It’s been a year of learning and growth for everyone. Head coach Becky Burke has almost finished her first season as a Power 4 coach. Almost every player on the squad has finished her first year as a Power 4 player. Now, it’s time to say goodbye to the players who are done with their college careers.
Arizona will honor three players who have spent at least five years in college basketball during its game against Houston on Tuesday evening at 6 p.m. MST. It will likely be the final time the duo of
Lani Cornfield and Nora Francois competes in McKale Center. Micky Perdue had her last collegiate home game on Jan. 6 against BYU before going down with a season-ending injury.
Cornfield and Francois hope that their final game in McKale ends like Perdue’s did. The high-scoring guard played her final time in an Arizona uniform in Burke’s first Big 12 win.
Those wins have been precious. The Wildcats have just two of them this season, although they have fought hard against some of the best teams in the league. This time out, they will be facing the only team that looks up at them in the league standings.
Houston is under a first-year head coach, as well. However, he had a big advantage over Burke in that he was hired when there was more time to work in the portal. He also has a great deal more experience and coached some of the top players in the game during his time at Kentucky. He still has faced obstacles in his first year in the Big 12.
Injuries have kept the Cougars from the success they might have liked this season, but they still have a chance to at least tie Arizona in the standings and receive the better seed in the Big 12 Tournament next week.
Burke wasn’t taking anything for granted despite getting within nine late in the game against Baylor in Waco last weekend. After all, the Wildcats dropped several “winnable” games at home, such as UCF the day after Perdue was ruled out indefinitely.
‘“We have to come to practice tomorrow with a sense of urgency to beat a Big 12 team regardless what their record is,” she said on Saturday. “I mean, we’re not good enough to sleep on anybody. We’re not good enough to overlook anybody. We have an opportunity—I feel like a good opportunity—to win our last home game at McKale. And if we don’t come to practice the next two days with the right mindset to do so, then again, Houston is capable of beating us on any given night…[W]e got to be mature about the positives that we take from this game into the next two days of practice. But I think we’re squeezing every ounce of juice out of this group right now, and I’m really proud of them.”
In years past, a team sporting an 11-16 record with two games to go in the regular season would know its season is over if it doesn’t win its conference tournament. That’s not necessarily the case since the WBIT was introduced and the WNIT was relegated to tertiary status.
Rutgers ended its conference tournament with an 11-19 record last season. The Scarlet Knights made the WNIT. They won two games before Burke’s Buffalo team dismissed them on the way to the tournament title. In a day and age when the NCAA Tournament and WBIT include most of the teams that qualify for or want to play in a postseason tournament, the WNIT will sometimes take a team with a record far below .500.
Assuming that Arizona wants to play postseason basketball and the athletic department is willing to pay the associated costs, the Wildcats could be that team this season. The Tucson community has continued to support the program in this transition year when it is 11-16 overall and 2-14 in league play. The WNIT was a superb springboard for fan engagement in 2019 and it could conceivably be played at home if UA is able to foot the costs.
Regardless, the final few games of the 2025-26 season will be the last in cardinal and navy for several current Wildcats. After the loss at Baylor on Saturday, Burke suggested that she expects some attrition on the roster that goes beyond those who have exhausted their eligibility, but she hopes players like Molly Ladwig and Sumayah Sugapong, among others, return to continue their careers as Wildcats next year.
“I’d love to see a group graduate and walk across the stage and have some three or four year players here in Arizona,” Burke said. “That’s obviously the goal. And the goal is also winning games. So the people that we need here, and we want here, gonna stick around and be here, and we’re gonna build. And then, in year one, there’s always some transition. There’s always some that weren’t happy with their playing time, or were homesick, or whatever the case may be. And we do expect a little bit of change. But like I said, those Mollys and the Sumayahs, we would love, love, love to just continue rolling with a good chunk of this group, if we possibly can.”
