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How much help is Savannah Catalon going to have in 2026-27? | Photo by Dan Squicciarini/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Team: Seton Hall Pirates
2025-26 Record: 19-13, 12-8 Big East
2025-26 Big East Finish: Tied for third with Marquette, won the tiebreaker by way of head-to-head record
Final 2025-26 Rankings
NET: #65
Her Hoop Stats: #90
BartTorvik.com: #61
Postseason? After sneaking past St. John’s by two points in the Big East tournament quarterfinals, Seton Hall fell in the semifinals, 62-48, to Villanova. Their record was good enough to get into the WBIT, the secondary event run by the NCAA, but they lost to #4 regional seed Missouri, 67-57, even though the Pirates ended up hosting that game.
Notable Departures: There’s a bit of a divide on the women leaving Seton Hall after last season. On one hand, you have Mariana Valenzuela and Messiah Hunter, both of whom were on their final year of eligibility with the Pirates last year. Valenzuela is a bigger loss from what we saw from SHU last season as she was one of just two players to start all 32 games and one of five to appear in every contest. She was one of three double digit scorers on the squad, and her 7.2 rebounds per game topped the charts for Seton Hall. Hunter is one of the five to play each and every night and she even started seven times, but by the end of the year, her minutes had dwindled to the point where she appeared for just one minute in their WBIT loss to Missouri and ultimately averaged only 11.7 per game.
On the other hand, you have three women that leave South Orange with playing time left in front of them. Jordana Codio had a huge breakout season for Seton Hall after not playing much in two seasons at Texas, starting 26 times in 32 appearances and averaging 12.5 points along with 4.3 rebounds per game. SHU’s #2 scorer last year will move on to Georgia for next season. Jada Eads was having an up and down season in the scoring department for the Pirates last year, but she was averaging 10.6 points, 5.1 rebounds, and a team high 4.1 assists per game when she suffered a season ending ACL tear in January. She was Seton Hall’s #2 scorer as a freshman and was obviously playing a major part for the Pirates before her injury, but Eads’ return to the court will happen at Tennessee…. if she makes it back this season…. and if Kim Caldwell keeps her head coaching job. Finally, there’s Zahara Bishop, who departs after one season. She was making an impact for the Pirates out of the gate, ending up at 8.4 points and 3.3 rebounds in nearly 23 minutes a night while ending up in that group of five to play in ever game. While you could argue that Codio and Eads are closer to home in Florida, you can’t say the same for Bishop, who shifts to Auburn instead of towards her home in Minnesota.
Notable Returners: Bringing back Savannah Catalon for her fourth season at Seton Hall is a pretty notable deal. She led the Pirates in scoring (13.1/game) and steals (2.8/game) last season and added 4.6 rebounds and 2.2 assists a night as well. That’s the good news. the bad news is that more than half of her 9.6 shot attempts per game were behind the three-point line, and she only hit 33% of them. That’s doing a lot of work to suppress her overall shooting percentage as well as her effective field goal percentage as well.
Unfortunately, Catalon is the only one of their top five scorers coming back, if you include Eads and her injury in the top five. That balances out by bringing back the next three scorers on the stat sheet, but only one of them was over four points a game. That was Ja’Kahla Craft, who added 6.9 points per game as a sophomore last year. She did shoot 40% on threes, which makes her the runaway team leader in that department, but her playing time was limited to 18 minutes on average in just 26 appearances. Shailyn Pinkney started 17 times in 28 appearances last season and ultimately averaged over 21 minutes a game… but that didn’t turn into contributions on the stat sheet: 3.8 points, 2.8 rebounds, 2.2 assists. Ari Woodard rounds out the list of returning rotation players. She came on late in her freshman year to make a big contribution, playing double digit minutes in her last eight appearances of the season and starting her last six, and clearing at least 31 minutes in all six of those. She averaged 6.6 points, 3.6 rebounds, 4.0 assists, and 2.1 steals per game in that stretch, which is impressive when you realize that Woodard played just 44 minutes up to that point.
Key Additions: Blue Star Basketball has Shamira Morton (6’3” freshman forward) at #63 in the country in their 2026 rankings. That would make her the standout of the five freshmen on the roster here. With five freshmen and three transfers filling in around the four returning rotation players, odds are we’ll here from more than one of the freshmen, but for now, Morton is the name to know. I don’t have rankings to back any of this up, but I don’t think we can just dismiss the possible impact of Inieye Oruh (6’4” freshman forward) or Kenadie Maughan (6’5” freshman center) for the seemingly obvious reason.
