Joe Tartamella loses a bunch of seniors and returns no one who averaged more than 8 points a game. That NCAA appearance in 2023 is getting further away….
Team: St. John’s Red Storm
2024-25 Record: 16-15, 5-13 Big East
2024-25 Big East Finish: Tied for eighth with Butler and earning the tiebreaker thanks to a 1-0 head-to-head record. They were one game behind Providence and one game ahead of Georgetown.
Final 2024-25 Rankings
NET: #72
Her Hoop Stats: #93
BartTorvik.com: #76
Postseason? The Red Storm topped Butler in the 8/9 game of the Big East tournament’s first round, but got buzzsawed by UConn, 71-40, in the quarterfinals to end their campaign.
Notable Departures: On one hand, it looks kind of bad that St. John’s is losing 8 women from last year’s team. On the other hand, only four of them had notable roles on last year’s squad, and all four were on their final years of eligibility anyway.
Now, it’s not ideal for the Red Storm to lose the only two double digit scorers from the 2024-25 roster, and they happen to be the only two women to average more than 8 points a game, too. That’s Lashae Dwyer and Ber’Nyah Mayo, who added 13.4 and 11.2 points respectively. They were also the top two in assists, just reversing for the top two spots and the only players with more than two assists a game. Dwyer also led the league in steals per game, and Mayo wasn’t so bad at 1.4 swipes a night, either.
Phoenix Gedeon started in 23 of her 30 appearances last season and led St. John’s in rebounding at 4.8 per game. Ariana Vanderhoop rounds out the list of Notable Departures after putting up 4.7 points and 1.9 rebounds in 16.5 minutes per game while coming off the bench in every contest.
Should we mention Tara Daye here? As a part time starter in 2023-24, she averaged 4.2 points and 3.5 rebounds for St. John’s. She started each of the first four games of the year last season, putting together 6.0 points and 4.5 rebounds. That was it for the year for her, and now she’s transferred to Purdue. I can’t find anything that says for sure that she was injured, but at the very least, she was supposed to have a big role last year and would have been projected to be a senior on this year’s roster. Instead, she’ll be a Boilermaker.
Notable Returners: We have a tie for top returning scorer here, as Skye Owen and Kylie Lavelle both averaged 7.7 per game last season. Both women were quality shooters (north of 34%), so that’s good news. Whether they’ll still be quality shooters if they’re asked to attempt more than three per game is still up in the air. Lavelle is also the top returning rebounder at 3.4 per game, which was third best on the roster last season. Owen gets the nod as the returning assists leader, but at 1.6 per game, that’s almost more of a coincidence than anything else. She averaged more than a steal per game on top of everything else, so Owen can contribute in a lot of ways.
The only other returning rotation player for the Red Storm is Jailah Donald, who joins Lavelle in the “played in every game, didn’t start every game” club. Lavelle’s starting assignments last year came in the wake of Daye’s departure from the active roster, while Donald came off the bench for four contests in the middle of the year. She still averaged over 30 minutes per game, which is good. Adding 6.1 points and 2.9 rebounds in over 30 minutes a game is not that great, but hey: That’s the kind of thing that happens when BartTorvik.com has STJ as one of the 20 slowest paced teams in the country.
Key Additions: St. John’s adds one freshman to the roster for this winter, but between what we noted about the Red Storm rotation earlier and the addition of four transfers, I’m not exactly expecting to see her much this season.
And so, we move on to the transfers.
The transfer that most jumps off the page as possibly ready to make an impact right away is Sa’Mya Wyatt (5’11” forward), who spent her freshman season at Austin Peay last year. She earned ASUN Rookie of the Year honors after averaging 12.8 points and 5.6 rebounds while starting in every game for the Governors. She wasn’t trying to be a shooter last year, but she did hit three of her 10 attempts.
The biggest question mark in the group is Daniela Abies (6’0” forward), who arrives in Queens after two seasons at Wichita State and an injury shortened campaign in Miami. Her sophomore year for the Shockers was great: 13.0 points and 9.7 rebounds per game. Junior year for the Canes? Not so much. Not even just the injury situation, as she was averaging less than 10 minutes a game across the first eight contests of the season. If the injury isn’t hampering her now and she can perform more like she did in 2023-24, that’s good news for STJ. If Big East Abies is more like ACC Abies before the injury? Well, that’s probably not great for anyone here.
I’m not completely sold on Brooke Moore (6’0” guard) or Shaulana Wagner (5’10” guard) as big time Big East contributors. Moore spent two years at Liberty, and her two campaigns were mostly the same, statistically speaking. She averaged 4.5 points and 3.3 rebounds for the Flames. Wagner started off her collegiate career with Xavier back when Melanie Moore was in charge and didn’t play all that much in the weird COVID season of 2020-21. Then she bounced off to Wabash Valley in the junior college ranks for a year before spending the last two with Troy, and she’ll use the Diego Pavia “JuCo Years Don’t Count” exception to keep things going now. She was pretty dang good for the Trojans this past season, putting up 9.0 points, 5.5 rebounds, and 6.7 assists per game. Troy went 24-14 and made a big postseason run, too, but we have to note that Wagner did all of this while playing for the team that BartTorvik.com rates as the fifth fastest paced team in the country last year. She had an absolutely atrocious turnover rate north of 27%, so we’ll see how that rolls out with St. John’s.
Coach: Joe Tartamella, entering his 14th season in charge of the Red Storm and overall as a Division 1 head coach. He has a record of 239-173.
Outlook: Two years ago, St. John’s couldn’t earn an NCAA tournament bid because they stacked up way too many losses in non-conference play and that was pretty much that.
Last year, St. John’s didn’t come anywhere close to an NCAA tournament bid because they followed up a 10-1 start to the season with a 1-8 start to Big East play where the only win was against Xavier. Heck, through their first 13 games of Big East play, the Red Storm were 3-10 because they beat Xavier twice, and that is not a compliment.
Two straight seasons, two straight “welp, never mind” reactions for two different reasons. This is probably not what the STJ administration was thinking about after handing Joe Tartamella a new contract extension in the spring of 2023 because he finally made it back to the NCAA tournament for the first time after six straight misses.
Going into last year, you could at least say, “well, they learned a valuable lesson about how to start the season, and they return enough to be pretty stable.” And they did! They didn’t knock your socks off with their start to the season, but the Red Storm wasn’t taking on terrible losses to disqualify themselves from a tournament future. But then everything went south after Christmas, and on top of it, it was a roster that was heavily depending on players on their final year of eligibility to go 16-15.
The three returning rotation players could pop after being role players last season. Sure. Maybe the three returning players that weren’t in the rotation make an impact because, well, because someone has to with only 11 women on this roster. I don’t think you can instantly say that any of the newcomers project to be major players here, but again: They only have 11 women. Yes, Joe Tartamella only had a seven woman rotation for most of last season. That still leaves four spots open and someone has to play minutes for them. I guess the big question is who is going to be the one getting those spots, and whether or not it can all come together to compete in the Big East this season.
No matter what happens: St. John’s is in for a big transition for the 2026-27 season, too. Five of these 11 women are listed as seniors.
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