They say “third time’s the charm,” but they also say “bad things come in threes.” The CAA’s women’s basketball head coaches seem to think the latter will be the case for Northeastern this year.
The Huskies were picked to finish 13th out of the conference’s 13 teams in this season’s CAA preseason poll, and it’s hard to blame the voters for slotting them there. Northeastern is coming off back-to-back seasons of unmitigated disaster in head coach Priscilla Edwards-Lloyd’s first two years at the helm, in both cases losing more than half of their roster to season-ending injuries.
While the Huskies were not forced to forfeit any games last year like they eventually had to during the 2023-24 season, their 3-25 record was the second-worst in program history, including a soul-sapping 16-game losing streak stretching from November to February that itself tied a program record.
Like two years ago, almost no one escaped the injury bug. Three of Northeastern’s opening-night starters — Huskies stalwarts Asha Parker and Maddie Vizza, as well as promising freshman forward Taylor Holohan — were out for the year before the spring semester started. For almost all of conference play, Northeastern had no more than seven players available for any given game.
While the first two seasons of Edwards-Lloyd’s head coaching career have essentially both been worst-case scenarios, the Huskies’ leader talked about the positives she’s trying to gain from the adversity at CAA Media Day in October.
“I think the biggest thing I kind of took away is just being able to control what you can,” Edwards-Lloyd said. “I think there’s still a lot of growth that can come from unfortunate things, or things not going your way, and a lot of things didn’t go our way the past two years that were out of our control. But from that, I think it helped build not only my own personal resilience and drive and understanding of things, but also for our returners that are still here … I think you come in with a perspective of not only humility but just what it takes to actually get and accomplish what you want.”
The Returners
Some of those positives from last year came from the Huskies who stayed healthy, headlined by the backcourt duo of Abby Jegede and Yirsy Quéliz. Jegede, a transfer from Villanova, led Northeastern in scoring last year with 15.8 PPG. Quéliz, who was also one of the few players to remain mostly healthy two seasons ago during her freshman year, was the only player other than Jegede to average double figures last season (11.7 PPG). Combined, that made up more than half of the Huskies’ entire scoring offense (49.9 PPG, fifth-worst in all of Division I).
While Jegede transferred to the University of Tulsa over the offseason, Quéliz is returning to Northeastern this year, now as the longest-tenured Husky, and she is the only remaining player on the roster from Edwards-Lloyd’s first season in 2023-24. The junior now finds herself in a leadership role and in the position to serve as a mentor to the team’s newcomers, just as fellow point guard Derin Erdogan was for Quéliz in her first season. It is a role that is going to be critically important as the Huskies welcome in eight newcomers this year (five transfers and three freshmen). Ten of the 14 players on the roster this season are underclassmen.
“Being by Derin’s side [my freshman year] definitely helped me a lot, because she’s a lot older, she came from Arizona, that’s huge,” Quéliz said at CAA Media Day. “I think my leadership this year has been really good, towards the younger people, especially. We do have a young team, so I think I’ve helped them a lot. Even Coach P has helped me to be a better leader every day for the past two years.”
The other clear standout from an otherwise lost season was center Alyssa Staten, who began the year on the bottom rung of the depth chart but was starting within a month due to the frontcourt casualties above her. Her best performance came in Northeastern’s lone CAA Tournament game, where she scored a season-high 20 points and grabbed 14 rebounds to record her fourth double-double in the final six games of the season. As the only true center on the Huskies’ roster this year, Staten is primed to carry over that momentum to her sophomore season.
Joining Staten as returners in the frontcourt are fellow sophomores Holohan and Maya Summerville. The two both fill a power forward niche, a position that Northeastern did not have a lot of depth at last season, and Holohan saw starting minutes right away perhaps because of that. Prior to her injury, she started in all six games she appeared in, and while turnovers and foul trouble were issues, she showed promise in her limited healthy minutes with hustle and rebounding. Based on the confidence Edwards-Lloyd showed in her at the beginning of last season, Holohan may be starting out of the gate again this year.
