Ithaca College seems to have a “redeem team” of its own this season, as the women’s basketball team aims to return to the summit of the NCAA Tournament.
The 2023–24 season marked a serious low point in the program’s recent history, as it lost in the semifinals of the Liberty League Championship Tournament for the first time since the 2017–18 season. More pressingly, the team failed to make the NCAA Tournament for the first time since the 2015–16 season, nearly a decade ago.
While last year’s team was nowhere near the double-digit losses of the 2015–16 squad, head coach Dan Raymond said that missing the postseason was painful all the same.
“Everybody was deflated because it is an expectation here,” Raymond said. “They didn’t know how to react or respond. The first–years, it was different for them because they’d never been here. But for the veteran players, they’d always been playing in the NCAA Tournament when we got to the end of the season.”
The highest scorer on the 2023–24 team was now-graduate student guard June Dickson, a transfer in from Division I Cal Poly, who put up 12.2 points per game. She said that few on the team took the realization harder than the graduating class.
“It was really sad,” Dickson said. “Especially for the seniors who’ve put in so many years and so much work into this program, for them to not achieve that final goal of making it to the NCAAs — that was just devastating.”
After a season like that, Raymond said he and the staff knew it was time to make significant changes to the team.
“We ended up electing captains, which is something that I hadn’t done in years,” Raymond said. “We came up with a different format for our summer program that was more engaging. From a coach’s perspective, there’s only a limited amount of things that we can actually be involved with in the summer, but I think the leadership really kind of elevated the focus for the summer program overall.”
Perhaps the most notable change to the South Hill squad going into the upcoming season is the roster, where the turnover has been substantial. The team graduated three players, including All-Liberty League second-team guard Camryn Coffey ’24, the team’s second-highest scoring player and best shooter from beyond the arc, hitting an efficient 38.6% of her three-pointers last season.
Replacing her production along with that of assist leader Hannah Polce ’24 may seem like a tall order, but the Bombers are more than reinforced this season. Extensive recruiting has caused this squad to rise to 19 players, up from 14 last season. Senior forward and team captain Anya Watkins, who was an All-Liberty League honorable mention in 2023–24 and led the team in rebounds last season, said the added depth has only made the players work harder.
“There’s a lot of competition,” Watkins said. “Everybody wants to win, but it’s making us all better. Everyone’s got a ton of talent, and so no one’s comfortable. Every practice you’re being pushed by a different person.”
Six new players are first-year students, but the Bombers have turned to a transfer duo for an immediate impact through the transfer portal. Raymond said sophomore guard Madalyn Barrows, from Division II Shepherd University, should be a great addition to a Bombers team that led the Liberty League in three-point percentage last season but was bottom half in three-point shots attempted.
The other upperclassman is a much more familiar face to fans of Bombers women’s basketball: Graduate student guard Emma Waite, an All-Liberty League second-team member, put up double-digit points in all three games RIT played against Ithaca last season. Waite averaged 12.4 PPG and tallied 111 assists for the season, the most in the Liberty League, and good enough for top 50 in the nation last season. Raymond said that getting her on the team was a very simple process.
“She reached out to us,” Raymond said. “We had a short timeline. She had to get her application in, she had to get accepted into the grad program — it was just one of those things where she felt very strongly about coming here and joining our program, and also was able to find an academic program in the graduate school that was going to prepare her for what she wants to do next.”
It’s not just about the new blood going into the 2024–25 season, though: the Bombers return eight of their 10 leading scorers from last season, including senior forward Annabella Yorio, junior guard Zoraida Icabalceta and team captain senior guard Jillian Payne. Additionally, Raymond said he expects the sophomore class to step up this season.
“[Sophomore guard] Tori Drevna, [and sophomore forward] Elizabeth Majka, I think they’re both going to be people that you’ll see more on the floor,” Raymond said. “I also think [sophomore guard] Grace McNamara is going to get some opportunities this year for us. And then the kind of sleeper is [sophomore guard] Aila Dervisevic. She works as hard as everybody else, [and is] probably our best shooter.”
Looking at the upcoming schedule, three of the Bombers’ upcoming non-conference games are competitors from last season’s NCAA Tournament, something Raymond said was an intentional decision to test how good this year’s team is. However, as they did the previous season, the team’s biggest threats may lie in the Liberty League. The Bombers lost six games last season. Two of those losses were to Vassar College and three losses were to Skidmore College, the latter being the team to knock Ithaca out of the Liberty League Championships.
Watkins said this season, the Bombers are out for revenge.
“We want to come back and redeem ourselves, show that that was a fluke, that it never should have even happened that way,” Watkins said. “I think it goes across the whole team, everybody wants to beat Vassar and Skidmore — ask anybody on the team. The next game is always the most important, but those girls have a target on their back.”
The Bombers’ first game will be at 5:30 p.m. Nov. 13 against local rivals SUNY Cortland, the beginning of a three-game homestretch.
