2026-27 Big East Women’s Basketball Summer Vibe Check: Butler Bulldogs
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Team: Butler Bulldogs
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2025-26 Record: 12-19, 6-14 Big East
2025-26 Big East Finish: Tied with Georgetown for eighth, one game behind Providence, one game ahead of DePaul
Final 2025-26 Rankings
NET: #136
Her Hoop Stats: #172
BartTorvik.com: #107
Postseason? Just a 62-58 loss to Georgetown in the 8/9 game in the first round of the Big East conference tournament.
Notable Departures: We have to start with head coach Austin Parkinson, who agreed with Butler to part ways on April 6th…… one month after their season ended in the first round of the Big East tournament. I am begging someone to make a decision faster than this in the future. Then again, seeing as Butler finished their “national search” for a new coach just two days later, maybe this was a wheels already in motion situation.
Unsurprisingly, the list of player departures relative to a coaching change is very long. We can qualify it as “gosh darn near everybody that mattered.” Leading scorer Mallory Miller is gone after one season after transferring in one year ago from Arizona State. Miller was also one of just three women on the roster to average more than four rebounds a game, and Caroline Dotsey, one of the other two to land amongst the team leaders in glass cleaning, is also out the door after one year in Indianapolis following her two seasons at Maine. Miller led the team in assists as well at 2.7 per game, and Butler loses the next four names on that list: Lily Zeinstra, Addison Baxter, and Kennedy Langham. That’s just about everyone who averaged 1.7 assists or more per game this past year. Zeinstra and Langham both played in every game this past season and started most of the time, while Baxter averaged 19 minutes a night in her 23 appearances including six starts. Zeinstra was a sophomore after two years at Butler, Baxter just finished her freshman year, and Langham had just come over to BU after two seasons at Samford.
I haven’t managed to work in Anna Wypych or McKenna Johnson to the discussion, but they’re gone, too. They averaged 17.1 and 15.1 minutes per game respectively while mostly coming off the bench for the Bulldogs. Wypych was a freshman, while Wisconsin native Johnson is headed to a third home in three years after starting at Minnesota.
If you’re scoring at home: Miller (Florida) and Wypych (Michigan State) are the only two departing rotation players to transfer to a high major school. Mckenzie Swanson is also transferring to Wake Forest, but she never played in two seasons in Indianapolis. I’m not sure about the timeline of everyone electing to transfer relative to when Butler announced that Parkinson would not return, but it’s safe to say that Butler didn’t get their roster raided even if the players were going into the portal before Parkinson’s departure was confirmed.
Notable Returners: You’ll notice that I said Butler is losing “gosh darn near everybody that mattered.” The literal only two returning players on the 2026-27 roster are the pair of sisters that transferred in from Valparaiso one year ago: Nevaeh and Saniya Jackson. The pair of 6’0” twins from Fort Wayne both had a decent role on the team last season, but Saniya Jackson obviously had more of an impact. She started all 31 games — Mallory Miller was the only other Bulldog to do that — and led the team in minutes played at 30.2 per contest. She was the top rebounder at 5.5 per game and she wasn’t that far behind Miller for the scoring title at 9.2 a night. Nevaeh Jackson averaged 22.1 minutes per game in 23 appearances — she missed a stretch from Christmas through the end of January — that included four starts. Nevaeh Jackson ended up averaging 6.3 points and 3.0 rebounds and just over an assist and a steal per game. That was way down from her numbers at Valparaiso the year before, but that can be chalked up to a drop in minutes to a certain extent. For what it’s worth to you, both of the Jacksons had similar per-40 minute numbers this past season.
Key Additions: Well, obviously we have to start this section somewhere else for context here, soooo….
Coach:Maria Marchesano, entering her first season as Butler head coach and 10th as a Division 1 head coach. She went 61-54 in four seasons at Mount Saint Mary’s and is coming off a 94-76 run in five seasons at Purdue Fort Wayne. When she finished her four year career at Butler in 2005, she was #2 all-time in made three-pointers, but she’s now just 10th on that list.
And back to our regular scheduled programming…….
Key Additions: We’ll get to the six transfers in a moment, but I do want to point out that three of the four freshmen on the roster are three of the four freshmen that signed to play at Butler with Austin Parkinson back in November and the fourth freshman committed to Parkinson in late March, which again: Would someone please make a decision faster in the future? Based on the information in the press releases on their signings and the lack of any kind of a ranking on Blue Star Basketball, I think it’s safe to generalize all four freshmen as “unremarkable” in terms of being a key addition to the roster. With two returning players and six transfers, there’s definitely going to be a chance for the trio to earn a spot in the rotation just purely based on the math of it all.
The first two of the transfers that stand out as making an immediate impact are Lili Krasovec (6’3” senior forward, Budapest, Hungary) and Destiny Macharia (5’6” sophomore guard, Columbia, Maryland). Both women have followed Maria Marchesano over from Purdue Fort Wayne, so that gives everyone a little bit of a cushion on an adjustment period. Krasovec is the more important of the two, as she was PFW’s #2 scorer (11.3 points/game) and #1 rebounder (5.4/game) last season. She also started her collegiate career at Boston College, so even though she wasn’t a notable contributor there, she’s at least seen what it’s like to play at a high major level. Macharia was a freshman for the Mastodons last season and averaged 10.2 minutes per game while appearing in 34 of their 35 games. Obviously that’s not a major contribution, but she was an every night rotation player as a freshman and she’s clearly enthused about continuing to play for Marchesano since she followed her through the transfer portal.
