the Year honor.
Undoubtedly, the hope in Northeast Indiana is that she can contribute to carrying Purdue Fort Wayne’s newfound winning culture forward, given the near-complete turnover of the team’s roster.
2. Shark in the Water
Aubrey Stupp didn’t finish her career at Purdue Fort Wayne, but she was nevertheless a significant part of the program’s Marchesano-era rise from 2020-23, before finishing her college career with a pair of seasons at Nova Southeastern University. At PFW, Stupp was a do-what-it-takes sort of player, as she filled in wherever needed within what was often a shorthanded lineup, highlighted by 20 starts as a sophomore.
She truly blossomed over her time at NSU though, including All-Sunshine State Conference honors following both of her Sharks campaigns. Last season, she was on the league’s first team after scoring 13.6 points per game (leading the team in scoring) while shooting 48.8 percent from the floor.
The result of all of that is not a career in coaching, at least not yet, but a professional contract with Gzira Athleta Birkirkara in Malta. Malta, for those of you who weren’t stuck with it in Model UN, is a tiny island nation in the Mediterranean Sea, closer to Sicily than anything else. It has a population of just over 500,000 spread across 122 square miles, numbers at least somewhat similar to a city like Milwaukee. That such a place can support a six-team domestic league is proof that basketball is pretty fantastic.
Athleta was brutally terrible last season with a 2-13 record, and both wins came against a Valletta Lioneses side that was somehow even worse than that. So Stupp will have her work cut out for her – though even in the worst-case scenario, she’ll still get an extended experience in a unique part of the world. There are certainly worse ways to exist.
3. 32 Flavors
On Wednesday, the NCAA approved an expansion of basketball’s regular-season game limit, to 32 games.
The maximum number had been 31 for nearly 20 years, through a somewhat-convoluted calculation that allows 28 “normal” games, plus a three-game multi-team event, or 29 games plus two at an MTE.
According to CBS Sports’ Matt Norlander, accommodating those MTEs was a primary reason for the change, as several, like the Las Vegas-based Player’s Festival, can now include up to four games. There’s also a belief that the extra game can produce more high-profile non-conference matchups, though I’m a bit skeptical of that in an era when most of the high-profile teams seem to be congealing in two conferences.
The impact is a little bit trickier to assess in the Horizon League. As an 11-team conference, there’s actually a natural application for an extra game: during the middle of the conference season, when the odd number of teams presents a necessary and rotating week-long gap between league games. Cleveland State, for example, slotted in a throwaway game against Ohio Christian when their turn to sit for a week came up last year (the opportunity to do so came about because a scheduled game at Niagara in November was canceled).
However, with Northern Illinois bringing the HL’s membership back to a round 12 in 2026, teams will presumably return to playing two conference games every week, eliminating those windows.
As with most things, the precise application of the extra slot will probably vary from school to school, with the possibilities ranging from paycheck games, to NET builders, to glorified tune-ups.
4. Brazil
Did that sudden detour to Malta, followed by a stop at a mundane NCAA rule change, make you think that we were done talking about former Horizon League players becoming coaches? Nuh uh.
Emaia “Biggie” O’Brien has made the transition to the Detroit Mercy sideline as a grad assistant with digital media responsibilities, a few chairs down from new Titans head coach Kiefer Haffey. Haffey, of course, is new to being UDM’s head coach but not to the program itself – he was Achter’s associate head coach last season, when O’Brien capped her playing career with an All-HL 2024-25, including team highs in minutes, scoring, and three-point shooting.
Biggie (she’s 5-1, by the way…ironic nicknames are just phenomenal) will join a former teammate as a grad assistant, since former Titans forward Latifa Amzil was hired to that post back in early May.
Meanwhile, UDM snuck in one last player addition a few weeks after most others in the conference unofficially locked in their rosters: Brazilian Brendha Schwartz, who spent the last two seasons at South Plains College, a juco.
Here’s Haffey on his newest player:
“At 5-11, with great length and athleticism, she can defensively guard the one through four positions for us. Offensively, Brendha played primarily as a 2-3, but handles the ball well enough to create and run the point. With her length and skillset, she has a chance to be a great player for us here at Detroit Mercy.”
5. Raise Up
On Wednesday evening, the Charlotte Hornets selected Duke’s Kon Knueppel fourth overall in the NBA Draft.
That might not seem particularly important on the surface – I mean, who the hell cares about men’s basketball, right? – but the connection that makes it worthy of discussion here is that Knueppel’s mother is Cheri Nordgaard-Knueppel, Green Bay’s all-time leading scorer. Nordgaard-Knueppel (just “Nordgaard” at the time, of course) was instrumental in the Phoenix’s rise (ha) into the juggernaut we know today, during her career from 1995-99.
Green Bay had only moved to NCAA Division I in 1987, and though program founder Carol Hammerle got her team acclimated quickly, including GB’s first NCAA Tournament appearance in 1994, Nordgaard-Knueppel helped supercharge the operation. Her junior year began a streak of twenty-one (spelled out for emphasis) consecutive seasons where the Phoenix won at least one of the Horizon League’s two titles, and usually both. Hammerle handed things off to Kevin Borseth for Nordgaard-Knueppel’s senior year, and you probably know most of the story from there.
Incidentally, Green Bay retired her number 33 in 2024, and then-Duke-commit Knueppel was in attendance, while a couple of his brothers confusingly (for those not in the know) wore Blue Devils sweatshirts on the floor of a different DI school.
