The 2025-26 girls’s faculty basketball season begins on Monday, and after an extended wait, it is not coming a second too quickly.
With Paige Bueckers now within the WNBA and USC famous person Juju Watkins saying she would miss the entire 2025-26 season because of the damage she suffered through the NCAA match, some new stars might want to emerge.
The excellent news is that there are many candidates. UConn and UCLA are among the many groups to beat, though South Carolina, LSU and Texas must also be within the combine.
So far as the people who can have the most important influence on the 2025-26 girls’s faculty basketball season, listed here are 10 individuals who will outline what occurs throughout one other extremely anticipated season.
Sarah Robust, UConn
When asking who’s subsequent in girls’s faculty basketball, we do not have to look any additional than the defending nationwide champs.
Outdoors of Bueckers, no person had an even bigger influence on UConn’s nationwide title run than freshman Sarah Robust. She averaged 19 factors and 11.7 rebounds through the postseason. The 6-foot-2 rising sophomore additionally averaged 2.0 blocks and 1.5 steals and made 2.2 3-pointers per sport whereas capturing 50 p.c from past the arc.
Lauren Betts of UCLA is perhaps the very best participant within the nation, however Sarah Robust is essentially the most thrilling.
She’s acquired subsequent.
Lauren Betts, UCLA
The Bruins reached the Last 4 final season Betts was an enormous motive why.
The 6-7 pressure may simply be the Nationwide Participant of the 12 months in 2025-26 after she averaged 20.2 factors, 9.5 rebounds and a pair of.9 blocks final season. The middle made 64.8 p.c of her field-goal makes an attempt. She’s additionally grabbed over 100 offensive rebounds in every of the previous two seasons.
Within the paint, she’s essentially the most dominant participant in girls’s faculty basketball.
Kim Mulkey, LSU head coach
There is not anyone extra fascinating within the girls’s faculty basketball than Mulkey. All she does is win and costume glamorously.
It has been two years for the reason that LSU Tigers gained the nationwide championship, and even reached the Last 4.
Armed with the highest recruiting class in girls’s faculty basketball, a key switch from South Carolina, MiLaysia Fulwiley and a few returning All-People, the Tigers are a top 5 team.
And with one of many biggest winners the sport has ever seen nonetheless on the bench, sleep on the Tigers at your personal danger.
Skim Milkey, insider
Faculty basketball has Trilly Donovan. Properly, girls’s faculty basketball has Skim Milkey.
When you do not observe the account on X, as a girls’s faculty basketball fan, it is best to.
Skim Milkey is not an actual individual. It is a faux title, however behind it’s a actual girls’s hoops insider, with in-depth evaluation, perception and recruiting information.
There are some nice follows on the market, however should you love girls’s faculty basketball, Skim Milkey must be certainly one of them.
Kiki Rice, UCLA
One of many greatest stars within the sport, on and off the court docket, Rice might be essentially the most well-known girls’s faculty basketball participant this season.
Throughout her sophomore season, she was featured on an ESPN documentary with Caitlin Clark and Paige Bueckers. She was a First-Crew All-Huge Ten choice final season, similar to her teammate Betts, after averaging 12.8 factors, 5.2 assists,and 4.8 rebounds.
Rice has improved as a three-point shooter from 21 p.c as a freshman to 36 p.c final season and is among the premier playmakers within the sport.
The senior was the primary athlete to signal an NIL cope with Jordan Model and has her personal shoe assortment amid quite a few different sponsorships. Her aunt is Susan Rice, and her cousin is Allan Houston. She’s additionally relationship NBA participant Cason Wallace.
Rice is a star, no query. However she’s acquired unfinished enterprise on the court docket.
Geno Auriemma, UConn
Auriemma has 1,250 wins in girls’s faculty basketball as UConn head coach. The Huskies gained their twelfth nationwide title final April, in what was Auriemma’s twenty fourth Last 4.
What’s scary is that UConn, the preseason No. 1, is loaded once more. The Huskies may need the very best participant this as soon as once more season, however they definitely have the very best coach, which is why many are predicting a thirteenth nationwide championship this season for Geno, the GOAT.
Ta’Niya Latson, South Carolina
One staff gunning to knock off UConn is South Carolina.
The Gamecocks misplaced within the nationwide championship sport, however regardless of some departures, have reloaded in their very own proper, due to the addition of Latson, the nation’s main scorer in 2024-25.
Latson, a 5-foot-8 guard, averaged 25.2 factors for Florida State final season. She additionally averaged 4.5 assists, 2.2 steals and 4.6 rebounds per sport.
The dynamic guard even shot 34.3 p.c from past the arc, and below the tutelage of Daybreak Staley, she might be Participant of the 12 months.
Hannah Hidalgo, Notre Dame
The junior for the Preventing Irish is commonly in comparison with Caitlin Clark. She matched the previous Iowa famous person’s totals of 1,500 factors and 300 assists in below 70 video games. She additionally led girls’s faculty basketball in steals as a freshman with 4.6 per sport. Final season, she averaged 3.7.
Hidalgo scored 23.8 factors per sport final season and shot 40 p.c from three-point vary. She’s not as prolific from deep as Clark, however she’s in all probability the very best two-way participant in girls’s faculty basketball.
Syla Swords, Michigan
The youngest Olympian in girls’s basketball historical past in Canada burst onto the scene as a freshman for the Wolverines, serving to them attain the second spherical of the NCAA match.
She was certainly one of three freshmen starters for Michigan, which has by no means reached the Last 4. In three video games in opposition to top-2 groups final season (South Carolina, USC, UCLA), Swords averaged 27.6 factors per sport. She scored 27 on the Gamecocks in her first profession sport.
After averaging 16 factors and 6.2 rebounds as a freshman, it seems like Swords is perhaps essentially the most underrated participant in all of girls’s faculty basketball.
If you do not know her title, you’ll quickly sufficient.
Flau’jae Johnson, LSU
The previous nationwide champion may need the very best hair in faculty basketball, now that Juju is out for the season, however she’s rather more than that.
Like Rice, Johnson is among the greatest manufacturers within the sport. She was an All-American final season with a mean of 18.6 factors per sport, is lethal from three-point vary (.383) and has the advertising expertise to match.
Like her head coach, Johnson is tenacious. If the Tigers make a Last 4 run in 2025-26, Flau’jae can have performed an enormous half.
