Duke's women's basketball team hasn't exactly had the season start that the Blue Devils hoped for. Like most, the team headed into a spate of non-conference games looking for wins, but struggled to muster up the result they hoped for.
While there is still plenty of time to turn the season around (and Duke would hardly be the first team to begin the season off their game but end up making a deep push during March Madness), it's worth looking back at when things started to derail for the team — and why.
The first sign that all might not be well for Duke this season came in April when Louann Battison became the first member of the team to announce she planned to enter the transfer portal. Battison ended up at Rice, where she is currently averaging 20.2 minutes per game, a sharp increase from the previous season in Durham, where she averaged 3.4 minutes per game.
Duke soon saw the departure of Jenessa Cotton and then Vanessa de Jesus, who announced her decision to enter the transfer portal on April 10.
Perhaps the biggest blow to the program came days later when sophomore Oluchi Okananwa entered the transfer portal after two seasons with the team. Okananwa was a huge part of Duke's bench for Lawson and averaged 21.4 and 22.4 minutes per game in 2023-24 and 2024-25 respectively. She was also the first transfer portal departure the program suffered at the end of the 2024-25 season.
Duke finally broke a 4-game losing stretch this week
Those losses clearly impacted the momentum of the team, and it's not completely surprising that much of the season has been an uphill battle for the Blue Devils.
Duke headed into the team's December 7 match against Virginia Tech in desperate need of a win, which they managed to secure after taking down the Hokies 70-54. But that effort was largely driven by sophomore Toby Fournier, who may not be able to bear to sustain that level of play without support from her teammates.
Still, there are reasons to be optimistic as the team heads into ACC play. As Kara Lawson told reporters following the December 7 game, the team has continued to steadily improve and, "We're a lot better tonight than we were last week. And that's what you want. You want your team to grow through the course of the season."
Continued improvement will be reliant on Ashlon Parker and Taina Mair, Lawson also said. "Those two kind of have to be iron women to play for us, because that's where we are in our depth chart. We just don't have a lot of guards that are healthy. We have a lot of forwards," she explained.
As ever, at this point in the season it's just about time. Luckily, Duke still has plenty of it.