Up Next for Arizona Women’s Basketball
Houston Cougars @ Arizona Wildcats
When: Tuesday, Feb. 24 @ 6 p.m. MST
Where: McKale Center in Tucson, Ariz.
Streaming: ESPN+
Radio: 1400 AM (KTUC)
Stats: Arizona Live Stats
First things first. This group of Wildcats is still looking to do some positive things this season, and they have an opportunity to do that in their last home game.
Houston has struggled this season, partly due to injuries. Kateri Poole has sat out considerable time for the second straight season. Poole has been listed as “out” on every Big 12 availability report this season and played just seven games in the nonconference season.
The former highly-ranked recruit was supposed to be an important piece for former head coach Ronald Hughey last year. She was supposed to be a big piece for new head coach Matthew Mitchell this year. Neither got to coach her much.
Former Maryland Terrapin Summer Bostock and Australian freshman Jemma Hunter have also had their names on the availability report for ages. Bostock appeared in just one game this year. Hunter has no stats at all.
Ten players have made at least one start for Mitchell this season. Eight have made double-digit starts. No one has started all 27 games.
Briana Peguero and Amirah Abdur-Rahim have made the most starts for the Cougars with 25 each. Jade Jones and Kayla King are the only two who have appeared in all 27 contests.
One player who has benefited from the unsettled lineup spent last year in Tucson. Arizona will welcome former Wildcat forward Jorynn Ross when the Cougars come to town.
Ross has found a bit more success with the Cougars, where she has started 10 times in her 22 appearances and scored 3.5 points in 14.4 minutes per game. However, like most of the players who left Arizona and didn’t follow Adia Barnes to SMU, her time at her new school has been a mixed bag as far as production.
Ross is one of two former Wildcats who is playing more this year for someone other than her former head coach. For Ross, that was spurred by the dramatic increase in her minutes over the past month.
She has played double-digit minutes in the last nine contests. In the previous 13 appearances, she had just six such games. She has hit 48.6 percent of her shots in those nine games despite going 2 for 13 in the last two.
Arizona is the last team to feel sorry for Houston’s lineup shifts. Burke has also started 10 players at least once. Seven of those have started double-digit games, including Perdue. Only freshmen MJ Jurado and Daniah Trammell have appeared in every game this season.
The two teams have some other things in common. Both lost to Southern and New Mexico, although the Cougars’ loss to the latter came in Albuquerque. Both have struggled in conference play, with Arizona getting two wins (over BYU and Kansas State) and Houston getting one (against Cincinnati). Overall, though, the Wildcats have been far more competitive this season than UH has.
Her Hoops Stats favors Arizona regardless of where this game is played. In Tucson, the Wildcats have an 80.3 percent win probability. The service believes they will win by double digits, currently predicting a +10.5 point margin of victory. It rates Arizona dramatically higher than Houston on both offense and defense and notes that the Wildcats score almost 10 more points per game than the Cougars. The point total margin in Arizona’s games is -1.2 compared to -12.3 for Houston.
Arizona has a very good chance to send out Burke’s first group of final-year players on a high note. It’s not the last game of the season. There’s a very slight chance that it’s not even the last game in McKale for this group. A win is important for this team regardless of all that. Its relevance as another building block for the future of this program under its first-year head coach might be the most important thing on the line.
“I say this with all due respect to everybody, the amount of games that we’re in position to win, and being highly, highly, highly competitive in with what we have makes me so excited for the future,” Burke said after the loss at Baylor. “Makes me proud of this group. It makes me really, really excited for Arizona women’s basketball’s future in this league. Baylor is a really, really good team, and I don’t think a lot of people thought we had any business being in the ball game today, and we were with maybe a little less talent, less length, less athleticism. So the future is bright. We’re excited. But again, take nothing away from this group. It’s a group that’s battled. We battled at TCU, we battled here. We’ve battled everybody that we’ve played. Have been in positions late in games to win. So, I couldn’t be more proud.”
