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Short stay in South Bend: Notre Dame guard Emma Risch enters NCAA transfer portal

IMG_9992by:Tyler Horka•04/01/25•

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Notre Dame freshman guard Emma Risch (Photo by Chad Weaver)

Emma Risch played all of 20 games for Notre Dame. It appears that’ll be it.

According to On3’s Talia Goodman, the rising junior guard will enter the NCAA transfer portal and explore her options to play somewhere else. Risch is the second Notre Dame player to enter the portal in as many days, joining rising graduate senior guard Olivia Miles. She was quickly followed by sophomore center Kate Koval to make it three Notre Dame players in the portal in the last two days.

Risch played seven games as a true freshman before having to sit out the season with a hip injury. As a sophomore, she nearly doubled that to 13. Then the same nagging hip ailment came back, and she needed it surgically repaired. In those 20 games, Risch averaged 5.3 points in 13.1 minutes per game.

Risch arrived at Notre Dame with the program feeling she could be a longterm solution to fill a team need as a sharpshooter. She was the No. 20 player in the recruiting class of 2023, according to ESPN, largely because of her ability to fill up the bucket from three-point range. She had a knack for doing so at Melbourne (Fla.) Palm Bay Magnet High School.

In a Fighting Irish uniform, Risch 24 of the 47 three-point attempts she put up in her 20 games played to finish her time at Notre Dame as a 42.1 percent three-point shooter. That would have played nicely in big game, but Risch was never healthy enough to contribute in that way. And when she was, she often could not crack the rotation. She did not play against Texas or UConn, for instance, despite being available for minutes. She only logged 2 minutes against USC. All of those teams appeared in this year’s Elite Eight, with Texas and UConn qualifying for the Final Four.

Needless to say, the 6-1 sniper is a bit of a project in other aspects of her game besides shooting. She’s got to get quicker to keep up with the college game’s guards, and she could stand to be a bit stronger for purposes on both ends of the floor.

With Risch, Koval and Miles leaving, though, Notre Dame is down to five scholarship players for the 2025-26 roster; freshman forward Leah Macy, junior guard Hannah Hidalgo, redshirt junior guard KK Bransford, senior guard Cassandre Prosper and graduate senior center Kylee Watson.

Macy had knee surgery recently for an injury suffered in her final high school game. Bransford and Watson both sat out the entire 2024-25 Notre Dame season to recover from injuries. It’s not clear if Watson will even use her final year of eligibility, which would be her sixth as a collegiate student-athlete.

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