Team: Providence Friars
2023-24 Record: 13-21, 6-12 Big East
2023-24 Big East Finish: Tied for 8th, lost the conference tournament tiebreaker to Butler to be the #9 seed.
Final 2023-24 Her Hoop Stats Ranking: #167 out of 360 teams.
Postseason? After downing Butler, 75-60, in the first round of the Big East tournament, the Friars got obliterated by UConn, 86-53, in the quarterfinals. Somehow, a 13-20 record was good enough to earn a bye in the WNIT, which was the tertiary postseason tournament behind the NCAA tourney and the WBIT. Even with extra rest on Colgate as well as home court advantage, PC’s season ended with a 54-41 loss in their first WNIT game.
Key Departures: There are two women that we can rate as notable in terms of contributions to the Friars last season, although one was a player that we didn’t expect to have to think about last summer. That’s Laryn Edwards, who played for four seasons at Loyola-Maryland, and then ended up as a grad assistant on the PC bench in 2022-23..... before talking to the new coaching staff a year ago and debuting in late November. She ended up playing in 15 games, making nine starts, and averaged 3.0 points and 2.0 rebounds in 21 minutes a game when she made it on the floor.
That makes Kendall Eddy the only other departure, and she’s off to Holy Cross after one year in Friartown. Eddy was a regular contributor for Providence last season, appearing in 31 games and starting six times while averaging over 14 minutes a night. That’s a pretty good chunk of the season! She contributed 2.5 points, 1.0 rebounds, and 1.2 assists per game, so her part of the stat sheet is easy enough to replace, but perhaps the minutes aren’t.
Key Returners: With that short of a Departures section, that means we have to be in for a long Returners section. Providence is bringing back their top six every game scorers from last season, with Olivia Olsen leading the way in both points (13.7/game) and rebounds (8.5/game).
Before we move along too far, we should note that technically Kylee Sheppard is Providence’s leading returning assist player at 4.0 per game.... but she appeared in just six contests last season before suffering a season ending injury. Depending on what the injury was, it’s reasonable to think that she’ll be back to form by the time we get to November, and she chipped in 7.3 points, 3.0 rebounds, and 2.3 steals per night in the first six games of the year.
Back to the Friars who played all season! Grace Efosa and Brynn Farrell both averaged more than 10 points per game for PC in 2023-24, with Efosa falling just a point behind Olsen for the team lead. Both Efosa and Farrell were dangerous three-point shooters, connecting on more than 36% each. Farrell was the more likely (3.3 attempts/game) and the more successful (38.9%) shooter, and this coming year will be her bonus season of eligibility after two years with Florida and two with Providence.
With Sheppard out for most of last season, Emily Archibald and Marta Morales Romero round out the usual starting five that are all returning for Providence. Romero did a little more scoring (7.6/game) and Archibald did more rebounding (5.1/game) but both women were getting more than 25 minutes of action per night for the Friars. Both were effective three-point shooters as well, and Romero was just barely behind Farrell for the team lead in attempts per game.
Anyone playing in most of a team’s games for more than 10 minutes per contest is a notable rotation player, so we have to mention Nariah Scott, Sarah Bandoma, and Ugne Sirtautaite here. They all played in at least 28 of PC’s 34 games, they all played between 10 and 17 minutes per game.... and they all averaged less than four points and three rebounds per night. It’s not much, sure, but that gives Providence a nine player rotation just amongst their returning players, and that’s a pretty good spot to start a season. Scott started four times last season and Bandoma got the nod three times, and the fact that there’s this many players mixing in a handful of starts does kind of help explain why PC was well under .500 by season’s end.
Key Additions: The Friars are adding two transfers and two freshmen. Blue Star doesn’t particularly think all that much of the freshmen in terms of recruiting rankings, so we’ll just move on to the transfers.
Davai Matthews comes over to the East Coast after two seasons at Long Beach State. The 6’3” forward from Michigan didn’t do much as a freshman out in California, but she started 18 times in 31 games as a sophom*ore. She chipped in 4.5 points and 4.6 rebounds per game for The Beach, doing most of her work on the offensive end on the inside.
The other transfer should be familiar to Big East fans, as Mackayla Scarlett has moved from Xavier to Providence for her bonus season of eligibility. In 22 appearances last season, she averaged 13.2 points, 3.1 rebounds, and 1.6 assists per game, and her conference only stats match that up pretty well.
Coach: Erin Batth, entering her second season at Providence and in Division 1 overall. That gives her a 13-21 career record, of course.
Outlook: Well, I don’t think we can call Erin Batth’s first season as Providence head coach a success. The Friars ended up with a worse winning percentage overall than the year before even though they did play a postseason game. They did win two more Big East games with two fewer games being played, so that’s a bit of an achievement, but ultimately, not a full fledged success.
That’s fine!
That’s how coaching transition years go sometimes. To a certain extent, holding the win total steady from the year before is good news for Providence. Holding the roster mostly steady heading into Year Two is good news as well. It’s not unreasonable to experience a little bit of shakeout down the line after a coaching change, but the Friars aren’t really experiencing much of that.
We do have to note that most of the returning players for 2024-25 are the same returning players from last year, too. Olsen, Efosa, Sheppard, Scott, Farrell, Archibald... they all made it onto the list of Notable Returning Players last summer, coming out of a coaching change following a 13 win season. Bringing back lots of players that contributed a bunch for you doesn’t automatically make you better the next season. Providence is kind of a perfect example of that point as returning players didn’t make them better in 2023-24. Given that they did have a better run in Big East action, there’s an argument to be made that it just took some time for the Friars to figure out how Erin Batth’s system works and how to get things done with her in charge.
After all, they did start out last season 3-5 after losing Kylee Sheppard following the sixth game of the year, and a loss to Kennesaw State in their second game of the West Palm Beach Classic dropped the Friars to 6-7 heading into Big East action. Loss #5 and Loss #7 ended up as Providence’s only two “unexplainable” losses on the season, meaning they were the only two contests that went as defeats against teams that were worse than the Friars in the NET at the end of the season.
Well, almost. It’s good that Providence got to play a postseason game even if I don’t understand why the WNIT took a team with a 13-20 record. It’s bad that Providence lost that game, and even worse than they lost it at home, and even even worse that they lost by 13 points, and even even even worse that it was to a Colgate team that ended up at #191 in the NET. They shot under 29% from the field in that one and were down double digits most of the fourth quarter. It’s an ugly way to end a season that maaaaaaaybe could have been looked at as a success from certain points of view. Instead, they went out on a low note that left a bad taste in their mouth.
Are the Friars motivated by that end of season loss? Are they more acclimated to Batth’s style and demands of them now? Could that lead them to take advantage of some unsteadiness in the middle of the Big East standings and allow Providence to move up the ladder? Can at least one of their two transfers turn out to be an impact player that lifts the Friars? Could all of that work out in their favor and lead to the program’s first winning season since 2019? It might take a bit of luck working out for them, but that has to be a goal for Erin Batth and her charges for 2024-25.
