The women’s basketball team went 21-11 last season, its first time winning 20 or more games since 2011.

This time, the Flashes will be without three of the top five scorers from last season.

“We lost a ton of experience, and you can’t just replace that,” said coach Todd Starkey. “That we will be something we have to figure out and overcome.”

KSU lost to Toledo 68-58 in the semifinals of the Mid-American Conference Tournament in March, earning an appearance in the Women’s National Invitational Tournament.

“We were really close to doing something special,” Starkey said. “We had a really good season, but we didn’t have a great season; we were close.”

Katie Shumate, Lindsey Thall, Casey Santoro, Corynne Hauser, Clare Kelly and Hannah Young were the top scorers last season. Only Hauser and Shumate remain this year.

“Lindsey was a phenomenal player for us for the last five years,” Starkey said. “You just don’t have that leave your program and not feel the effect.”

Thall is the only player in conference history to score over 1,500 points, make over 350 3-pointers and block over 200 shots.

Last season, she averaged 11.4 points and started in 27 games, earning ALL-MAC honorable mention.

“We have some very capable players that are going to be able to fill the numbers that she was able to accumulate, but that’ll be by multiple players,” Starkey said. “Our job as a coaching staff is to recruit players that can help us win, and I think we have players that can help us win.

Replacing Young, Thall, Kelly and Santoro will have its challenges, Starkey said.

“Every team loses some players for whatever reason every year, so you have to fill those roles,” he said. “Those players had a ton of college game experience, and that’s gone, so we have to reestablish a new normal for the group that we have.”

One player in particular the Flashes will count on this season is Shumate, a redshirt senior guard.

“Katie knows that this is her team,” Starkey said. “Everybody looks to her. She sets the tone every game for us, and she wants to be the best leader she has been since she has been here.”

She started 30 games last season and averaged a team-high 12.1 points per game. Shumate is a two-time All-MAC Honorable Mention and has started in 105 of the 111 games in her career.

“I think she has the potential to be a first-team all-conference player,” Starkey said, “and maybe even be in discussion for conference player of the year.”

For Starkey, the goal is to win a championship and earn a bid to the NCAA tournament in 2024.

“We want to give ourselves a great opportunity to the NCAA tournament,” he said. “Putting ourselves in one of the two lanes where we play well enough during the regular season that we don’t have to solely rely on winning the tournament.”

Success for the Flashes means staying healthy and peaking at the right time.

“We need to stay healthy, and we need a little bit of luck to go our way,” Starkey said. “We also need to continue to progress and get better as the season goes and play our best basketball when the games matter the most late in the season.”

Hauser, a sophomore guard and last season’s MAC All-Freshman Team member, said the team spent offseason getting to know one another.

“We lost a lot of our seniors, so just getting everyone comfortable with each other,” she said. “We brought in five new people, so we started to build that chemistry with them.”

Last season, Hauser’s 95 assists were the most on the team and the 15th-best in the MAC.

The second-year guard averaged nearly nine points per game while starting 25 of her 32 games played.

Through the transfer portal, the Flashes added two players: graduate student forward Mikala Morris and redshirt sophomore guard Kaley Perkins.

Morris has spent the previous four seasons at Quinnipia. She was a four-year starter, averaging 11.2 points and 8.4 rebounds per game.

She earned Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference Defensive Player of the Year in 2021 and was a three-time All-MAAC performer.

“My biggest thing has been getting to know and building relationships with everyone,” Morris said. “It took me a little bit to adjust just because they were on a different system than I ran at my old school, but I’m starting to get it, and it’s been a lot of fun.”

Perkins, who did not appear in a game last season, averaged 2.6 points per game, shooting 42.9% from behind the arc during the 2021-22 season.

The Flashes’ first regular-season game will be 4 p.m. Nov. 12 at The University of Louisiana at Lafayette, which finished 16-15 overall last season and had a 10-8 record in the Sun Belt Conference. The team’s two top scorers, who both totaled over 318 points last season, are returning.

“I think we have the ability to be even better than what we were last year,” Starkey said. “So, our expectations are pretty high internally in our program.”

Emily Lowen is a reporter. Contact her at [email protected].