Notre Dame women’s basketball scholarship chart: April 17, 2023
Notre Dame women’s basketball added a scholarship player to its 2023-24 roster in Fordham graduate transfer Anna DeWolfe on Monday. She’s slated to be the 11th scholarship player on head coach Niele Ivey‘s roster for the upcoming season. College basketball teams are granted 13 scholarships to award to players per year.
Here’s what Notre Dame’s scholarship count looks like for the foreseeable future.
The Fighting Irish have room to go to the portal two more times assuming none of the current players transfer out. Losing some of them is entirely possible; Ivey saw four walk out the door to different schools at this time last year.
It’s hard to imagine any of the four juniors and sophomores going anywhere else, though, and the two incoming freshmen aren’t going to get cold feet and back out of their NLIs. That’s very unlikely.
So if graduate student Jenna Brown and seniors Maddy Westbeld, Nat Marshall and Kylee Watson stay put, Ivey will have successfully retained every player who had eligibility to return from last year’s roster. Center Lauren Ebo and guard Dara Mabrey, both graduates, ran out of eligibility at the end of a season in which Notre Dame made it to the Sweet 16 for the second consecutive year.
The addition of Wolfe makes up for losing Mabrey. Now, Ivey needs to find a portal player to fill the void left by Ebo. It’s a big one; the 6-5 center averaged 9.0 points and 7.0 rebounds in 28 games for the Irish. She set a program NCAA Tournament record with 18 rebounds in a second round victory over Mississippi State.
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Ebo played at Penn State and Texas before landing at Notre Dame. She was a leader on the floor and in the locker room. Finding another post player like that would be a huge boost, but at the least Notre Dame needs to bring in another player with size.
Notre Dame also needs to hit the ground running on its recruiting class of 2024. There is plenty of time to do so. Only four of the top 20 players in ESPN’s individual rankings have committed somewhere. UConn has two of those commitments, and Michigan and UCLA have the others.
Last week, Notre Dame announced it will start the 2023-24 season abroad in Paris, France, against South Carolina. The Gamecocks were the No. 1 team all season until their undefeated season ended in the Final Four at the hands of Cailtin Clark and Iowa.
