Welcome back to the #HLWBB Starting Five, your sporadic offseason rundown of news and fun from around Horizon League women’s basketball.
1. Living for the City
It’s admittedly sort of an old school way of thinking, but I love when teams have some relationship to their immediate geography. That’s particularly true in the Horizon League with its #MajorCities, and the status of most HL members as urban universities.
Detroit Mercy has taken noticeable steps to identify themselves more “Detroit,” a process that began during Kate Achter’s tenure, and has continued with Kiefer Haffey. The latest sign? A commitment from rising Detroit Edison Public School Academy senior Marianna Jones earlier this month.
It’s hard to say what any college basketball team will look like from year to year anymore, let alone one as veteran-heavy as this coming season’s Titans. But, regardless of any turnover by the time Jones shows up in Calihan Hall in 2026, the 6-0 power forward should be well-prepared to make an immediate impact, thanks to her high-motor work down low.
“Marianna is the type of forward prospect I’d want on my team,” Prep Girls Hoops’ Evan Bell wrote this spring. “She is a relentless rebounder and had several offensive boards for Michigan Crossover 17U EYBL at LBI April Showers on Saturday. Her strength and hustle resulted in multiple offensive rebound putbacks. Marianna knocked down free throws, finished off two feet, and was a vocal leader.”
UDM first offered Jones last summer, when Achter was still in town. Haffey then renewed the school’s interest exactly one year later, and just a couple weeks before she committed.
2. I Will Remember You
One of the more fun things to emerge from this year’s transfer portal activity was the return of Nneka Obiazor to Youngstown State.
Obiazor was the Horizon League’s Freshman of the Year in 2020-21, when she dropped 15.3 points per game for the Penguins – on a 52.6 effective field goal percentage – and also grabbed 8.1 rebounds each time out. She left after that single season for UNLV, and though she was successful for the Rebels, including a Mountain West Conference Sixth Player of the Year award and three trips to the NCAA Tournament, Obiazor never really achieved the level of stardom that seemed certain during her rookie campaign.
That seemed set to possibly change when, after an aborted 2024-25 at Grand Canyon, Obiazor hit the portal and re-joined YSU (which, of course, has undergone a coaching change since 2021).
Yep. According to Neel Madhavan of Warren Tribune-Chronicle and Youngstown Vindicator, Obiazor has again left the program, even after showing up for summer workouts.
Madhavan also quoted YSU head coach Melissa Jackson as “being very comfortable” with a roster now down to 12 players. That’s a fair assessment, particularly given some of the injuries her team dealt with last season. Still, there was every reason to believe that Obiazor would have been an all-conference level performer for the Guins, and that sort of loss is always going to sting.
3. Pop Bottles
If you’re at all plugged in to college basketball’s internet chatter (and you probably are, given that you’re, you know, reading this), you’re probably aware that the NCAA, its high-major conferences, and sundry water carriers (yes you, Seth Davis) have been pushing for an expansion of the NCAA Tournament.
That deserves a meme:
Well, good news, that’s not happening. At least not yet.
Last Friday, the NCAA’s Division I Women’s Basketball Committee confirmed that the 2026 NCAA Tournament will include the familiar 68 teams, consisting of 31 conference champion autobids and 37 at-large selections. That’s not to say that expansion isn’t on the way in 2027, or points beyond, but for now, the NCAA is standing pat.
However, the committee did introduce a couple interesting modifications to the selection process.
For starters, how about Selection Saturday?
Women’s basketball’s tournament, as you hopefully know, differs from the men’s tournament in one very important respect: in women’s March Madness, the top 16 teams host the first and second rounds, before things transition to neutral sites for the Sweet 16. Beginning in the coming year, that top 16 will be announced the day before the full selection show, in an effort to give the hosts 24 hours of additional prep time (and, let’s be honest, create an extra television event to draw a few eyeballs).
That reveal will only involve 16 school names in alphabetical order so they, along with everyone else, will have to wait until Selection Sunday to learn their dates and opponents. The South Carolinas of the world might find the whole exercise anticlimactic, but teams on the top 16 bubble will certainly pay close attention.