All three of Seton Hall’s incoming transfers fall into the category of hoping a change of scenery improves things for them, and two of them are probably hoping that a second scenery change bounces them back to the way things used to be. Samari Bankhead (6’0” sophomore guard) went from nearly 18 minutes a game to barely playing at all in the final five games of the season. She wasn’t knocking them dead up to that point — 4.1 points and 1.6 rebounds per game — but she was getting regular playing time as a freshman…. right until she wasn’t. Jada Crawshaw (6’0” senior forward) was turning into an impact player at Long Beach State, putting up 10.4 points and 4.8 rebounds per game as a sophomore, but that wasn’t last season. That was the year before last, and last season she was at Georgia Tech. She averaged just 14.8 minutes per game and added 7.2 points and 3.0 rebounds per game, but was then ruled out — presumably for injury? — for GT’s final seven games of the year. Saniyah King (5’7” junior guard) clearly tried to cash in on a great freshman year at Howard in her move to Mississippi State, but it didn’t work out. She led the MEAC in assists as a freshman at 4.5 per game, and she chipped in 11.5 points and 3.1 rebounds, too. The jump to the SEC led to her averaging just 14 minutes per game in 26 appearances for the Bulldogs, and she averaged just 2.5 points, 1.3 rebounds, and 1.1 assists.
Coach: Tony Bozzella, entering his 27th season as a Division 1 head coach and 14th at Seton Hall. He has a record of 229-164 with the Pirates, 415-378 in Division 1, and 535-482 as a collegiate head coach.
Outlook: As I mentioned earlier, there were just five Seton Hall players to appear in all 32 games and just two to start in all of them. With that in mind, it may be wrong to attach value to the loss of any one particular player. However, something really jumps out at me when I pull up SHU’s BartTorvik.com page to start putting all of this together. The Pirates were mostly fine up until they took their second loss to UConn this past season. Their Game Scores were almost all up above 80, and their T-Rank had gone from #69 to start the season up to 36 when they lost to the Huskies the first time and a totally fine #41 a few games later when they took that second loss.
The first loss to UConn was the first game all season that Jada Eads missed. She played just twice more, 30 minutes in a 64-61 home win over Marquette and three minutes at DePaul (an 86-77 victory) where she blew her knee out. After that DePaul game, Seton Hall was 13-5 overall and 7-2 in Big East play. After the second loss to UConn, they were 14-6 and 8-3. The Pirates were top 50 in both offensive and defensive efficiency per Torvik at that point of the season, but they wouldn’t have Eads in the lineup again.
After that point:
5-8 overall, 4-6 in Big East play including a regular season ending 62-55 road loss to a sub-100 Butler team, #84 in the country per Torvik in that time, #111 on offense, #69 on defense. I don’t think I’m out of line to say that Seton Hall fumbled an NCAA tournament bid over the month of February, and then they clonked out in the first round of the WBIT, in a home game that they got gifted based on seeding, to really drive that point home.
The wheels came off without Eads, big time, and now she’s in Knoxville. Maybe it’s wrong to pin all of that on her injury, but the timing matches. Yes, Ja’Kahla Craft missed five games at the end of the season. Shailyn Pinkney missed four right around the same time. Ari Woodard missed a couple in there. There are compounding effects of all of that to be sure, but the overall quality of play — based on Torvik’s Game Scores — was already falling without Eads in the lineup anyway.
What is Tony Bozzella going to do to adjust for that now that he has an entire offseason to find a solution? What’s the plan when leaning back on Jordana Codio and Mariana Valenzuela — nearly 25 points a game combined last year — isn’t an option either? What does Seton Hall do when the incoming transfers don’t pop the way Valenzuela did with an immediate impact even though her Florida State stats didn’t hint to use that was going to happen? Is Shamira Morton’s ranking by one recruiting service enough to bolster the entire roster and make everyone else a little bit better?
Is this going to be a year of well-coached basketball but inexperienced basketball for Seton Hall, one where they tilt towards getting minutes for the freshmen and sophomores like Woodard and Bankhead and building towards results for the future? That seems like it could be the case, and in a year where the NCAA tournament is going to have more at-large bids than ever before, that seems like it might be a bit of a let down for the Pirates.
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