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Former Notre Dame women's basketball center Kylee Watson signs with Villanova

IMG_9992by:Tyler Horka•about 11 hours•

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Notre Dame forward Kylee Watson (Photo by Michael Hickey/Getty Images)

All four former Notre Dame women’s basketball players who left the Fighting Irish program via the transfer portal since the end of the season have chosen new destinations. Kylee Watson was the latest to do so, choosing Villanova on Tuesday.

Watson didn’t play this past season while recovering from a knee injury. The 2025-26 season will be her sixth in the collegiate ranks in a career that started in at Oregon 2020-21 as a McDonald’s All-American coming out of Linwood (N.J.) Mainland High School.

Watson played sparingly at Oregon, making 50 appearances with 9 starts, but she was a mainstay at Notre Dame for two seasons. She started all 64 games she played in and averaged over 23 minutes per game in both campaigns. She put up 6.5 points and 4.6 rebounds per game.

Notre Dame lost a lot of front court depth from the 2025-26 roster. Forwards Maddy Westbeld, Liatu King and Liza Karlen exhausted their eligibility. Westbeld and King were selected in the 2025 WNBA Draft on Monday. Watson was one of two centers to take to the portal, joining rising sophomore Kate Koval. The former five-star prospect who only spent one year in South Bend is headed to LSU.

All-American guard Olivia Miles will suit up at TCU in the final year of her college career, and rising junior Emma Risch will continue hers as a redshirt sophomore at Florida State. They entered the portal two weeks ago. So far, Notre Dame has only gotten one signee from the portal. Wake Forest’s Malaya Cowles committed to the Irish this past Friday.

Head coach Niele Ivey has much work to do in filling out her 2025-26 roster. Currently, it consists of five players including Cowles. There are three returning players from last season’s roster; junior Hannah Hidalgo and seniors KK Bransford and Cassandre Prosper. Incoming freshman Leah Macy will be on campus this summer, but she’ll still be coming back from knee surgery she had just over a month ago.

Bransford did not play last season to heal a foot injury. Thus, Notre Dame’s roster will have just two players who logged any minutes in an Irish uniform in 2024-25; Hidalgo and Prosper. Ironically, though, the Irish’s season ended against a TCU team that was largely built on transfer portal players. If the Irish are to oust anyone in the tournament 11 months from now, it’ll have to be because of success of portal players of their own.

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