Though she must still figure out exactly how will fit next to and , coach has an idea of how the LSU women’s basketball team’s guards will contribute next season.
The Tigers have only four returning contributors, and they all play in the backcourt.
What’s less certain, Mulkey told ¶¶Ňőh in a recent interview, is the LSU , a group she and her staff had to overhaul this offseason after a few key contributors left the program via the transfer portal.
“I think the exciting thing about the upcoming team is the unknown,” Mulkey said, “and the unknown is probably gonna be considered our post game.”
This spring, LSU had to replace all five frontcourt players from its 2024-2025 roster. Aneesah Morrow exhausted her eligibility and began her WNBA career. The other four decided to hit the transfer portal. Sa’Myah Smith landed at Virginia. Jersey Wolfenbarger and Aalyah Del Rosario enrolled at Tennessee and Vanderbilt, respectively. Amani Bartlett transferred to Houston.
Those departures forced Mulkey and her staff to overhaul their roster on the fly.
By the time the dust settled, the Tigers had found eight newcomers — five freshmen and three transfers — to replace the eight contributors they lost. That’s the most roster turnover LSU has experienced since the first full offseason of Mulkey’s tenure.
“That's not gonna stop,” Mulkey said, “even if you win national championships. That's just the way it is now, and you can't even guesstimate because you don't know.”
The only thing LSU did know was that it had four recruits signed to the nation’s No. 1 freshman class. In the 30-day portal window, the Tigers had to first make sure they would retain both Johnson and Williams, then figure out which transfers they could recruit to plug the remaining holes. The frontcourt was a blank slate.
“The portal is open long enough,” Mulkey said, “for you to rebound and realize, â€OK, this is who we lost; this is how many we lost; and so, now we’ve got a barometer of how many we need to sign and what we need to do.’”
First, LSU signed former Notre Dame forward Kate Koval. Then it dipped into the mid-major ranks to sign ex-East Carolina forward Amiya Joyner, a rising senior with a guard’s skillset.
Mulkey and her staff also pursued former Wisconsin star Serah Williams, one of the top portal entrants of the 2025 cycle. But she wrapped up her visit to Baton Rouge without committing to the Tigers and later signed with UConn instead, leaving LSU with a need to acquire more post production and few avenues to do so.
So, Mulkey rounded out her roster by adding 6-foot-2 forward Meghan Yarnevich, a former Georgia signee, to her freshman class.
The overhauled frontcourt now has the makings of a group that can complement LSU’s star guards.
Koval, a strong 6-5 Ukrainian with a soft touch, can anchor lineups. In her freshman year with the Irish, she grabbed 10.3 rebounds and blocked 3.8 shots per 40 minutes. Only 11 other power-conference players who logged at least 500 minutes last season cleaned the class and protected the rim at both of those rates.
Joyner, like rising freshman Grace Knox, likes to use her face-up game and play in transition. Knox is a 6-2 forward from California ranked as the seventh-best recruit in her class, according to ESPN. She, along with the other three highly rated prospects who signed with LSU in November, is expected to contribute to next season’s team.
So, too, can Yarnevich, if she can find some minutes at the back end of the Tigers’ brand-new, uncertain frontcourt rotation.
“What I do know is they're gonna play,” Mulkey said, “and they're gonna play at an early age, and you've got a mixture of two of them that have college experience and two of them that don't, and I think that's great. I think that's wonderful.”
