{"id":621586,"date":"2026-02-24T09:32:15","date_gmt":"2026-02-24T09:32:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/621586\/"},"modified":"2026-02-24T09:32:15","modified_gmt":"2026-02-24T09:32:15","slug":"arizona-wildcats-womens-basketball-honor-first-seniors-becky-burke-era","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/621586\/","title":{"rendered":"Arizona Wildcats women\u2019s basketball honor first seniors Becky Burke era"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"TUCSON,<\/a><\/p>\n

TUCSON, AZ – FEBRUARY 17: Arizona Wildcats guard Noelani Cornfield (4), forward Nora Francois (13), guard Tanyuel Welch (11), guard Sumayah Sugapong (3) and guard Molly Ladwig (5) during a women\u2019s basketball game between the Colorado Buffaloes and the Arizona Wildcats on February 17, 2026, at McKale Center at ALKEME Arena in Tucson, AZ. (Photo by Christopher Hook\/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images) Icon Sportswire via Getty Images<\/p>\n

It\u2019s been a year of learning and growth for everyone. Head coach Becky Burke has almost finished her first season as a Power 4 coach. Almost every player on the squad has finished her first year as a Power 4 player. Now, it\u2019s time to say goodbye to the players who are done with their college careers.<\/p>\n

Arizona will honor three players who have spent at least five years in college basketball during its game against Houston on Tuesday evening at 6 p.m. MST. It will likely be the final time the duo of Lani Cornfield and Nora Francois competes in McKale Center. Micky Perdue had her last collegiate home game on Jan. 6 against BYU before going down with a season-ending injury.<\/p>\n

Cornfield and Francois hope that their final game in McKale ends like Perdue\u2019s did. The high-scoring guard played her final time in an Arizona uniform in Burke\u2019s first Big 12 win.<\/p>\n

Those wins have been precious. The Wildcats have just two of them this season, although they have fought hard against some of the best teams in the league. This time out, they will be facing the only team that looks up at them in the league standings.<\/p>\n

Houston is under a first-year head coach, as well. However, he had a big advantage over Burke in that he was hired when there was more time to work in the portal. He also has a great deal more experience and coached some of the top players in the game during his time at Kentucky. He still has faced obstacles in his first year in the Big 12.<\/p>\n

Injuries have kept the Cougars from the success they might have liked this season, but they still have a chance to at least tie Arizona in the standings and receive the better seed in the Big 12 Tournament next week.<\/p>\n

Burke wasn\u2019t taking anything for granted despite getting within nine late in the game against Baylor in Waco last weekend. After all, the Wildcats dropped several \u201cwinnable\u201d games at home, such as UCF the day after Perdue was ruled out indefinitely.<\/p>\n

\u2018\u201cWe have to come to practice tomorrow with a sense of urgency to beat a Big 12 team regardless what their record is,\u201d she said on Saturday. \u201cI mean, we\u2019re not good enough to sleep on anybody. We\u2019re not good enough to overlook anybody. We have an opportunity\u2014I feel like a good opportunity\u2014to win our last home game at McKale. And if we don\u2019t come to practice the next two days with the right mindset to do so, then again, Houston is capable of beating us on any given night\u2026[W]e got to be mature about the positives that we take from this game into the next two days of practice. But I think we\u2019re squeezing every ounce of juice out of this group right now, and I\u2019m really proud of them.\u201d<\/p>\n

In years past, a team sporting an 11-16 record with two games to go in the regular season would know its season is over if it doesn\u2019t win its conference tournament. That\u2019s not necessarily the case since the WBIT was introduced and the WNIT was relegated to tertiary status.<\/p>\n

Rutgers ended its conference tournament with an 11-19 record last season. The Scarlet Knights made the WNIT. They won two games before Burke\u2019s Buffalo team dismissed them on the way to the tournament title. In a day and age when the NCAA Tournament and WBIT include most of the teams that qualify for or want to play in a postseason tournament, the WNIT will sometimes take a team with a record far below .500.<\/p>\n

Assuming that Arizona wants to play postseason basketball and the athletic department is willing to pay the associated costs, the Wildcats could be that team this season. The Tucson community has continued to support the program in this transition year when it is 11-16 overall and 2-14 in league play. The WNIT was a superb springboard for fan engagement in 2019 and it could conceivably be played at home if UA is able to foot the costs.<\/p>\n

Regardless, the final few games of the 2025-26 season will be the last in cardinal and navy for several current Wildcats. After the loss at Baylor on Saturday, Burke suggested that she expects some attrition on the roster that goes beyond those who have exhausted their eligibility, but she hopes players like Molly Ladwig and Sumayah Sugapong, among others, return to continue their careers as Wildcats next year.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019d love to see a group graduate and walk across the stage and have some three or four year players here in Arizona,\u201d Burke said. \u201cThat\u2019s obviously the goal. And the goal is also winning games. So the people that we need here, and we want here, gonna stick around and be here, and we\u2019re gonna build. And then, in year one, there\u2019s always some transition. There\u2019s always some that weren\u2019t happy with their playing time, or were homesick, or whatever the case may be. And we do expect a little bit of change. But like I said, those Mollys and the Sumayahs, we would love, love, love to just continue rolling with a good chunk of this group, if we possibly can.\u201d<\/p>\n

