When she coached at Buffalo, first-year Arizona head coach Becky Burke tried to get players she thought could play up a level but might not get the looks from bigger schools. That strategy not only helped
her bring two recruits with her in 2025, but it has paid off in the class of 2026.
Burke has mentioned that she thought Daniah Trammell would have gotten Power 4 offers if she had not committed to Buffalo so early. She has shown herself to be one of Arizona’s best bigs in the early part of 2025-26. Burke thinks her recruiting strategy from Buffalo allowed her to bring in two players who got praise from recruiting services in the 2026 class, as well.
Makayla Presser-Palmer and Priyanka Ponnam both have ties to Burke’s home state of Pennsylvania. Presser-Palmer will come to Arizona directly from the Keystone State. Ponnam started high school there, but she has taken a detour through New Jersey.
“I have a previous relationship with Makayla,“ Burke said. ”I was her first Division I offer at Buffalo. She came to our team camp. I mean, she was this big, and I was her first DI offer. And then Pri, I have known. We recruited her very, very, very hard at Buffalo, as well. We knew we always wanted to recruit those cusp kids where we were like, Okay, we want to recruit these players that have potential to go P4, but if they don’t, we wanted to slip down to us at Buffalo. And then she just got better and better and better. We knew we weren’t going to get her, but those previous relationships really helped seal the deal here at Arizona.“
That still left spaces to fill. Arizona’s top-ranked recruit Jasleen Green isn’t one of the players from the Northeast. She doesn’t come from anywhere near Tucson, either. Burke and her staff pulled in the guard from Plantation, Fla. That came down to pure hard work.
“Our staff did a really, really, really good job,” Burke said. “When we finished putting this team together to be able to compete this season out of the portal, it was immediately on to 2026s. And we were really far behind. These are 2026s. All four of these guys have been recruited for two, three, four years by previous institutions, and we just get here in April and try to start talking to them—and actually probably didn’t even start talking to them until June or July. So, the fact that we got to build those relationships as quickly as we did with the caliber of players that we did, I’m so thankful for our staff and their hard work and just all coming together. And being able to sign as many top 100 kids as we did is super impressive.”
Up Next for Arizona Women’s Basketball
Grambling State (1-3) @ Arizona Wildcats (2-0)
When: Sunday, Nov. 16 @ 2 p.m. MST
Where: McKale Center in Tucson, Ariz.
Streaming: ESPN+
Radio: 1400 AM (KTUC)
Stats: Arizona Live Stats
Green is rated a four-star recruit by ESPN, 247sports, Rivals, and Prospects Nation. She is also the highest-ranked Arizona recruit by the services that have her among their ranked players.
“Jasleen’s one of the best players in the state of Florida, which says a lot, because that’s a jam packed state full of talent,” Burke said.
While she may not be the top-ranked player in the class—in fact, she was the last of the quartet to earn a four-star rating by any of the services monitored by this website—Callie Hinder out of the Phoenix area was in high demand.
“A 6-6 post that had 27 offers, and everybody in the Big 12 wanted her, and to decide to stay home was a really cool thing,” Burke said.“
Even better, Hinder will come in early. While Burke didn’t have an exact date for her arrival, early enrollees at Arizona arrive in early January for most sports. The volleyball team has been bringing in its freshmen a semester early for several years. They begin taking classes in the spring semester and are eligible to practice with the squad.
“She has to graduate, go through all of her kind of paperwork and NCAA protocols before she’s able to officially be here,” Burke said. “But from a scholarship standpoint, we do have room to bring her early. She will be graduating early, so to get her here, and especially as a post player, she needs to get stronger. She needs to get in our system and live in the weight room and just be immersed in our player development system. And so it’s gonna be really, really good for her to spend a semester with us before her teammates come in June and join her.”
The last early enrollee for Arizona women’s basketball was Madi Conner, but she arrived during the pandemic under different circumstances. If she had waited, she would not have received the fifth year awarded to players who were on rosters during the 2020-21 season. Since she came, she got that extra year, which turned into a redshirt for the semester she spent as an early enrollee.
Hinder will not automatically get an extra year like Conner did, but the NCAA is exploring whether to expand eligibility to five years for all student-athletes. In any case, she will still have four years to play under current rules since she won’t appear on-court for Arizona during her early enrollment semester.
In addition to getting into Burke’s system and practicing with the team, she will have the opportunity to learn all the things a young adult has to learn when she moves away from home.
“I think that’s going to be another thing you know, to be able to have her in the weight room, to be able to have her practice player development, but get the college—she’s coming in like the rest of them did in June, and to start this semester where she’s going to be a little bit homesick, figuring out how to live on her own,” Burke said. “Let’s get all those things out of the way right now. So then, when she’s she arrives back here in June with the rest of her teammates, she almost feels like a sophomore, in a sense.”
The group of four doesn’t mean recruiting for 2026-27 is over. In this day and age, it may not even be the most important part.
“I’m ecstatic about our class, and it’s just something to be excited about moving forward to the future,” Burke said. “And then you add some some transfers in the portal come April and May of this year, and I think we’re going to be looking pretty good.”