Summerville, meanwhile, did not play at all last year, so it will be interesting to see how she is used in the rotation with Holohan and the newcomer forwards in her first games as a Husky. Northeastern added two transfer forwards over the offseason (see more on them below), so they will have more bodies to work with in the frontcourt, and there may be some experimentation at the start of the season.
The other two returning faces for Northeastern are in the backcourt: redshirt senior Natalie Larrañaga and sophomore María Sánchez Pitarch. Larrañaga was another bright spot out of the Huskies who were able to stay mostly healthy last season, and as the oldest player on the roster (she turns 24 in February), she also figures to take on an important leadership role.
Sánchez Pitarch was more of a playmaker than a scorer last year, although she was thrust into a larger role than expected as a rookie due to the injuries. Having that experience under her belt will be valuable as she enters her sophomore season.
The Newcomers
When asked at CAA Media Day about which of the eight newcomers Northeastern fans should be looking out for, Edwards-Lloyd specifically mentioned one freshman (guard Kailee Beaudion-Foliaki) and two transfers (sophomore guards Morgan Matthews and Camryn Collins).
Beaudion-Foliaki comes to the Huskies out of Hightower High School in the Houston area, following a season in which her school made it to the championship game of their state classification, earning her a nod to the All-State Second Team. In the release last year announcing her signing, Edwards-Lloyd described Beaudion-Foliaki as “a natural playmaker who can create open looks for others and herself.”
Matthews, a native of Foxboro, and the only player on the Huskies’ roster from Massachusetts, appeared in 17 games and made six starts for George Washington last season. Collins, who’s joining Northeastern after playing at Rider her freshman year, was second on the Broncs in scoring (8.9 PPG) and steals (1.3 SPG), starting all but two of the team’s games. Edwards-Lloyd said that the two “bring a different level of athleticism to our team that we just haven’t had over the past couple of years.”
The only graduate student on the Huskies’ roster this year, guard Nariyah Simmons, brings four years of experience from three different schools. She spent the first two seasons of her collegiate career at Johnson County Community College in Kansas, transferred to Kansas City for her junior year, and then played the 2024-25 season at Austin Peay. Simmons has started every game her team has played for the past two seasons, something no Husky accomplished last year. Perhaps her arrival at Northeastern can help turn their fortunes around in the health department — regardless, as with the other upperclassmen on the roster, she will be in a position to provide valuable mentorship and guidance to her younger teammates.
The newcomers in the backcourt are rounded out by two freshmen, Lindsey Lemay and Beatriz Pérez Pulgar. Lemay won back-to-back national prep school championships the past two years at Tilton School in New Hampshire. In announcing her signing last year, Edwards-Lloyd said she “excels playing in an up-tempo style and will bring speed and athleticism to our backcourt.” Edwards-Lloyd emphasized that regarding all of the newcomers when talking with the Field of 68 on CAA Media Day.
“The CAA is really athletic, really fast, and I think we’ve brought some players in who really buy into playing the style of CAA basketball that’s physical and up-tempo,” Edwards-Lloyd said.
Pérez Pulgar comes to the Huskies with international experience: she is a three-time silver medalist for Madrid’s youth teams and a member of the Spanish national 3×3 U17 team. Edwards-Lloyd told the Field of 68 that Pérez Pulgar wasn’t able to join the Huskies over the summer and is just now getting adjusted to the team, so it’s possible that she may be more gradually phased into the season.
Looking to the frontcourt, the two forwards that are joining the Huskies are junior Andrea Martinez and sophomore Justice Tramble. Martinez, a Barcelona native (that makes three Spaniards on the team, for those keeping score at home), spent her first two collegiate seasons at Gardner-Webb. Last year, she took more than half of her field-goal attempts from three-point range, although she only shot 24% from beyond the arc.
