Beware Princeton women’s basketball in 2025-26
The Tigers are poised to be the best team in New Jersey again next year thanks to one word: Retention.
The practice of publishing “Way Too Early Top 25” rankings the moment after a national championship game goes final does not bother me. You’d think I would criticize pumping out content for content’s sake, and how they’ve become especially unhelpful when they drop in the middle of the transfer portal window, when most rosters in the sport are fluid if not empty.
But I’m still too much of a college hoops-head to mind all that much. I can’t resist Way Too Early looks at next season, however prescient or off-base they’ll end up.
Not long after Kaitlyn Chen and UConn won the women’s national championship on Sunday, ESPN published its Way Too Early preseason rankings for 2025-26. And I was absolutely unsurprised to find Princeton in the No. 23 spot.
If there’s one thing I can say with confidence after four seasons writing this newsletter, it’s that you do not bet against the Princeton women’s basketball program. They are reliably the best Division I program in New Jersey, regardless of gender, and I have high expectations for the Tigers in 2025-26.
2024-25 constituted a down year for the program, as the top of the Ivy League was highly competitive and Princeton came away with neither a regular-season championship (Columbia) nor the conference tournament title (Harvard). Yet the program was recognized for its stellar 21-7 season by receiving an at-large bid to the NCAA Tournament for the second time.
How does this translate into a buoyant outlook for next season? One word: Retention. Princeton returns six of its top seven scorers – including, critically, a healthy Madison St. Rose.
For all the fair critiques of a Way Too Early ranking exercise in early April, one thing they tend to illuminate is which teams should have most or all of their key contributors back.
“The return of Madison St. Rose from the knee injury that cost her most of this season to join Skye Belker and Ashley Chea in the backcourt will put the Tigers back in the familiar place of favorites to win the Ivy League,” ESPN’s Charlie Crème wrote.
St. Rose suffered a torn ACL in the fourth game of the season in mid-November. I am no doctor and have no inside knowledge of her rehab, but she’s more than likely to be ready for opening day given almost 11 1/2 months of recovery time.
St. Rose, who could have been an Ivy League Player of the Year candidate as a junior, puts a major scoring threat on the floor alongside Belker and Chea. Fadima Tall had a breakout sophomore year on the wing, and she, Belker and Chea will surely grow from the experience of falling short in Ivy Madness and losing a close game to Iowa State in the First Four.
“It’s really, really important. You can never just simulate what it’s like to play on this stage and under these lights and what kind of experience it will be for them,” coach Carla Berube said before that game. “But yeah, we’re treating this like any other NCAA Tournament, whether we … were strong in the senior class and starters, or we have sophomores starting. They’re ready.”
I didn’t publish anything the day after Princeton lost 68-63 to Iowa State, if only because there wasn’t tons to say beyond, “Basketball’s a game of runs, huh.” Princeton ended the first half on a 14-0 run, with Chea and Tall in particular picking apart a Big 12 defense, only for the offense to completely dry up as Iowa State won the third quarter 27-9. One can imagine what a healthy St. Rose could have done to lift up the sophomores.
“I think losing is something that I never want to do again,” Tall said. “That is something that will help with motivation for next year.”
Princeton bids farewell to five seniors: starter Parker Hill and reserves Adaora Nwokeji, Amelia Osgood, Paige Morton and Katie Thiers. They combined for only 18.1% of Princeton’s minutes and 17.7% of its scoring in 2024-25, though they were responsible for 22.2% of the Tigers’ rebounding.
That’s because Hill, Morton and Thiers were three members of a four-headed rotation at the five. This leaves Tabitha Amanze in a vital role for 2025-26. A top-50 high school recruit in 2022 along with St. Rose, Amanze’s first two years at Princeton were marred by injuries, but she owned her role spelling Hill this past season.
Though Amanze’s 6.0 points and 4.0 rebounds per game don’t jump off the page, she only averaged 12.4 minutes. On a per-40 basis, no one in the rotation was as efficient as Amanze and her 19.3 points and 12.8 boards.
The Ivy League will still be top-heavy next year, but probably not a three-bid league again. Columbia brings back budding star Riley Weiss but loses do-everything guards Kitty Henderson (13.3 ppg, 6.2 rpg, 4.8 apg, 2.5 spg) and Cece Collins (13.7 ppg, 5.5 rpg, 4.6 apg, 1.3 spg) and will need others to step up. They lose the edge in experience over Princeton that Lions coach Megan Griffith often talked about. Harvard will move on without Ivy League POY Harmoni Turner (22.5 ppg, 5.4 rpg, 3.4 apg, 2.8 spg) and its only other double-figure scorer, Elena Rodriguez (11.7).
Unlike most other teams in most other leagues around this sport, we have a really good sense of what these rosters will look like next year. The Ivy League is no longer immune to the gravity of the transfer portal – Xaivian Lee being the latest example – but the reality is very few undergraduate transfers enter the Ivy League and very few leave, especially on the women’s side.
So just how good can Princeton be in 2025-26? This is a program that has never rated lower than 45th in the country in BartTorvik.com’s T-Rank this decade. That’s the floor. Will they be Top 25 good? Well, that isn’t so unheard of, either.
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Appreciate you stopping by. Let’s clean the glass:
While I’ll spend a bit more time on Rutgers and Seton Hall’s offseasons in the coming weeks, each school has added one transfer so far. Yesterday, Rutgers landed George Washington forward and D.C. native Darren Buchanan Jr., a 6-foot-7 forward who’s averaged 13.0 points and 6.2 rebounds in two years at a respectable A-10 school.
Seton Hall, of course, nabbed one of the best mid-major talents in the Northeast last week by signing Merrimack transfer Adam “Budd” Clark. He’ll be no-doubt starting point guard that Shaheen Holloway and the Pirates build around. If you aren’t familiar with Clark’s game, the way I put it in a social media post is that he’s simply more accomplished than any player to transfer to Seton Hall last cycle. The 2023-24 Northeast Conference Rookie of the Year, Clark had no trouble when Merrimack moved up to the MAAC and made the All-MAAC first team with averages of 19.8 points, 4.5 rebounds, 6.0 assists and 2.7 steals per game.
Abdi Bashir Jr. committed to Kansas State on Monday, bringing him just a few hours south of the city of Omaha that he calls home. King Rice is no doubt happy that Bashir is getting that bag. Now to see who Monmouth can retain from this year’s team; Madison Durr, Jaret Valencia and Chris Morgan are also in the portal.