Additionally, the committee added a metric called Wins Above Bubble (WAB) to its selection criteria. That one’s pretty straightforward, a simple count of victories over teams ranked 45th (a number chosen after studying recent bubbles) or better in the NET.
The chairperson of the committee happens to be a Horizon Leaguer, Milwaukee athletic director Amanda Braun, so I’ll let her explain.
“We believe that the WAB will be an important tool to help objectively see the value of each win and loss and how to best evaluate and emphasize a team’s strength of schedule and results,” she said. “Whether it’s a nonconference or conference game, no matter the scoring margin, the WAB is going to tell us a lot about what a team did against the schedule they played. This will be used along with the established selection criteria when considering the selection and seeding of teams.”
4. Feel It Still
Without a doubt, Halle Idowu was one of the Horizon League’s best stories last year. After four mostly-unremarkable years at Toledo and Northeastern, the forward abruptly clicked after joining Jeff Hans’ new regime at Northern Kentucky.
Idowu unofficially announced her arrival with a monstrous 29-point effort – on 13-for-18 shooting – in a upset of Marshall on November 10, 2024, and didn’t slow down much from there. Her 12.4 points and 6.1 rebounds per game ranked 11th and 10th, respectively, among HL players, leading to a much-deserved…actually, never mind. I assumed that Idowu made an all-conference team, and she didn’t. She should have. Y’all pick too many guards for that stuff.
At least we named her to our postseason third team.
Regardless of that, the Calumet Park, IL native was good enough for Portugal’s Maia Basket Clube, which signed her to a professional contract last week.
In 2024-25, Maia was a mid-table team in the second-division Divisao I, and led up front by Bluffton University graduate Morgan Smith, with NJIT product Kenna Squier controlling the backcourt. Certainly, Idowu represents the sort of upgrade that can help Maia contend for promotion.
5. Kiss from a Rose
A terrifying situation played out last weekend at the Run 4 Roses Classic, a staple showcase of college basketball’s summer recruiting calendar.
Before proceeding, it’s important to point out that I wasn’t there. I was demolishing a PB&G bowl at Pulp and getting ready to see Superman. So this account is entirely the result of piecing together social media posts from a few of the roughly 2,000 coaches and other personnel who stopped by the mega-event.
Late Sunday afternoon, the Louisville Metropolitan Police Department acknowledged a report of an “active aggressor” at the R4R. Others, with apparent guidance from the LMPD, used the word “shooter.” Regardless, the event was abruptly evacuated.
The important news is that, apparently, there was neither a shooter nor any other flavor of aggressor around, and everyone in attendance at the time – including several Horizon League coaches – is safe.
So what did happen? That’s where things get a little confusing.
Throughout Sunday evening, and into Monday, R4R’s organizers turned into a hybrid of Michael Scott and Larry Vaughn, the mayor of Jaws’ Amity Island, and released a series of statements that increasingly minimized the incident (which struck me as insensitive, given that people were scared for their lives just a couple hours earlier).
The final announcement claimed that “an unfortunate malfunction at the Kentucky Exposition Center in Louisville during the Run 4 The Roses Championships caused a loud disturbance. This led to several individuals shouting ‘shots fired’ while fleeing the venue.” R4R went on to offer that “a smoke alarm triggered by a duct vent sensor malfunction caused the disturbance.”
Ultimately, it’s a good thing that they were as communicative as they were, and to their credit, they bumped up their previously non-existent security for the rest of the event, which was eventually played on Monday. But…if the disturbance was a smoke alarm, why were people yelling “shots fired” and calling the cops?
An early statement from LMPD indicated that a ceiling tile fell on a metal chair. That, coupled with a blaring alarm, might be enough to cause a panic. However, they later retracted that detail. Another first-person account related that the yelling and ensuing rush for the doors began with the players. That’s certainly believable as well, given that recent generations of schoolkids have grown up with active shooter drills as a steady presence in their lives. A siren, to them, is more closely associated with firearms than fire.
Realistically, we’ll probably never be able to definitively connect the dots from “smoke alarm” to “shots fired,” but at least everyone is okay.
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