Team: St. John’s Red Storm
2025-26 Record: 22-12, 11-9 Big East
2025-26 Big East Finish:
Tied for fifth with Creighton, one game behind a Seton Hall/Marquette tie for third, and four games ahead of Providence. Lost the tiebreaker for fourth with the Bluejays because of head-to-head record.Final 2025-26 Rankings
NET: #105
Her Hoop Stats: #141
BartTorvik.com: #96
Postseason? After winning the 6/11 game in the first round of the Big East tournament against Xavier, 53-48, and losing by two to Seton Hall
in the quarterfinals, St. John’s qualified for the WBIT, which is the secondary tournament run by the NCAA. They were matched up with #4 regional seed Columbia in the first round… and lost, 74-26. No, really. They were losing 20-4 at the end of the first quarter and scored just eight points in the entire second half. Per the BartTorvik.com Game Score metric, that was STJ’s worst game of the year…. because they got a Game Score of 0.0.
Notable Departures: Five women appeared in all 34 games for St. John’s this past season…. but the Johnnies are losing just one of them. That’s Kylie Lavelle, who started in 20 of those appearances. She came off the bench for the first two games, started the next 19, went back to the bench against Villanova, started against Creighton, and then was off the bench the rest of the year. Lavelle ended up averaged 4.8 points and 2.9 rebounds per game in 23.0 minutes per game, but seeing as she had a 10 minute per game gap between starting and coming off the bench, obviously her stats look better with more minutes.
Jailah Donald comes up next on the list of departures because she missed the Columbia game to blow up her run of appearing in every game up til then. It’s kind of interesting that Lavelle and Donald swapped starting spots after two games, but that doesn’t hold up to when Donald got back into the starting five and then stayed there for the last 14 games that she appeared in. In 24.1 minutes per game, Donald averaged 5.1 points, 2.0 rebounds, and 2.0 assists per game.
That leaves us with two more departures to mention here, one of whom was headed out after the end of her eligibility just like Lavelle and Donald, and one who hit the transfer portal. The end of eligibility came for Shaulana Wagner after time at Xavier, two years in junior college, two years at Troy, and then one more season at St. John’s. She started in 27 of her 30 appearances here and averaged 6.8 points, 3.5 rebounds, and 4.7 assists per game. Beautiful Waheed came to St. John’s after two years at the same junior college as Wagner, but after appearing in 28 games and starting 26 times, Waheed is taking her 9.1 points and 3.8 rebounds per game to Arkansas next season.
FUN FACT: Wagner and Waheed did not play in the Columbia game, just like Donald! I wonder if that had something to do with how terribly that went for the Johnnies.
I do want to mention one more transfer here that doesn’t qualify as a notable departure from what we saw on the court from St. John’s last season, but losing a player to a high major program is worth mentioning. Skye Owen is heading off to Florida, presumably on a medical redshirt waiver because she played in just six games last season, which was her fourth with the Red Storm. After averaging 7.7 points and 2.2 rebounds in 2024-25, you’d have to figure she would have been a notable contributor to the Johnnies if not for the concussion in November that ended up shutting down her entire season after that. Probably worth wondering why the Staten Island native is leaving the Red Storm for one year, huh?
Notable Returners: So you’re probably thinking “Hey, a moment ago, you indicated that St. John’s is returning four of the five women who appeared in all 34 games last season! That’s gotta be pretty good, right?” Well, yes, obviously, that’s a benefit. I’m just going to have to ask you to figure how much it matters when they’re only returning five players at all.
Sa’Mya Wyatt wins the trophy for most notable returner as the only St. John’s player to start in all 34 games last season. We’ll get to #2 on that list in a moment, but I will note that Wyatt is one of just two women to start in more than 27 of STJ’s 34 games. You have to wonder if that inconsistency had anything to do with their middling performance this season. She was St. John’s #2 scorer at 10.9 points per game, while also ranking second on the team in rebounds at 4.9/game, and on top of that, Wyatt was also one of the most wasted players on the Red Storm roster as she shot 41% from behind the three-point line…. by shooting 7-for-17 on the season.
Brooke Moore is the only other Red Storm player to start more than 27 times, and she was on the floor to tipoff 31 of them. She was STJ’s leading scorer at 11.7 points per game — I feel like I should note here that St. John’s has beensub-300 in pace per Her Hoop Stats in the last four seasons and sub-200 in 15 of the last 16 seasons — and she added 4.6 rebounds per contest as well.
Daniela Abies was the leading rebounder on this squad last season at 7.0 caroms per game even though she started just 11 times and averaged just 20.7 minutes a night. The former Miami Hurricane was #140 in the country in offensive rebounding rate and #43 in defensive rebounding rate, and it’s worth noting that she was pulling down nearly 10 rebounds a game in 28 minutes in her 11 starts last season.
That leaves just Janeya Grant in terms of notable returning players, and of the group here, she was the least impactful with just 17.0 minutes per game and only one start. She’s still STJ’s #3 returning scorer at 6.2 points per game, and she was a passable three-point shooter at 33% last season.
Key Additions: The Red Storm have a trio of freshmen on this roster, and I like the immediate possible upside of two of them. Syvannah Dawson (5’9” freshman guard, Richmond, Virginia) comes in as ESPN’s #98 prospect in the Class of 2026, and Blue Star Basketball has her at #100 as well. She’s a small guard, so we’ll see if she can make an impact right away or if she’ll need to acclimate to Division 1. Yohana Fami (6’1” freshman forward, Montreal, Quebec, Canada) is the other freshman that I’m interested in, just because she was on the Canadian team at the FIBA U17 World Cup. Well, okay, that and the fact that she averaged 6.6 points, 4.7 rebounds, and 2.1 steals during the competition. If you can do that on the world stage against your age-similar opposition, you might be able to chip in right away in the Big East.
