Correspondent file photo / Robert Hayes Youngstown State women’s basketball coach Melissa Jackson (center) leads the team in the huddle after the Penguins beat Oakland on Jan. 26 at Zidian Family Arena at the Beeghly Center.

YOUNGSTOWN — For Youngstown State, the 2024-25 season was a year filled with plenty of ups and downs, as well as marked by change and adversity.

The Penguins entered the season with a new head coach for the first time in 10 years after Melissa Jackson was hired last March.

Jackson’s arrival brought a new culture, a new style-of-play and plenty of new players, including freshmen and transfers.

With the youth on the roster, there were growing pains, but the Penguins showed signs of growth and progress throughout the year, especially approaching the end of the season.

“I thought we accomplished a lot this first year,” Jackson said. “I think first years are hard. Whenever you take over a program, I think the first year is when you have a lot of adversity and injuries can make it even more difficult. But I was really happy and proud of what we accomplished.

“I know we have a lot of work ahead of us, but I think we have established a foundation and an energy that we want to continue to go forward with.”

For Jackson, establishing her culture modeled around her “five core values” of toughness, gratitude, family, passion and commitment was paramount for her first season.

“That was huge for me, how we wanted to practice, the intensity with which we wanted to practice, how we wanted to prep for games, then once we got into games, our preparation — I thought that continued to get better throughout,” Jackson said. “I think that was huge for a lot of people, whether it was returners or obviously all the freshmen coming from high school. So there was a learning curve there, and I think we really got up to speed with that.”

As with most teams, YSU was led by its upperclassmen, including returning seniors Malia Magestro and Haley Thierry and transfer Jewel Watkins.

Watkins proved to be the team’s star, leading the team in scoring at 15.3 points per game, while also being one of YSU’s best defenders. Her accomplishments earned her All-Horizon League Second Team honors.

In addition to some older players, including juniors Faith Burch, Xoe Rosalez and Abby Liber and sophomore Bella Samz, the rest of the roster was comprised of freshmen, including Sophia Gregory, Sarah Baker, Erica King, Danielle Cameron, Ashlynn Van Tassell, Dacia Lewandowski and Hayden Barrier.

Gregory had a slow start to the season. But once she started to figure things out, she became an invaluable piece for the Penguins, eventually winning Horizon League Freshman of the Year after leading all conference freshmen in points, rebounds, steals and blocks.

The Penguins opened the season with four straight wins, but once they got into the meat of their non-conference schedule, their youth started to show. They struggled during their trip to Puerto Rico for a multi-team tournament, especially offensively, losing both games.

YSU then opened Horizon League play with a pair of wins, but injuries began to take their toll on the roster.

The rest of conference play proved to be a mixed bag, as the Penguins tried to find consistency on both ends of the floor with a young and injury-depleted roster.

However, from the middle to the end of February, YSU seemed to find a recipe for success during the closing stretch, as it dropped back-to-back heartbreakers in overtime before winning three of its last four games to end the regular season.

“When you talk about the end of the season, I thought we were playing our best basketball,” Jackson said. “Any coach, I don’t care who you talk to, wants to be playing great basketball at the end of the year. I thought we had some tough losses, and we learned and grew from that. Then we went up to Michigan and swept the Michigan trip — I thought that was a huge accomplishment for our program.

“Then for us to come back and beat a top-three team in Cleveland State on our home floor, I think that was the culmination of a lot of hard work and a lot of fight in our group. I was so happy for that locker room to experience that.”

The Penguins finished the year 12-19 overall and 7-13 in conference play, before closing out the season in the first round of the Horizon League tournament.

“The biggest thing I learned was how special YSU is … that’s a credit to our fans and the amount of support we have,” Jackson said. “I’m so excited about our future. … I think this place is really special, and I fully believe I have everything here to make us one of the top teams in the league.”

BATTLING INJURIES

A variety of injuries throughout the season likely prevented the Penguins from reaching their full potential.

“I saw the doctor more than my own staff some weeks,” Jackson said.

Before the season even began, YSU lost Van Tassell to a season-ending injury. Things then started to snowball from there.

Cameron went down in the Penguins’ second game against St. Bonaventure with a season-ending lower leg injury, then the same thing happened to Baker about a month later in the conference opener against Milwaukee.

Magestro then missed four games from late November into early December, Burch got banged up a couple times, before she then missed the final five games, and finally Lewandowski missed a handful of games throughout the year, as well.

“I’ve never had a season like this — I’ve had one or two injuries and maybe one season-ending, but I’ve never had multiple season-ending injuries,” Jackson said. “So that was something, even for me, we had to figure out how to manage it because we had so many of them. But I thought they did an unbelievable job of bonding, and our trainers did a great job.

“I thought our staff really managed it well — we had to make a lot of adjustments that people don’t even realize throughout the course of the season, whether that was our defense or whether that was our offense.”

The Penguins have the offseason to get everyone healthy and back to where they were again ahead of next season.

OFFSEASON OUTLOOK

Going forward into the offseason, the immediate focus for YSU’s coaching staff becomes roster management.

“I think it’s just the new age of college basketball,” Jackson said. “You don’t really ever get a break. So yes, our season ended, but you quickly turn the page to next season and what that looks like.”

While Watkins, Magestro and Thierry have exhausted their eligibility, retaining the Penguins’ core that can return is key for the program to build on things going into next year.

That includes making sure key players like Gregory, Baker, King, Rosalez, Liber, Samz, Cameron and Burch decide to stick around instead of entering the transfer portal.

“I think, first and foremost, the most important thing is retention with this team, because I’ve talked at length about how special these young kids are, and I truly believe that,” Jackson said. “We feel really good about where our locker room and culture is, and we feel good about those kids that they want to be here and they want to build something special.”

Then, in addition to high school signee Brooke Adkins from Wayne, W.Va., YSU expects to be active in the transfer portal to bring in experienced players to fill those extra roster spots.

“With the portal and with the scholarships we have, we have to bring some experience in because we’re still going to be young with (redshirt) freshmen and sophomores,” Jackson said. “So we’ll look at that and look at our roster and what positions we really need to key on and focus on.”

From there, Jackson wants to make sure the returning players use the offseason for strength training and skill development before the team comes back together in the summer to begin to prepare for the 2025-26 season.

“The No. 1 thing right now is getting stronger,” Jackson said. “I was really happy with where the conditioning was at. I thought we were able to play at the pace that I wanted to and the pace that we needed to in this league. But I don’t know if we had the strength that we need in this league. Again, I think that goes to some of our youth too.

“So those freshmen will now have their first spring as a Division I college athlete. So we will hit the weight room hard, as well as work on one-on-one skills. Then when we come back in the summertime and see what our roster looks like, then we’ll do a lot of team stuff and continue to build on the foundation that we put in place.”