This season has been a relatively unfamiliar experience for Lenée Beaumont.
The guard has spent much of her basketball career on winning teams. During Beaumont’s four years of high school ball at Benet Academy in Lisle, Ill., the Redwings accrued a 95-17 overall record. Indiana women’s basketball reached the Sweet 16 in her first collegiate season on the court, and the team won an NCAA Tournament game last year while she recovered from her knee injury.
But 2025-26 has been different. The Hoosiers dropped to 11-11 overall and 0-10 in Big Ten play after Thursday’s 95-67 loss to No. 9 Michigan at Simon Skjodt Assembly Hall. They’re on track for this to be the worst season of the Teri Moren era in Bloomington.
The only comparison Beaumont could draw to this slide is an AAU team she played on that won two games all summer.
“It’s definitely a tough stretch right now,” Beaumont said after Thursday’s game. “But I’ll reiterate it. … I have full belief in coach Moren and how she handles herself even when — for her, this is probably one of the toughest stretches of her coaching career. We just gotta stay together. It’s tough. We know we gotta be better.”
Moren has racked up 10 consecutive years with at least 20 wins at IU. Her only losing season came in her first year with the program, in 2014-15. Prior to her tenure at Indiana, she endured only two losing seasons: a 15-16 finish in her second season with Indiana State (2011-12), and an 11-16 campaign at Division II UIndy in 2005-06.
This year’s IU team entered the season with a lot of questions after major roster turnover in the offseason, and things just haven’t panned out as Moren and her staff had hoped.
“I’m disappointed,” Moren said Thursday. “Nothing kills me more than where we are, as far as not being able to win a Big Ten game. But I’m still in charge of this program, and I have to make sure that I show up every day and try to help us get better.”
Indiana’s disappointing season has several root causes.
The primary factor is the youth and inexperience around the roster. IU’s preferred starting lineup contains one senior (Shay Ciezki), a redshirt sophomore (Beaumont), a true sophomore (Zania Socka-Nguemen), and two freshmen (Maya Makalusky and Nevaeh Caffey). Junior Edessa Noyan has filled Socka-Nguemen’s spot during the UCLA transfer’s multiple injury spells.
Sophomore Valentyna Kadlecova opened the season as a starter, but the only experience advantage she held over any of the transfers was her year spent within the IU program. And the Czech Republic native left the program and returned home to pursue professional basketball in mid-December.
Indiana has only two seniors on the roster, at all: Ciezki and Jerni Kiaku. The latter has become IU’s sixth player off the bench when Socka-Nguemen has been out. The remaining reserves had little experience entering the year and haven’t produced much in conference play.
The Hoosiers have been careful to not portray their youth and inexperience as an excuse. But their lack of reliable production — in part because of that roster makeup — is a big reason why they are where they are.
Ciezki has played at an All-Big Ten level this season, leading the conference at 23.1 points per game. Beaumont (13.5 ppg) has looked like a budding star at times, but in other moments, she’s looked like the young player who hasn’t seen much Big Ten action. Socka-Nguemen, at 11.8 points and 8.7 rebounds per game, has posted good numbers when healthy. But she missed all of December with a lower leg injury, and has now missed two straight games with an issue in her other leg — and Moren didn’t express optimism for a quick return. Nobody else on IU’s roster has shown consistency the team can rely on every game.
The Hoosiers have struggled with turnovers all season, and it hasn’t improved — their 18.7 turnovers in conference games is second-most in the Big Ten. They’ve also had issues with rebounding and fouling, leading to very thin margins for error in other areas of the game.
Moren hasn’t shied away from referencing her team’s inexperience when discussing the rough stretch.
“This is a young team, and we’ve continued to make a lot of the same mistakes. I don’t have an answer for why that is,” Moren said Thursday. “They see it every day. We drill it every day. It’s unfortunate.”
But Indiana’s roster build didn’t just happen on a whim. At times near the end of last season, Moren outlined the type of changes she wanted to implement into her program, the sorts of traits she felt were lacking within her squad that she would look to fortify in the offseason.
Specifically, she wanted her team to get more athletic — a reasonable goal, since the Hoosiers had trouble in recent years against super quick, athletic teams that could beat them up and down the court.
That meant seeing a swath of players leave Bloomington for the transfer portal, creating the holes Indiana’s staff had to fill in April and May.