They’ll have to fight for playing time against the four transfers that St. John’s has brought in. However, none of the transfers immediately bowl you over with “oh, yes, they are going to be great right now” types of backgrounds. Maybe the closest to “oh, well, look at that!” is Asia Donald (5’9” junior guard, Hobart, Indiana), who averaged 14.8 points and 5.0 rebounds for West Georgia last season. However, I have questions that I can not rummage up answers for, specificially what was Donald doing in the 2024-25 season. Her Basketball Reference page shows a perfectly fine freshman year at Indiana State, then a gray line, then her campaign with West Georgia last year. Where’d she go? What’s going on there?
Olivia Tucker (5’7” junior guard, Durham, North Carolina) comes in next after showing a perfectly acceptable trajectory from freshman to sophomore year at Campbell. She averaged 10.4 points, 3.4 rebounds, and 1.9 assists in 32 starts last season, so she’s got the experience as a notable component of the team she was on at least. Reina Green (5’9” senior guard, Fort Lauderdale, Florida) ended up in the starting lineup in her second season at Duquesne last season, getting the nod for the final 23 games of the season. Once in the starting lineup, she averaged 9.0 points in just under 28 minutes a night, and she’s the only one of the transfers that looks to be helpful from long range after shooting nearly 34% last season. Lastly, there’s Sanaa Tripp (5’7” junior guard, Covington, Georgia), who has been at Belmont the past two seasons. She had a nice little role as a freshman, and that grew in her sophomore year even if she was still coming off the bench most of the time. She averaged 7.9 points, 3.8 rebounds, and 1.4 steals per game in 26 minutes a night.
[UPDATE: Guys, I finished writing all of this on September 8th and then scheduled it to be published at a later date that didn’t have any soccer or volleyball obligations. Thus, I missed the addition of Ny’Ceara Pryor on September 12th. I’m not editing any of what I previously wrote, as I can’t be responsible for mid-semester additions.]
Coach: Joe Tartamella, entering his 15th season in charge of the Red Storm and overall as a Division 1 head coach. He has a record of 261-185.
Outlook: Let’s start here, because I think it’s incredibly instructive on what to think about where the Red Storm are going.
St. John’s announced a six year contract for Joe Tartamella after the 2022-23 season. That season ended with the Johnnies in the NCAA tournament for just the fourth time in Tartamella’s tenure and the first time since 2016.
Since that deal was inked, St. John’s has posted a record of 56-42, which includes a mark of 27-29 in Big East play. At #68, #76, and #96 in the BartTorvik.com rankings, I think it’s safe to say that the Red Storm have been nowhere close to making it into another NCAA tournament. Did they win 22 games last season, marking just the second time that’s happened for the Johnnies since 2017? Sure, but they were at #100 in the NET on Selection Sunday thanks to a 7-8 record in the top three quadrants and a 15-3 record against Quadrant 4 opponents. Sure, 10 Big East games in Q4 didn’t do them any favors, but STJ also scheduled like crap as well with five sub-250 opponents, and things could have been a lot worse for them if they didn’t figure out how to get past Hofstra 63-60 in December.
And so here’s my point: Things are not going well for that six year investment in Joe Tartamella at the midway point. The fact that he’s bringing back four rotation players isn’t actually good news when the Red Storm went from #62 in the country in the BartTorvik.com preseason rankings to #82 in the country before they handed in a joke of a performance against Columbia in the WBIT which dropped them all the way to #96. Do you understand how hard it is to shift 14 spots in any direction in a computer ranking when there’s 33 data points of information already placing you in a spot? That’s what St. John’s did, shorthanded or not.
Can you trust Sa’Maya Wyatt et. al. to be the core of a roster that finishes top half of the Big East this coming winter when they were part of a core that was trending downwards all season long? None of the transfers scream “program savior” here. Maybe the freshmen can give you something, and that’s really more like “hopefully,” because with seven newcomers, at least a few of them have to be rotation players just by pure math of how basketball works.
The thing that really blows my mind in terms of what Joe Tartamella is doing in Queens? I have no idea what his program identity is. They aren’t reliably good on either side of the ball. Sometimes they can shoot it, sometimes they can’t. Sometimes they’re good at not turning the ball over, sometimes they’re awful at it. Sometimes they can rebound on one end or the other, sometimes they can’t. The one thing that they’re reliably great at in the last six seasons, per BartTorvik.com? They don’t put you on the free throw line, which, okay, I guess?
I can’t even say “ah, but Tartamella coaches a patient paced game.” That’s two-fold because sure, they’ve been sub-200 in pace according to Her Hoop Stats in all but one of his seasons in charge, and sub-300 in nine of his 14 years including each of the last four. I can’t say that because 1) St. John’s doesn’t do anything else reliably along with being extremely slow relative to the rest of the country so there’s nothing to point at and say “that’s why they’re doing that,” and 2) there’s the 2021-22 season where St. John’s was inexplicably top 60 in tempo.
I don’t know what they’re doing, I don’t know where they’re going, I don’t understand any of the transfer additions because hey, didn’t mention this before: None of them can shoot threes really well after STJ was under 30% last year. It’s probably in the best interest of Joe Tartamella’s job security that he find a way into the newly expanded 76 team NCAA tournament, but you’d think that he’d try to maintain success in the wake of his tourney appearance and new contract and that didn’t happen.
This may be the most frustrating team in the entire Big East. I wonder what would happen if they threw some of that Vitamin Water money at this team?
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