Danes head into offseason after WNIT loss
ALBANY — Some time off awaits, then the University at Albany women’s basketball program will get back to work after a successful season that didn’t end the way the Great Danes wanted.
Junior guard Meghan Huerter offered a solid preview of what the focus will be this offseason for the returning Great Danes, who project to bring back enough talent to again compete for an America East Conference championship, but know improvement is necessary.
“For the returners and people who are staying, it’s definitely just working to expand your game,” said Huerter, a former Shenendehowa High School star who started her college career at Providence before transferring to UAlbany ahead of the 2023-24 campaign. “You don’t want to be complacent with where you’re at. Like, say, for me, I’m known for my shot, (so) I want to try to get more of a mid-range game, I want to try to be able to attack the basket more, so definitely that’s going to be a focus for me.”
Huerter said that after the Great Danes’ season ended with a 64-50 loss Thursday at Colgate in the first round of the Women’s National Invitation Tournament. That defeat wrapped up a 25-7 season for head coach Colleen Mullen’s team, a campaign that outdid external expectations for the program.
The loss, though, was also emblematic of what went wrong for the Great Danes in the closing stretch of their season, of what kept UAlbany from making an NCAA Tournament appearance rather than a WNIT one. The Great Danes won 22 of their first 25 games and looked the part of the America East’s top team, then closed with a 3-4 stretch as their schedule heated up.
Its roster small in numbers and dealing with a variety of health woes, UAlbany never could find ways to expand its offense as opponents caught up with how to defend the Great Danes. While the team’s stingy defense remained the team’s backbone, its offense never scored more than 60 points in any of its final 10 games. In six of those games, UAlbany failed to score more than 50 points.
“I think once you get to the end of the season, there’s a lot of media for people to watch, [so] people have more time to get their scouts together. There’s a lot of ways you can scout people with the duration of the season,” said senior Kayla Cooper, whose team came in second in the America East regular season and lost in the league’s semifinals to Vermont. “So I just think that teams were really prepared for us, and I think that we’re going to get everyone’s
Jim Franco/Times Union archive best game.”
Cooper, UAlbany’s firstteam all-conference star, finished the season averaging 15.9 points and 7.3 rebounds per game. But none of the team’s other six players who averaged double-digit minutes averaged double-digit scoring. While the Great Danes still boast the nation’s No. 1 scoring defense at 51.3 points per game, their offense ranks No. 250 in the country through Friday’s games at 60.9.
“We need to (be able to) make plays that are outside of the scout,” said
Huerter, who averaged 8.1 points per game and ranks No. 4 in the country in 3point shooting at 45.9%. “I definitely think that, this offseason, we’re going to be working on stuff to expand our games and make our team harder to guard.”
The best development for the 2024-25 Great Danes came earlier this month when Cooper announced she’d use her final year of eligibility with UAlbany.
“Let’s just say I cried tears of joy,” Mullen said of that news.
Beyond Cooper, UAlbany is able to bring back five of its players that averaged at least nine minutes per game. That includes starters Deja Evans and Lilly Phillips. If UAlbany is able to avoid any significant defections to the NCAA transfer portal, Mullen’s program will return four of its top-five scorers.
The departures UAlbany cannot do anything about are guard Sarah Karpell and forward Helene Haegerstrand, both starters and graduate students who have exhausted their NCAA eligibility. Karpell averaged a team-high 32.7 minutes per game, while Haegerstrand
averaged 9.1 points per game, second on the team behind Cooper.
In Haegerstrand, UAlbany loses a player that Mullen described as “transformative.” In five seasons with the Great Danes, Haegerstrand earned all-conference honors on four occasions. The 6-foot-1 forward ranks No. 4 in Division I all-time scoring for the program, and has meant as much to the program off the court as on it.
“She truly embodies the culture and values of our program,” Mullen said. “She’s an exemplary role model, on and off the court, in the community. She’s somebody that is an amazing ambassador for the university. She’s always doing the right thing when nobody’s looking.”
UAlbany has four signed recruits in Martina Borrellas, Delanie Hill, Makayla Noble and Manuela Piljevic, while The Next’s women’s basketball transfer portal tracker reported Friday that UAlbany freshman Hailey Ford had signaled her intention to transfer. At the moment, the Great Danes have four open scholarships for next season’s roster.