The Hoosiers have had previous success identifying talented transfers who could help them, even before the portal existed. Ali Patberg, Brenna Wise, Nicole Cardaño-Hillary, Sara Scalia, Sydney Parrish, and Ciezki all played big roles on IU teams that won NCAA Tournament games after transferring in from other programs.
This isn’t to say Indiana’s transfer portal class this year has been full of whiffs, nor that they won’t improve in future years. But nobody who transferred in this season has had the sort of immediate impact that the aforementioned six transfers had over the last decade. That’s created a situation where Ciezki and Beaumont have to account for most of the scoring load, at a rate that’s difficult for even the best players in the nation to maintain, on most nights for IU to have any chance of winning.
Additionally, Moren’s program had long relied on player development, with freshmen rarely seeing significant playing time and then building up their workloads over the rest of their careers. But while Indiana achieved historic success on the court with Grace Berger and Mackenzie Holmes, high school recruiting and player development dropped off a bit.
Yarden Garzon entered Bloomington with a lot of experience competing against WNBA players in Israel, and she was a high-level starter from day one. But while Lexus Bargesser, Lilly Meister, Henna Sandvik, and Jules LaMendola showed potential and some improvement over their time in cream and crimson, they never quite reached the caliber of players who preceded them at IU. All four transferred out in the offseason. Redshirt Sydney Fenn is currently out for the season due to the same injury that kept her off the floor last season, and Kadlecova is back in Europe.
So that leaves Beaumont and Faith Wiseman as the only active players on IU’s roster from its 2022-24 recruiting classes. Wiseman stepped up in the conference tournament last season against Oregon, but she has not yet proven she can be a Big Ten-caliber player for Moren.
That’s a three-year gap that left Indiana’s cupboard pretty barren.
On top of that, two of Moren’s three assistants from her 2022-23 Big Ten championship staff are gone: Glenn Box became head coach at Miami (OH) in 2024, and IU parted ways after last season with lead recruiter Linda Sayavongchanh, who’s now at Colorado State. The one still with Indiana, associate head coach Rhet Wierzba, has significantly scaled back his duties the last two years as he’s battled brain cancer.
Given the amount of roster upheaval and staff turnover IU has endured, perhaps a down year was to be expected. But Moren isn’t one to fold on a season. She called herself “a prisoner of hope” after her team lost at Ohio State on Jan. 22.
“We’ve won an awful lot around here. And I hope our fans have enjoyed that. But I hope also that they haven’t forgotten that, you know, I haven’t forgotten how to coach, right? And my staff hasn’t forgotten how to coach,” Moren said Thursday. “And I’m not making excuses. That’s just not how I’m built. But we are dealing with a team that just hasn’t had a lot of reps in big-time games. And this is a big-time conference.”
Indiana’s path forward from a winless January is solely big-picture focused. The Hoosiers will have a lighter schedule in February and should have some better opportunities to pick up a Big Ten win or two. But postseason play — whether the NCAA Tournament, WNIT, WBIT, or any other competition — looks unlikely this year.
That said, the rest of the season will provide valuable opportunities for Indiana’s younger players who have shown promise for the future, particularly Caffey and Makalusky. With their freshman seasons being disappointing for the team, it becomes particularly important for IU that they — along with sophomores Phoenix Stotijn and Chloe Spreen — develop into more reliable pieces for the Hoosiers for next year and beyond.
Additionally, IU has a very strong recruiting class coming in next season, perhaps the best of Moren’s career. ESPN ranks wing Addison Nyemchek the No. 28 overall recruit in the class of 2026, guard Gigi Battle is right behind her at No. 32, and guard Ashlinn James (No. 64) has a lot of potential, as well.
So there’s reason for optimism going into the offseason that Moren and her staff can turn things around. As the winningest coach in program history, the one who built Indiana women’s basketball into the force its fans are now longing for, she’s more than earned the opportunity to get things back on track. If the sorts of struggles Indiana has displayed this year continue into the next few years, it could be time to have some difficult conversations.
But the Hoosiers are sticking together through their current rough stretch, with the workmanlike spirit that defined the successful teams Moren has fielded over the last decade, in hopes that brighter days are ahead.
“It’s unfortunate, because we’re so freaking close,” Moren said after the Ohio State game. “Those are the messages that you keep saying to your group: ‘Look, we are in this with you. We’re in this fight with you. We’re going to keep our nose down. We’re going to keep the blinders on. We’re going to keep the noise out and we’re just going to keep working. And sooner or later, we’re going to, we’re going to be able to put four quarters together.'”
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