Oct. 31—The 2024-25 UAA women’s basketball team is blending a strong returning nucleus along with a recruiting class buoyed by a trio of international players.
The Seawolves return a pair of starters — guards Jazzpher Evans and Elaina Mack — from a team that finished 19-9 and narrowly missed the Division II NCAA Tournament.
The team also boasts a pair of talented posts in forwards Tori Hollingshead and Ashlyn Rean. Hollingshead is the team’s top returning scorer after averaging 12.5 points per game off the bench as a junior. Rean, a freshman from Rangiora, New Zealand, has experience playing internationally and joined the Seawolves in the final semester of last season as a redshirt.
“We’re excited,” Seawolves head coach Ryan McCarthy said. “We have one of the best players in the conference in Tori Hollingshead coming back. It’s really hard to find posts at our level that can play at the level that she’s been playing at. Ashlyn Rean from New Zealand has been playing at a really high level for us. So I’m excited about those two in particular.”
The Seawolves kick off their season this weekend with a pair of games against NAIA foe Simpson (California) University. The games at the Alaska Airlines Center are scheduled for 7 p.m. Friday and 4 p.m. Saturday.
McCarthy expects senior transfer Emilia Long to also make a big impact as a starter early in the season. Long averaged 15.2 points per game, 5.6 rebounds per game and 4.1 assists per game with Cal Poly Humboldt last season.
Mack, from King Cove, was also tabbed by McCarthy as making waves after a strong offseason. Mack averaged 7.7 points per game as a sophomore.
“We’ve got a great group and we mesh well together,” Mack said. “It’s an even split between newcomers and returners so that was helpful. We were able to show (the newcomers) a lot but were also able to learn a lot from them.”
Two of the team’s newcomers are international players. Junior forward Hedda Koehne from Germany and junior guard Noa Muranaka from Japan will bolster the team’s depth.
“(Muranaka) plays a very unique style compared to what we see in American basketball,” McCarthy said. “But the Asian style is so fast that she fits real nicely in our system.”
Jaisa Gamble will likely fill out the starting lineup in the early going. A 6-foot senior forward, Gamble was the team’s fourth-leading rebounder and contributed on defense as a junior.
The Seawolves were picked third in the Great Northwest Athletic Conference preseason poll and are a perennial contender for the conference title. McCarthy, with a record of 281-62, is the winningest coach in UAA women’s basketball history since taking over the program in 2012. During his tenure, the Seawolves won six straight GNAC regular-season titles and won the GNAC Tournament four times.
“I do think that this is a team, if we stay healthy and all those things fall into place, this team can compete for a championship,” McCarthy said. “That’s something that we talk about as a program every year, and it’s something that we recruit to because, if you do come here, that is the expectation.”
Last year’s team narrowly missed the NCAA Tournament, and Mack said that is at the top of the list for the team’s 2024-25 goals.
“For us returners, that’s something that we think about every day,” she said. “We 100% believe that we’re among the best teams in the West Regional. Just knowing too that the games at the beginning of the season are just as important as the ones in conference (is important).”
McCarthy said returning to the national tournament is an expectation for the team.
“We’ve talked about that a lot, even when the days are hard, to use that as motivation to get through some of those harder days,” he said. “And you know, so long as we stay healthy, I think that’s a realistic goal and expectation for this team.”
After this weekend, the Seawolves will begin a run of five games on the road. When they return to play in Anchorage, it will be for the Great Alaska Shootout.
North Dakota State, Troy and Vermont will join the Seawolves in the tournament, which runs Nov. 22-23.