Up Next for Arizona Women\u2019s Basketball<\/p>\n

Houston Cougars @ Arizona Wildcats<\/p>\n

When: Tuesday, Feb. 24 @ 6 p.m. MST<\/p>\n

Where: McKale Center in Tucson, Ariz.<\/p>\n

Stats: Arizona Live Stats<\/a><\/p>\n

First things first. This group of Wildcats is still looking to do some positive things this season, and they have an opportunity to do that in their last home game.<\/p>\n

Houston has struggled this season, partly due to injuries. Kateri Poole has sat out considerable time for the second straight season. Poole has been listed as \u201cout\u201d on every Big 12 availability report this season and played just seven games in the nonconference season.<\/p>\n

The former highly-ranked recruit was supposed to be an important piece for former head coach Ronald Hughey last year. She was supposed to be a big piece for new head coach Matthew Mitchell this year. Neither got to coach her much.<\/p>\n

Former Maryland Terrapin Summer Bostock and Australian freshman Jemma Hunter have also had their names on the availability report for ages. Bostock appeared in just one game this year. Hunter has no stats at all.<\/p>\n

Ten players have made at least one start for Mitchell this season. Eight have made double-digit starts. No one has started all 27 games.<\/p>\n

Briana Peguero and Amirah Abdur-Rahim have made the most starts for the Cougars with 25 each. Jade Jones and Kayla King are the only two who have appeared in all 27 contests.<\/p>\n

One player who has benefited from the unsettled lineup spent last year in Tucson. Arizona will welcome former Wildcat forward Jorynn Ross when the Cougars come to town.<\/p>\n

Ross has found a bit more success with the Cougars, where she has started 10 times in her 22 appearances and scored 3.5 points in 14.4 minutes per game. However, like most of the players who left Arizona and didn\u2019t follow Adia Barnes to SMU, her time at her new school has been a mixed bag as far as production.<\/p>\n

Ross is one of two former Wildcats who is playing more this year for someone other than her former head coach. For Ross, that was spurred by the dramatic increase in her minutes over the past month.<\/p>\n

She has played double-digit minutes in the last nine contests. In the previous 13 appearances, she had just six such games. She has hit 48.6 percent of her shots in those nine games despite going 2 for 13 in the last two.<\/p>\n

Arizona is the last team to feel sorry for Houston\u2019s lineup shifts. Burke has also started 10 players at least once. Seven of those have started double-digit games, including Perdue. Only freshmen MJ Jurado and Daniah Trammell have appeared in every game this season.<\/p>\n

The two teams have some other things in common. Both lost to Southern and New Mexico, although the Cougars\u2019 loss to the latter came in Albuquerque. Both have struggled in conference play, with Arizona getting two wins (over BYU and Kansas State) and Houston getting one (against Cincinnati). Overall, though, the Wildcats have been far more competitive this season than UH has.<\/p>\n

Her Hoops Stats favors Arizona<\/a> regardless of where this game is played. In Tucson, the Wildcats have an 80.3 percent win probability. The service believes they will win by double digits, currently predicting a +10.5 point margin of victory. It rates Arizona dramatically higher than Houston on both offense and defense and notes that the Wildcats score almost 10 more points per game than the Cougars. The point total margin in Arizona\u2019s games is -1.2 compared to -12.3 for Houston.<\/p>\n

Arizona has a very good chance to send out Burke\u2019s first group of final-year players on a high note. It\u2019s not the last game of the season. There\u2019s a very slight chance that it\u2019s not even the last game in McKale for this group. A win is important for this team regardless of all that. Its relevance as another building block for the future of this program under its first-year head coach might be the most important thing on the line.<\/p>\n

\u201cI say this with all due respect to everybody, the amount of games that we\u2019re in position to win, and being highly, highly, highly competitive in with what we have makes me so excited for the future,\u201d Burke said after the loss at Baylor. \u201cMakes me proud of this group. It makes me really, really excited for Arizona women\u2019s basketball\u2019s future in this league. Baylor is a really, really good team, and I don\u2019t think a lot of people thought we had any business being in the ball game today, and we were with maybe a little less talent, less length, less athleticism. So the future is bright. We\u2019re excited. But again, take nothing away from this group. It\u2019s a group that\u2019s battled. We battled at TCU, we battled here. We\u2019ve battled everybody that we\u2019ve played. Have been in positions late in games to win. So, I couldn\u2019t be more proud.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"TUCSON, AZ – FEBRUARY 17: Arizona Wildcats guard Noelani Cornfield (4), forward Nora Francois (13), guard Tanyuel Welch…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":621587,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3724],"tags":[9763,7],"class_list":{"0":"post-621586","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-basketball","8":"tag-arizona-basketball","9":"tag-basketball"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/116124920243566382","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/621586","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=621586"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/621586\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/621587"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=621586"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=621586"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=621586"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}