Tramble arrives at Northeastern after one season at South Carolina State, one of only four teams in Division I last year to finish with fewer wins than Northeastern (the Lady Bulldogs went 2-29). She led the team in rebounding (4.0 RPG) and recorded a double-double against Longwood in her first start of the season.
The bottom line? There’s plenty of new blood for the Huskies this season, and if the majority of these newcomers can stay healthy, their roster will be considered an embarrassment of riches compared to what it was by the finales of the past two seasons.
The Schedule
Northeastern’s non-conference slate should provide some challenging tests, but also some opportunities for wins. They open the season hosting LIU at the Cabot Center, a team they probably should have beaten when they faced them on the road in Brooklyn last year. (It would seem like a layup to open the season as part of a doubleheader with the men’s team at Matthews Arena for its farewell season, especially after seeing the success BU has with their opening day doubleheaders when they host Northeastern, but that’s beside the point.)
The Huskies then head down to New Haven to face Yale, a team that went 4-23 last season and was also picked last in their conference’s preseason poll this year.
Northeastern returns home to host BU in a Veterans Day matinee, as they look for their first win over the Terriers since 2022. That contest is followed by a visit to Merrimack that weekend to face former Husky forward Oralye Kiefer, who transferred out this past offseason. Northeastern then goes on the road to play Providence, where Edwards-Lloyd spent five seasons as associate head coach from 2016 to 2021.
The Huskies then host Sacred Heart, picked second-to-last in the MAAC preseason poll, and three days later go on the road to face UMass Lowell, unanimously picked dead last in the America East preseason poll.
Northeastern’s non-league slate ends with two “high-major” opponents in three games, as they travel to New Jersey to face Rutgers on Black Friday, host UMass on a Wednesday afternoon, and head out to Chestnut Hill to battle Boston College on the Friday before Christmas.
By the time the Huskies start CAA play, they will be sharing the Cabot Center full-time with the men’s team, which results in the first full weekend of the spring semester featuring four basketball games at Cabot on four straight days, from Thursday to Sunday.
Northeastern will face expected contender NC A&T in their home CAA opener that Friday night, following a matchup in Charleston to face the Cougars and Preseason Player of the Year Taryn Barbot the previous weekend.
With Delaware’s departure from the Coastal, the Huskies will now play six teams twice and the other six only once during conference play. Unfortunately for Northeastern, the schools they will play home-and-homes against include the top three from the preseason poll (Charleston, Drexel, and NC A&T). The Huskies will also play Monmouth, Hofstra, and Stony Brook twice, with the Hofstra game at Cabot serving as their Senior Day game. Details on additional theme nights have not yet been released.
The Verdict
Northeastern was probably an easy choice for the conference’s voters to rank dead last after they added a hodge-podge of transfers and freshmen to last year’s squad that finished 2-16 in CAA play.
But the Huskies have been doubted before.
Following their eighth-place (out of 10 teams) finish in the 2020-21 season, Northeastern was picked to finish last in the preseason poll for former coach Bridgette Mitchell’s first season at the helm. The Huskies went on to a better-than-expected 8-10 record in conference play, outperforming the preseason expectations (with Mitchell often reminding people about this throughout the season).
A finish near the bottom of the CAA is probably still likely, but if — and that’s a big if — Northeastern can stay relatively healthy, that will automatically give them a boost over the previous two years.
For now, Huskies fans should be doing whatever it takes to try to get luck back on their team’s side. Say a prayer. Or maybe hire an Etsy witch. Or maybe sage all of Solomon Court before the season starts.
Northeastern hosts LIU on Nov. 4 to open up the 2025-26 campaign. Sammy Glassman and Jacob Phillips will have the call at 4 p.m. on WRBB Sports+.
Jordan Walsh is a fifth-year student at Northeastern who has been with WRBB Sports since 2021, primarily covering men’s and women’s basketball. You can read all of his articles for WRBB here and find him on Twitter here.