If you’re not a PC fan, you’re not going to recognize a single player on the roster next winter.
Team: Providence Friars
2024-25 Record: 13-19, 6-12 Big East
2024-25 Big East Finish: Seventh, two games behind DePaul and one game ahead of a St. John’s/Butler tie for eighth.
Final 2024-25 Rankings
NET: #134
Her Hoop Stats: #188
BartTorvik.com: #131
Postseason? Their season ended after a two point loss to Georgetown in the 7/10 game of the first round of the Big East tournament.
Notable Departures: Essentially everyone in the rotation.
Here’s a thing I didn’t actually realize when I was putting together last year’s summer check in with the Friars: Providence had ten players on their final year of eligibility, either as COVID bonus years or just the normal four year progression. Eight of those 10 were Providence’s night in and night out rotation, appearing in at least 29 of their 32 games and averaging at least 9.9 minutes per game. A ninth was Kylee Sheppard, who played in 19 games after appearing in just six the year before. Sheppard played in just six games after Christmas and not at all in PC’s final seven contests.
In any case: Grace Efosa and Olivia Olsen, Providence’s only double digit scorers? Gone. In fact, their top four scorers, no matter how many games were played are gone. Olsen led the squad in rebounding with 8.3 per game, and each of the next four rebounders are gone. All of this was completely expected, as all of these women were on their final year of eligibility.
Notable Returners: Technically, no one.
Orlagh Gormley was a freshman last year, and she averaged 3.9 points, 2.5 rebounds, and a team high 2.3 assists per game in nearly 22 minutes an outing…… in Providence’s first 11 games before suffering a season ending injury. If you’re going by “who’s coming back from the Providence team that Marquette beat 67-54 and 69-51,” then the answer is effectively no one.
Officially there are four women returning, three more next to Gormley. Those three played a total of 304 minutes last season with one of the three sitting out as a redshirt freshman after enrolling mid-year as a Class of 2025 recruit.
Key Additions: Providence is going to try to fix this problem by bringing in three senior transfers. Teneisia Brown spent two seasons at Merrimack and two and Fairleigh Dickinson with a missed year in the middle there for some reason. Since her first year at Merrimack was 2020-21, she’s now at PC on her COVID bonus season of eligibility. The 6’2” forward has grown as a player in each of her four seasons of college hoops, culminating in 15.1 points and 9.7 rebounds per game as she led FDU in both categories while guiding the Knights to a regular season NEC title and a #15 seed in the NCAA tournament last year.
Sabou Gueye comes to Friartown after one year at Northwest Florida State, two seasons at New Mexico State, and one at Florida A&M. I presume this means that she’s getting an extra year by way of the Diego Pavia Junior College Exception. The 5’9” guard had her best year with the Rattlers, putting up 11.3 points, 5.1 rebounds, 2.7 assists, and 2.0 steals, all of which were Division 1 career highs for her. The bad news? Florida A&M went 9-21 while she was doing that.
Providence’s third senior addition does require a bit of long winded explanation, seeing as she was a freshman in college in 2019-20. Nalani Kaysia started her collegiate career back then as a volleyball player for Charlotte, and stayed with the 49ers through the fall 2021 season. That’s 3 years of volleyball, but only two count because of COVID. She transferred to George Mason and switched to basketball for the next school year (3), ended up with a medical redshirt for the year after that because she was pregnant, and then made 32 starts for the Patriots in 2024-25. As far as I can tell, that’s 4 years of eligibility across two sports in six seasons. I know in the past there have been athletes who have played 4 years at one place and then went somewhere else to play a different sport for their fifth season of eligibility, essentially “redshirting” in the new sport up until that point. That match doesn’t work for Kaysia, so I have no idea how she’s eligible any more. IN ANY CASE, she averaged 7.5 points, 9.7 rebounds, and 1.2 blocks per game for GMU as a 6’2” forward last season.
Providence also brings in two more transfers, but neither one played all that much as a freshman at Virginia or Louisville last season. None of the five freshman on the roster — four true freshman as well as the previously mentioned mid-year enrollee — pop up on the Blue Star Basketball radar, although 5’8” guard Princess Moody earns an Elite 150 stamp from Prospects Nation.
Coach: Erin Batth, entering her third season at Providence and in Division 1 overall. She has a record of 26-40 through two campaigns.
Outlook: Probably bad!
Here’s my point: Erin Batth returned most of the core from Jim Crowley’s final Providence that went 13-19 and went 13-21. Most of that core returned once more and then went 13-19.
Now essentially everyone is gone.
Sure, if you want to say “hey, but things weren’t going well with those players anyway,” you could. I concede your point there, but you know what’s really bad? Only returning 8.4% of your minutes from last season. That’s a real bad sign that it’s going to take a very long time for Erin Batth’s brand new roster to get to know each other and then start moving in a positive direction. I’ve seen this happen before, it happened with Marquette in Carolyn Kieger’s second season. They went 9-22 in her first season, she blew up nearly the entire roster for Year Two, and then started 5-10 including a 0-4 start both to the regular season and then again for Big East play.
Yes, Marquette ended up at 14-16 overall that year because they ended up at 9-9 in the league. If you think there’s not one but two future Big East Player of the Year winners on this Providence roster, then sure, maybe nice things are in store for Providence here. That’s how Kieger coached her way out of it. I suspect Erin Batth is going to go in a different direction, namely letting her three senior transfers carry the heavy load and this team will go as far as they can drag the Friars. That’s definitely an immediate term solution, but if that’s what happens, then next year’s Summer Vibe Check is going to turn into “okay, but everyone who did important things is gone again.”
If those senior transfers can’t contribute in the Big East…… well, things are going to get very interesting for Erin Batth’s tenure as head coach pretty quickly. If you can’t win with the players you inherit, and you didn’t build a roster to develop long term, and you can’t win with a roster that you threw together in one offseason, then I have to ask how much longer this is going to continue with Batth in charge. Of course, Jim Crowley got seven years with just one winning campaign and never more than eight Big East wins, so it does stand to reason that Providence is just going to keep chugging along Just Doing This.
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