From there, I think we move to Tamar Singer (5’4” junior guard, Haifa, Israel) as the most likely impact player coming through the portal. She’s been a starter since Day 1 at Miami (OH), and is coming off a sophomore season where she just barely fell short of averaging seven assists a game, which was best in the MAC. She also added 10.9 points, 3.9 rebounds, and 2.6 steals per game, so if any of that translates to the Big East, Singer is going to be a core component of the Bulldogs right away.
I like the possibilities of Karina Bystry (5’9” sophomore guard, Englewood, Tennessee) popping for Butler right away. She was a freshman at Northern Kentucky last year, but was still the team’s leading scorer at 14.8 per game while starting in 28 of 32 appearances. She can rebound a little bit as well (4.2 per game) so that’s a nice added bonus. With multiple years of eligibility on deck, it would make sense to point resources in her direction to help build the program up .
Judit Valero (5’11” senior guard, Barcelona, Spain) and Taya Ellis (6’1” senior forward, Toronto, Ontario, Canada) are coming through the portal as seniors with one year of eligibility left…. unless the NCAA approves the 5 seasons in 5 years rules before we get to August. Still, you’d have to guess that they signed on with Marchesano with the idea of going out on a high note. Valero spent her freshman year at South Florida before moving on to FIU for the past two seasons. No matter the location, her role grew every year of college hoops, landing at starting 27 of 30 appearances for the Panthers and averaging 9.2 points, 3.2 rebounds, and 1.2 assists per game, all of which were career highs. Ellis was at Bowling Green for all three of her college seasons to this point, and she was a most of the time starter last season. She had career bests of 6.5 points, 6.7 rebounds, 1.1 steals, and 1.1 blocks per game for the Falcons in 2025-26, but we should note that Marquette held her to just two points, six rebounds, and a block as the Golden Eagles won 77-51 in Milwaukee this past season.
Outlook: Before we get into what Maria Marchesano’s Butler will look like, we have to take stock as to what the Bulldogs are as they exit the Austin Parkinson era. Here’s what I know for sure: Butler was REALLY BAD at the end of the Kurt Godlevske run as head coach, and Parkinson almost immediately steered the Bulldogs out of that. They won four total games in Godlevske’s last two seasons, three in Big East play, and Parkinson had them at 11-19 overall and 6-14 in the Big East in Year One. And then they got better in Year Two and Parkinson returned most of his roster…. and they didn’t really get better AND THEN the roster emptied out. Lily Zeinstra was the only notable returning player a year ago, and the Bulldogs took a big ol’ step back and now the roster’s emptied out again except for the Jackson sisters and there’s a new head coach.
I am not 100% sure as to the timing of when everyone started heading for the door after the 2025-26 season ended, but the fact of the matter is Butler had just one senior and only two women return for next season. It’s possible that the delay on Butler parting ways with Parkinson is a realization between all parties that the roster was emptying for the second straight year and then deciding how everyone wanted to proceed from there. That would make sense. At the very least, it would make a lot more sense than Butler or Parkinson taking a month to decide what to do and then the roster emptying out. If we presume it’s the former, then Butler — the athletic department more than Maria Marchesano at this point — has to figure out what got in the way of Parkinson being able to retain players who ended up transferring to locales such as UMass, Southern Miss, and Loyola Chicago instead of staying int he Big East.
That’s big picture structural stuff, and we’re not going to get an idea of where the Bulldogs are steering that ship until next year when we talk about Maria Marchesano’s retention from Year One to Year Two. For now, what we can point out is that Marchesano can, at the very least, make a claim to being the most impactful Purdue Fort Wayne coach during their time in Division 1. Since they debuted in 2001-02, there have been just five seasons at .500 overall or better. Marchesano coached three of them, and that’s the last three years after going 21-40 in her first two years in Fort Wayne.
None of these three years has resulted in breaking through to the NCAA tournament, even after going 18-2 in Horizon League play in 2025, but that’s the nature of playing in the HL: Sometimes you lose 76-63 in the conference tournament title game after going 18-2…. because Green Bay was 19-1 and the #1 seed ahead of you. Still, Marchesano had Purdue Fort Wayne playing like a top 140 team in the BartTorvik.com rankings, including #93 in that year when they were 18-2 in the Horizon League. The past two seasons, her Mastodons were a great shooting team, ranking in the top 70 in effective field goal percentage, and they got there two different ways. In 2025, Purdue Fort Wayne shot over 37% on threes, making them a top 10 team in the country. In 2026, Marchesano got them to the top 40 in two-point shooting percentage as the three-point shooting drifted way back to earth.
Marchesano’s teams have been pretty solid to great at keeping track of the ball on their end of the floor, but they’ve never been good at offensive rebounding. That second one is a persistent issue, to the point where it has to be tactical: Take the best shot we can, then get back on defense and don’t worry about second chances. The Mastodons had their fastest tempo of Marchesano’s five year tenure this past season, but they’ve never been a poky little puppy of a team, either.
This is a Year 1 for Maria Marchesano, so expecting her to come in and be competitive immediately with a roster that she had to assemble on the fly is perhaps a bit of a high bar. She’s shown the ability to build a program towards a competitive baseline in both her time at Purdue Fort Wayne and at Mount St. Mary’s before that. That’s a good sign, and now she has a chance to do that for her alma mater…. it’s just that she has to do that in the Big East, not the Horizon League that she played in or the one she coached in, either.
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