The Kansas women’s basketball team rode out an injury-riddled 2024-25 season on the back of sophomore guard S’Mya Nichols, featuring a supporting cast forced into much bigger roles than anyone had expected. KU concluded its year with a 16-14 record and did not appear in the WBIT or WNIT fields released late Sunday night, meaning it will presumably go without a postseason appearance for the first time in four years.
The Jayhawks began their season with starting guard Wyvette Mayberry, who was one of only two returning starters for this year’s team, out with a knee injury, forcing a starting lineup that featured four transfers. Mayberry returned in mid-November after missing the first three games of the year but wasn’t 100% healthy as she played the next six games and averaged only 5.2 points per game before missing Kansas’ final 21 games.
Creighton transfer and starting guard Brittany Harshaw briefly joined Mayberry on the end of the bench after Kansas’ first two games, in which she averaged 11.5 points and nine rebounds per game, due to a lower-body injury. Harshaw only missed a month of time with her injury, but fell out of the starting lineup upon her return and didn’t reach double-digit scoring until six games into her comeback.
The Jayhawks lacked a true center after the graduation of Taiyanna Jackson following the 2023-24 season. This left most of the inside work to 6-foot-3 freshman Regan Williams, who started Kansas’ first 24 games at center before head coach Brandon Schneider decided to bring her off the bench for an extra spark for the last six games of the year.
Along with Williams, Nichols and Wisconsin transfer Sania Copeland each had to play out of position at times, with Copeland deployed in all five spots. As Nichols became Kansas’ main ball handler, she continued as the Jayhawks’ top scorer, but found herself in a much different role in her second year at Kansas.
Without shot creators Zakiyah Franklin and Holly Kersgieter by her side, Nichols had a much heavier weight to bear, with only one of her teammates, Elle Evans, averaging more than 10 points per game (13.3). Last year, Nichols averaged 15.4 points and had three teammates, Jackson (12.6), Franklin (11.8) and Kersgieter (11.6), average double-figure scoring across the season, with Mayberry scoring 9.7 points per game as the fifth starter. This year, Nichols scored 18.6 points per game as she and Evans combined for 49% of Kansas’ points scored througouht the season.
Kansas came into the season with lower expectations than the previous three seasons, in which the Jayhawks had made it to the postseason. The Big 12 Conference preseason poll projected Kansas to finish eighth, which put the Jayhawks close to being in the mix to make it to March Madness again, as seven teams from the conference made it in 2024. Kansas had a lot of unknowns going into the year as a team now centered around a sophomore guard with a supporting cast that had never played together.
Kansas started off strong with a relatively weak nonconference schedule, winning its first five games — all at home — before losing to Iowa, 71-58, in a neutral site matchup in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. In their November tournament, the U.S. Virgin Islands Paradise Jam, the Jayhawks turned some heads by beating three quality teams in Northern Iowa, Pittsburgh and Auburn to be crowned tournament champions. Kansas pulled this off without Harshaw and in Mayberry’s first games back, when her knee was still an issue.
The Jayhawks finished nonconference play with a 10-1 record and on a six-game winning streak after beating Penn State. But in its last game before the winter break, Kansas fell 86-66 to a good, and eventually second-place, Baylor in its conference opener. The slide continued as the Jayhawks traveled to Ames in another double-digit loss before they grabbed a surprise win to finish the road trip, knocking off Oklahoma State 75-66 in the Cowgirls’ only home loss of the season.
After losing a very close battle with eventual conference champion TCU 80-73, the Jayhawks rode peaks and valleys throughout the rest of conference play, usually coinciding with their home and road trips.
Kansas grabbed a win at last-place Houston in late January but lost four of its last five road games in conference play before finishing on a high note by beating a struggling BYU team in Provo, Utah. Williams recorded a career-high 20 points in the game while coming off the bench as Evans led the Jayhawks with 24 points and Nichols slotted into a peripheral role, recording seven assists and 14 points.
But injuries caught up to Kansas in the last part of the season, as Evans went down with a quad injury after the BYU game and missed the regular-season finale, a 57-51 senior-day loss against Oklahoma State, and the Jayhawks’ sole Big 12 tournament game, a 57-53 loss against Texas Tech. In Kansas’ final game of the year against Tech, the Jayhawks had only two solid options coming off the bench, Williams and regular role player Carla Osma. Nichols went down with a leg injury late in the third quarter and didn’t return, having also struggled in her time on the floor, scoring only eight points in 28 minutes of play while committing eight turnovers.
KU could bring back the vast majority of its contributors next season, as it had just two players go through senior-day festivities, and so far has lost just one known player to the transfer portal (Freddie Wallace, who did not play this season for medical reasons). The Jayhawks’ four-player recruiting class of Tatyonna Brown, Jaliya Davis, Libby Fandel and Keeley Parks includes three state Gatorade players of the year and at the time of their signing was ranked No. 6 by ESPN.
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Injury-marred, transitional season concludes for KU women without postseason play
Mike Gunnoe/Special to the Journal-World
