STATE COLLEGE – Penn State women's basketball coach Tanisha Wright was a college head coach with no players on the roster at one point.
Now, with the season opener less than a month away, Wright and Penn State women’s basketball are ready for the start of a new era.
Prior to Vitória Santana’s return on Sept. 29, every player from the 2025-26 roster either ran out of eligibility or transferred, including leading scorer Kiyomi McMiller (who’s now at Florida with Moriah Murray) and 6-foot-6 center Gracie Merkle (now at Minnesota).
That meant Wright and her newly assembled staff had to put together a roster from scratch. As great and established as Wright is as a program legend and accomplished WNBA coach, finding talented players under those circumstances isn’t ideal.
And yet, after the dust has settled, the Lady Lions are 11-deep heading into 2026-27, and the roster includes some legitimate talent.
“We started this journey with zero players,” Wright said at media day on Oct. 12. "So, to be able to fill the roster with 11, and with the caliber of people that they are, we’re ready to get started.”
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Petra Božan brings two years of Big Ten experience from Nebraska, along with FIBA experience for Team Croatia; Skylar Durley won Mountain West Freshman of the Year last season at Nevada; Kamrah Banks is a 247Sports top-100 recruit and top-12 point guard in the country; and Ava Black saw real minutes on one of the top programs in country as a freshman at Vanderbilt.
What’s more impressive than the quick accumulation of basketball talent, is how quickly the players have bonded with each other. An entirely new team can struggle to develop chemistry, especially this early, but Wright said it’s been the opposite thus far.
“I got really lucky, to be honest with you,” Wright said. “We do some things together, but they’ve taken the initiative to do things on their own and build the culture that they want.
“Ultimately, when you’re building a team, you want it to be player-centric, where the players decide who they want to be, and the identity they want to be. They’re doing that on their own, so it’s made our lives a lot easier.”
Graduate forward Savannah White credited “Coach T” with recruiting “good people,” which has made the chemistry building much easier. She added how the team has a unified belief in Wright’s goals and a shared desire for success, both individually and as a unit.
Games still have to be played, but the cultural identity of the new-era Penn State women’s basketball is off to a good start.
This article originally appeared on York Daily Record: After starting at zero, Tanisha Wright built Penn State women's basketball from scratch