Considering lineup options for next season’s KU women’s team, with freshmen in the fold

photo by: Kahner Sampson/Special to the Journal-World

The Kansas women's basketball team huddles during the game against North Alabama on Sunday, Nov. 17, 2024, in Lawrence.

The Kansas women’s basketball team had the unexpected luxury of completing its roster in mid-April.

When Indiana transfer forward Lilly Meister signed on April 14, she both filled KU’s biggest and essentially only remaining need and, based on remarks head coach Brandon Schneider made soon afterward, essentially put an end to its offseason activity. As Schneider said in early June, there’s a difference between having remaining scholarship slots available — the Jayhawks could conceivably use as many as three more — and having money left over to bring in players beyond their current 12.

Fortunately for KU, it’s a strong dozen, bringing back nearly the entirety of last year’s rotation and combining it with arguably the best recruiting class in program history.

The unprecedented class is a significant milestone, and each player contained within will have her role to play. But any discussion of the 2025-26 Kansas women’s basketball team has to start with S’Mya Nichols and Elle Evans.

Nichols performed as expected during her second year in the program; that is, there was no sophomore slump for the local star out of Shawnee Mission West. She became a first-team all-conference selection and earned an All-American honorable mention from the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association after she averaged 18.6 points and 4.7 assists per game.

Not only did Nichols embrace her role as the team’s primary ball handler and distributor, a role which had been key down the stretch in her freshman season and was even more so during her second year as Wyvette Mayberry missed almost the whole year due to injury, she was an unstoppable force whenever she drove toward the rim. Nichols drew seemingly endless fouls, attempting a remarkable 260 free throws and making 218 of them.

As she took such a beating, though, she also got banged up. Nichols remarkably didn’t miss a game all year, but she exited a road tilt at Colorado on Jan. 11 with a back injury, then later left the Big 12 tournament game against Texas Tech and was unable to return as KU lost in the first round. Her production dipped slightly at times late in conference play, even as she was still the Jayhawks’ most consistent player.

She’ll now be counted on for an even greater leadership responsibility in shepherding KU’s incoming freshmen, one Schneider pointed out she’s already embracing by choosing to live with them on campus.

Evans also missed the Big 12 tournament game, as well as the senior-day matchup with Oklahoma State just before it. Prior to then, she had delivered on the promise she offered as a transfer from North Dakota State, as a knock-down shooter whose 6-foot-3 frame also allows her to offer plenty of utility in other offensive applications and on the defensive end. She posted 14.4 points and 4.1 rebounds per game while shooting 42.1% from deep on 164 attempts. Evans was also very durable and played more than 35 minutes per game.

Schneider said earlier in June that “most everybody’s cleared to be able to fully participate” and that time to rest did plenty of good for the likes of Evans and Nichols. Both will be locks for next season’s lineup.

Schneider has stated that he wants KU to play more often with three guards and two forwards this season, instead of four guards around one center. Placing Evans at the 3 spot and Nichols at the point leaves one more guard position open, for which there should be plenty of competition.

Laia Conesa is a solid secondary ball handler and decent shooter who started 25 games last year. Sania Copeland, who will be a senior, is an elite defender who was a nonfactor on offense down the stretch in the spring. Brittany Harshaw at one point made eight 3s in a game against Iowa State but only made 22 in 90 tries the rest of the year.

They will all have to reckon with the arrivals of freshmen Libby Fandel and Keeley Parks. Fandel is a 6-foot-1 wing from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, while Parks, from Norman, Oklahoma, is 5-foot-11 and more of a combo guard.

In a recent edition of the “Hawk Talk” radio show that served as an introduction to KU’s newcomers, Parks said, “I play super fast, I can shoot the 3, and defending is one of my biggest things.”

Fandel, for her part, described her offensive game as follows: “I love to shoot the 3. That’s what I love to do. But other than that, I like to create off that too, just drive. I need to work on my pull-up jumper a lot more.”

She also said that she loves to rebound but will need to work on her defense more as the pace of play increased in college.

If KU were to choose between its distinguished freshmen for one spot in the starting lineup, Fandel would provide a bit more length and therefore potential switchability on defense, but that attribute isn’t necessarily at a premium if KU is going to also start the 6-foot Nichols, 6-foot-3 Evans and a pair of forwards who are also 6-foot-2 or 6-foot-3. Parks might have the edge in terms of overall offensive firepower and also enters as the better-regarded recruit as a consensus five-star. Schneider and his staff will undoubtedly tinker with lineups this season now that they have enough depth to reasonably do so, but Parks is a strong option for the third guard spot.

The shift to two forwards will be a welcome one for a KU team that looked quite different — and often worse for wear — as it had to deploy smaller and less dominant players in the post in 2024-25 after years of Taiyanna Jackson. This time around, the Jayhawks will not be as vulnerable to foul trouble or to hard-charging opposing centers. They essentially have five players for these two spots: freshmen Tatyonna Brown and Jaliya Davis, returnees Nadira Eltayeb and Regan Williams and the senior transfer Meister, from Indiana.

Brown, a Colorado Springs, Colorado, native and the fourth member of the vaunted recruiting class, shouldn’t be neglected just because she doesn’t have all the same accolades as Davis, Fandel and Parks. She’s a high-energy, athletic forward with a passion for rebounding and defense that could potentially get her on the floor early. Eltayeb is a physical 6-foot-4 center and by far the longest-tenured member of the roster.

The three top contenders for two starting spots, though, are Davis, Meister and Williams.

Davis is another local product who excelled to such an extent at Blue Valley North that she developed into a five-star prospect and just the second McDonald’s All-American that KU has ever recruited out of high school. She is the top recruit in KU’s top class and will undoubtedly make an immediate impact as long as she can adapt quickly to the collegiate level, a transition she didn’t seem especially concerned about when she spoke to reporters earlier in June.

Meister, who grew up in a KU-supporting family, joins the Jayhawks after three seasons at Indiana, where she spent about half a year as the Hoosiers’ starting center and was part of some successful campaigns that featured trips to the postseason. Despite her history of working in the post, she can shoot from the outside and has said she hopes to run the floor and stretch it more than she did at IU.

Williams, the lone returnee among the three, acquitted herself rather well in extended action as a freshman, scoring 8.9 points and 5.0 rebounds and showing off a versatile range of abilities as a mobile forward. She was named to the Big 12’s all-freshman team and started for the vast majority of the year.

Needless to say, it’s hard to exclude any of these three from the starting lineup. Davis seems like a lock with her background and her two-way skill set. Meister is one of the most experienced players on the roster and pairing with Davis could be a good opportunity for her to show off some of those capabilities she felt were neglected in the past. It’s difficult to relegate Williams to the bench, but Schneider actually did it late in the 2024-25 season — which was presumably an attempt to get some production somewhere other than the starting lineup when KU’s bench contributions were minimal otherwise, but one that shows she could potentially thrive in a sixth-player role. In one of those games, she scored a season-high 20 points in 25 minutes against BYU.

The narrow margins between some of these players demonstrate just how different this roster is from last year’s. They also show that all 12 Jayhawks could contend for roles this season.