photo by: AP Photo/David Yeazell

Indiana forward Lilly Meister (52) shoots the ball during the second half against South Carolina in the second round of the NCAA college basketball tournament, Sunday, March 23, 2025, in Columbia, S.C.

When Lilly Meister entered the portal in late March after three seasons with the Indiana women’s basketball team, she was looking for a sense of familiarity.

“The transfer portal is hard, because in high school you have all these years to be recruited and get to know everybody,” she said on Monday on the “Hawk Talk” radio show. “When you’re in the portal you get a month, maybe a little more than that if you’re lucky. I was really looking for somebody, kind of, that I already knew and I already had a connection with so I didn’t have to waste all the time of getting to know an entirely new staff.”

Kansas quickly emerged as an option that fit that description particularly well, as the school that, under head coach Brandon Schneider and his staff, was “always second in line when I was being recruited in high school” out of Rochester, Minnesota, Meister said. She followed along with the KU program over the years even after she ultimately went to Indiana.

Schneider, for his part, has said that he felt the way his staff left things with the 6-foot-3 forward when she picked IU played a role in maintaining their relationship, “just in terms of how we took the news and how we were going to be supportive of her.”

But the long-term relationship that the KU staff had built with Meister was actually shorter in duration than her connection to KU basketball itself — which was revealed to the public when, upon committing on April 14, she shared a photo on Instagram from the archives in which she and one of her siblings were wearing KU T-shirts.

“My dad was born in Kansas,” Meister explained on Monday. “I couldn’t tell you where. But he was born here. A lot of his side of the family lives here so I have a lot of family in the Kansas City area. And so, yeah, he was raised a Jayhawk fan. We’ve always been Jayhawk fans in my house.”

And his response to Meister’s transfer decision?

“Oh my gosh, he was so excited,” she said. “I think I became the favorite child.”

Now, as the lone transfer addition to the roster, Meister — who has already given her father, Kurt, a KU-branded polo shirt for Father’s Day — will provide a long-awaited post presence and veteran experience for the highly anticipated 2025-26 team.

“It’s surreal just to be here,” she said.

Besides a KU family, Meister comes from a bona fide basketball family. Kurt and Meister’s mother Angie each had distinguished careers at South Dakota State, her older brother Lincoln played four seasons at Minnesota-Duluth and one as a walk-on at Minnesota and her younger sister Laynie is an incoming freshman at St. Cloud State.

Meister herself was the second player ever to score 2,000 points at John Marshall High School and played 63 games over her first two seasons at IU as the Hoosiers made their fourth and fifth consecutive trips to the NCAA Tournament, reaching the Sweet 16 in 2024.

As a junior, she started in the post in her first 17 games of the season, putting up 20-point performances against Harvard, Columbia and Wisconsin, but saw her playing time reduced in the second half of the year as she finished with 6.7 points and 3.5 rebounds in 17.2 minutes per game. In the NCAA Tournament against Utah on March 21, she went 5-for-5 and scored 11 points, her first time scoring in double figures since her removal from the starting lineup.

She entered the portal soon after IU’s season ended with a loss to South Carolina and didn’t take too long to pick KU.

In announcing Meister’s signing, Schneider highlighted her ability to aid the Jayhawks in the pick-and-roll game and to step out and stretch the floor.

“We believe that she pairs extremely well with both our returners and incoming players,” he said in a release.

Here’s how Meister described her own skill set on Monday: “I’d say I’m pretty versatile. I did a lot of time inside in my college career so far, so I have a lot of experience playing inside. I know how to play on the outside, I can shoot the 3, obviously I like to rebound.”

Meister is just 2-for-11 from beyond the arc in her college career but told her hometown paper, the Post Bulletin, in April that she felt she didn’t get to make use of her shooting and her ability to run the floor often enough when she was at Indiana.

“Those things that have been cooped up inside of me, I’m ready to release them,” she told the Post Bulletin.

It certainly seems like Schneider is ready to help her to do so. He has said he expects to play her alongside another forward as KU goes away from the four-guard lineups it has used in recent years.

That means Meister could see significant time alongside fellow newcomers Jaliya Davis and Tatyonna Brown, members of KU’s highly touted freshman class, as well as returnees Regan Williams and Nadira Eltayeb.

photo by: Damon Young/Kansas Athletics

New Kansas forward Lilly Meister is pictured in summer workouts on Tuesday, June 10, 2025, in Lawrence.