Oct. 29—MITCHELL — Excitement is high for the Dakota Wesleyan University women’s basketball team ahead of a new season tipping off this week.
A talented roster returns for the Tigers, who are ranked No. 9 in the preseason nationally and expect to be among the contenders in the Great Plains Athletic Conference and contend for another long NAIA postseason run in March.
Here’s what to know ahead of the upcoming season:
Coach: Jason Christensen, 15th season.
Record (2023-24): 22-11, 14-8 GPAC.
Last postseason: The Tigers lost to eventual national champion Dordt in the GPAC tournament semifinals and received an at-large bid to the NAIA tournament. DWU won two games on the opening weekend, knocking off Rust (Miss.) and No. 5 Clarke (Iowa) to return to the final 16 in Sioux City, Iowa. There, the Tigers’ season ended with an 87-80 loss to Cumberlands (Ky.).
Key returners: The Tigers bring back nearly 85 percent of their scoring from last season, led by GPAC freshman of the year Emma Yost, who scored 15.1 points per game. Rylee Rosenquist (10.6 ppg), Isabel Ihnen (9.9 ppg), Shalayne Nagel (9.8 ppg), Taliyah Hayes (8.4 ppg) and Grace Fryda (5.8 ppg) also all return for the Tigers.
Key departures: Starting guard Morgan Edelman did not return to the Tigers roster this season for a potential senior season. Forward Lacey Sprakel transferred to Mount Marty for her final season of eligibility. Forward Anna Campbell graduated from the Tigers roster as a senior last season.
Key newcomers: The biggest new name for the Tigers is 6-foot-1 sophomore guard Avery Broughton, the former Corsica-Stickney High School standout who joins DWU after one season at the University of South Dakota. Among the notable freshmen to watch this season are guards Nora Dinger (Wall) and Tesa Olson (Luverne, N.D.), forward Lizzie Pavlis (Flandreau) and 6-foot-3 center Avery Orth (Wessington Springs).
Notes: DWU was picked third out of the 12 teams in the GPAC preseason coaches poll. … DWU ranked No. 7 in the NAIA last season in free throw percentage at 77.9%. The Tigers also ranked No. 14 overall in offensive efficiency. … Yost was the conference’s leading freshman scorer last season and fourth among all players. … The Tigers’ roster is made up of nearly all South Dakotans, except for one North Dakotan (Olson) and one Nebraskan (freshman Haley Johnson, of Gordon). … The Tigers are 31-9 in home games over the last three seasons.
Work in progress: Expect the Tigers to evolve as the season goes on, in major part because they’ve dealt with injuries during the preseason. Christensen said Ihnen, Maleighya Estes, Fryda and Hayes have all missed time and all have varying timetables to return to the game court. Christensen said he’s hopeful the team will be at full strength by mid-December.
Back for one more: Both Mya Wilson and Isabel Ihnen are back for fifth and final seasons as graduate-level players in the Tiger program. “It’s huge, and it’s not only on the court … what they do on the court speaks for itself, but off the court, just all the little things of getting players to jell, to understanding what we’re trying to do on the court and Mya and Izzy have been with me for four years, so they understand my system,” Christensen said. “You look at a lot of the teams that had success last year, they had a lot of fifth-year kids on their team and I’m hoping that helps us too, having that leadership on the court.”
Christensen on his team: “There’s a lot of teams, if they’re losing four players to start the season, they’d be asking, ‘What the heck are we going to do?’ For us, we have a talented roster and if we’re healthy, I feel really good that we can play 10 to 12 kids. I’m serious on that. And of that group, we’ll have some kids that won’t get to start but they probably would at some other GPAC schools. So that’s a good problem for right now and I think it’s going to take us a while to mesh just because we haven’t had the chance to play everyone with each other in practice.”
How it starts: DWU starts the season at 6 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 1 at Oklahoma Wesleyan University in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, before heading to Friends (Kan.) in Wichita, Kansas at 5:30 p.m. on Saturday, Nov. 2. DWU’s home schedule opens on Wednesday, Nov. 6 with a top-10 national matchup with No. 6 Dakota State visiting No. 9 DWU at 6 p.m. at the Corn Palace.
