Breaking news:.Louisville women’s basketball head coach Jeff Walz announce his resignation and departure leaving…
Louisville women’s basketball head coach Jeff Walz enters the 2024-25 season with one of his most inexperienced rosters in more than a decade.
Doesn’t matter; he’s got the Cardinals once again jockeying for position at the top of the ACC preseason poll, which was released Tuesday. The conference’s 18 head coaches and its Blue Ribbon Panel of 61 select voters ranked U of L fourth.
Defending ACC Tournament champion Notre Dame took the top spot with 70 first-place votes. The Fighting Irish are coming off a Sweet 16 appearance and boast the league’s preseason Player of the Year, Hannah Hidalgo.
N.C. State, which reached its first Final Four since 1998 this past spring, came in second with eight first-place votes.
Louisville finished the 2023-24 season at 24-10 overall and fifth in the ACC with a 12-6 record. For the first time under Walz, it got bounced from the NCAA Tournament without winning a game.
“We laid an egg,” Walz said during ACC Tipoff last week in Charlotte, North Carolina. “I’ll be the first to admit (that).
“A lot of programs might be excited to (just) make the tournament. That is not the expectations here. It didn’t go as we had hoped, and we’re working to change that.”
This go-around, the Cards’ roster features eight freshmen — more than any other school in the conference — and a core group of returners headlined by Olivia Cochran. They open the season at 2:30 p.m. Nov. 4 in Paris against UCLA at the Aflac Oui-Play event. ACC play begins with a 1 p.m. tipoff Dec. 15 against N.C. State at the KFC Yum! Center.
U of L, at No. 17, was one of six ACC teams to crack the preseason AP Top 25. The others were: Notre Dame (No. 6), N.C. State (No. 9), Duke (No. 11), North Carolina (No. 15) and Florida State (No. 19).
With the additions of California, SMU and Stanford, only the top 15 teams in the final regular-season standings will earn spots in the ACC Tournament; which runs March 5-9 at the Greensboro Coliseum in Greensboro, North Carolina.
