2026-27 Big East Women’s Basketball Summer Vibe Check: Xavier Musketeers
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Team: Xavier Musketeers
2025-26 Record: 11-19, 4-16 Big East
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2025-26 Big East Finish: 11th, which is last, one game behind DePaul.
Final 2025-26 Rankings
NET: #201
Her Hoop Stats: #250
BartTorvik.com: #151
Postseason? Only losing to St. John’s in the 6/11 game of the first round of the Big East tournament, leaving the Musketeers with eight straight losses to end the season.
Notable Departures: Almost everyone that mattered.
Some of the departures were to be expected, Savannah White and Petra Oborilova were on their fourth season of eligibility. White had a little bit of a question after playing in just six games for Wisconsin as a freshman, but the fact that she was part of the lawsuit against the five years/five seasons rules tells you everything about whether or not she was eligible under the old rules. White led Xavier in rebounding and blocks last season at 7.3 and 1.4 per game respectively and she chipped in 7.0 points per night, too. No, that’s not much, but when your leading scorer is under 15 a game, it’s helpful. White nudged out Oborilova in the starts department, 29 to 28, but Oborilova appeared in all 30 games last season. Even though she played nearly 22 minutes a night, Oborilova didn’t impact the stat sheet much at 4.1 points and 2.5 rebounds per game.
That moves us along to the transfers, and that means we get to talk about the departure of Xavier’s top two scorers from last season. Mariyah Noel got what she was probably looking for when she left Ole Miss after two seasons and less than 320 minutes played in that time. She was Xavier’s #1 option, leading the team in field goal attempts on her way to leading in scoring at 14.9 points per game. She also added 6.3 rebounds and 2.4 assists per game, so that’s a lot of production heading out the door. #2 on the scoring chart was MacKenzie Givens, who departs Cincinnati after two years with the Musketeers. She grabbed up a starting spot six games into the season, and as a starter, Givens averaged 12.1 points and 4.5 rebounds per game. Now she’s at Marquette, and probably in line to start for the Golden Eagles. It’s worth noting that according to BartTorvik.com, Givens was Xavier’s most effective player at least in terms of production compared to her usage rate.
Two more to go! Vivien Nejasmic started picking up a handful of starts late in her second year with the Musketeers and ended up averaging 22.2 minutes while appearing in all 30 games this past season. She averaged 6.9 points and 3.7 rebounds, but the 6’0” guard is at La Salle now. There wasn’t too much different between Audia Young’s sophomore season at Auburn (13.5 minutes, 4.7 points) and her junior year at Xavier (16.6 minutes, 3.0 points), so it’s probably not a terrible surprise that she’s opting to try her hand at Charlotte now.
Notable Returners: Remember when I said “almost everyone that mattered” departed the Xavier program after last season ended? The “almost” in that phrase is referring exclusively to Meri Kanerva. The 5’9” Finnish guard finished her second season as a starter for Xavier by leading all of Division 1 in minutes per game at 38.3, and she was Xavier’s third double digit scorer behind Noel and Givens, adding 10.1 points per game. She also chipped in 2.5 rebounds and a team high 3.8 assists per game.
Officially, there are four other women returning from last year’s roster, but the four of them combined to play 45 minutes for Xavier with three not playing at all. Two were freshmen last season, so that’s perhaps not the worst thing in the world.
Key Additions: Xavier adds five freshmen to the roster for this fall, four from overseas and one from the United States. The American is the only one of the five to join the roster as a November signee, and the four overseas players trickled in after the middle of April. I’m not going to hustle around trying to find an upside for most of these women. Most, not all. The one I will isolate is Kejia Ran, because I don’t think she should be allowed to play NCAA basketball at all. Ran was the 43rd pick of the 2026 WNBA Draft, and now the 6’0” guard from China is going to suit up for Xavier instead of trying to latch on with the Atlanta Dream immediately. I don’t have a lot of patience for the ongoing “I have chosen to go play professional basketball, actually, no, I would like to turn around and play in college now” storylines. This isn’t like hockey or baseball where you’re draft eligible just by being 18 years old and you can choose to forego your professional career until you choose to sign an entry level contract. You chose to be a pro, now go live with your choices. Counterpoint: I’m going to have a lot of questions if Kejia Ran isn’t Xavier’s best player in 2026-27.
That leaves us with three incoming transfers to address, and given the lack of anything else reliable on the Xavier roster, I’d have to imagine that all three are going to have somewhere between a mostly significant and very significant role to play. With that said, all three have question marks about whether or not they can be a load bearing piece for the Musketeers.
Maria Anais Rodriguez (6’1” junior forward, Barcelona, Spain) didn’t do much at Oklahoma State as a freshman, then started her first six games at Arkansas… then came off the bench the rest of the way for the Razorbacks. She was a rotation player, ending up at 16.5 minutes per game, but it’s clear (5.4 points, 3.0 rebounds, 30% three-point shooting) that Arkansas wasn’t depending on her to carry the mail. Diawna Carter-Hartley (6’1” senior forward, Cincinnati, Ohio) has never been seen as a starter by her coaches for two years at Stetson or last year at South Alabama. And yet, she keeps playing her way into the starting lineup as the season goes along. She averaged 8.8 points and 6.3 rebounds for the Jaguars last year. Hila Karsh (5’8” sophomore guard, Rishon LeZion, Israel) got off to a good start as a freshman at Purdue last year, appearing in the starting lineup for the first 15 games of the season. Then she came off the bench for the remaining 15 games of the campaign and she lost about a third of her minutes per game. As you’d expect, her production faded out hard (9.8 points/game as a starter, 3.9 as a reserve), so it remains to be seen what she can do with consistent playing time for a full season.
Coach: Billi Chambers, entering her fourth season with the Musketeers and 14th as a Division 1 head coach. She is now 19-70 in Cincinnati and 160-223 overall.
Outlook: Credit where credit is due, as Xavier won 10 games in a season for the first time since 2018-19. They got there with a 71-61 home win over DePaul on January 13th, and then they pushed to an 11th win by toppling Butler, 63-59, on February 1st.
That means Xavier closed out the season with losses in 12 of their final 13 games, and that means I can repeat some sentences that I wrote in last year’s Vibe Check because they’re still true:
They have been ranked below #230 in the country in either offense or defense by Her Hoop Stats (sometimes both!) in every season since 2016-17. They haven’t had a winning season since a 17-13 campaign in 2015-16. The Musketeers haven’t been on the winning side of a conference schedule since going 14-0 in the Atlantic 10 back in 2010-11.
Xavier goes into next season chasing a 12 win season for the first time since 2016-17. Billi Chambers is going to have to try and accomplish that with one player on her 13 woman roster who has a track record of being a starter at any level of Division 1. Seven of her 13 players have never played a second of Division 1 basketball.
I ask you this: What about her career winning percentage of .418 makes you think that Billi Chambers is capable of pushing the right buttons with this roster and turning it into a team that can have a shot at finishing at .500?
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