After an offseason defined by roster upheaval, Indiana women’s basketball will look a lot different for the 2025-26 season.
The Hoosiers have just five players returning from last year, including Lenée Beaumont and Sydney Fenn, who both missed the entire season. They lost Chloe Moore-McNeil, Sydney Parrish, and Karoline Striplin to graduation, and then saw six players enter the transfer portal.
Head coach Teri Moren didn’t anticipate all of those pieces leaving her program; she wasn’t looking to hit a reset button. But in rebuilding a very new roster around those five returnees and two incoming freshmen, she had an opportunity to make some stylistic changes to Indiana’s brand of basketball. After IU lost to South Carolina in the NCAA Tournament last season, Moren said she wanted her team to add more size and athleticism. The roster situation this offseason gave her the flexibility to do that in the transfer portal.
“We did have to put together a roster, and go into the portal and figure out the pieces where it could help us become more athletic, for sure. And we wanted it to make sense systematically, still, for us, in terms of how we wanted to play, how we wanted to guard,” Moren said during IU’s preseason media availability. “The things that were and have always been important to us are the things that are always going to be important to us. And we didn’t change that, stylistically.”
Indiana has only one returning starter, guard Shay Ciezki, whose speed already fits into the mold of this new-look Hoosier team.
Ciezki didn’t really ever think of joining her now-former teammates in the transfer portal, feeling good about the relationships she’d established with the coaching staff in Bloomington. She, Beaumont, and Fenn helped the staff with portal recruitment, reaching out to players over Twitter and Instagram direct messages to express interest in playing together.
The roster turnover put Ciezki in a tricky position, after just transferring to Indiana from Penn State last year. But she wasn’t fazed by the situation.
“It’s not as crazy as you think, just because it’s the new normal,” Ciezki said. “I had it my freshman year, I had it my sophomore year. It’s nothing different. Coaches leave every year. Girls leave now. So it’s nothing that I haven’t seen before. And if anything, I get to make more friends every year.”
Indiana enters this season with a more athletic team, as Moren aimed for.
The Hoosiers, in recent years, had trouble keeping up with teams that could really push the pace on them — Illinois is a glaring example. Some key transfers to make that transition include Chloe Spreen (Alabama), Zania Socka-Ngueman (UCLA), and Phoenix Stotijn (Arkansas). True freshman Nevaeh Caffey has also caught Moren’s eye as a potential early contributor.
“We’re definitely more athletic. We’re fast. We want the ball out quick. We’re playing in transition a lot more, early drags,” Ciezki said. “Z’s an athletic post player, probably the most athletic post I’ve had the privilege to play with. So it’s going to be really exciting.”
The improved athleticism could, however, balance out with an unfamiliar weakness to recent Indiana teams.
The Hoosiers have finished in the top 20 in the country in 3-point percentage each of the last three seasons. But they lost three of their top four 3-point shooters from last year in Yarden Garzon, Parrish, and Moore-McNeil. Ciezki will have to shoulder a lot of that load for this year’s team, and some newcomers will need to emerge if IU is able to shoot the ball well as a squad.
But Moren expressed some early concern in that department.
“Do I think we did get more athletic? Yeah,” Moren said. “But I think what we — again, it’s early — but what we’ve given up athleticism a little bit is our ability to shoot it. And so, yes, we got more athletic, but I think the jury’s still out on, can we be as efficient as we’ve been accustomed to being outside the arc?”
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