[BostonCard]

Also, you have take these rankings with a grain of salt: in the 2023 class, Madison Booker was ranked 12th (hah!), Tessa Johnson 25th, and Hannah Hidalgo (5th) was one spot below Cierra Toomey (4th), who played five minutes and went scoreless against us last weekend when UNC visited.

You should take all rankings with a grain of salt; players over and under perform all the time, and that's why I said these are early returns.  At the end of the day, collegiate coaching is a mix of who you get and how much you get out of them.  So far, we are doing alright in terms of who we've gotten (recruiting) under Paye in terms of the class of 2025, though all those recruits started being recruited while Vanderver was still the coach, and a single season does not a long term trend make.  But we got a good class of 2025 so that's a start.  Figuring out the second part of the equation is harder, because it's really hard to judge the counterfactual (how much a different coach would have gotten out of this same group of players).  The best you can do is project how what might have expected given the talent, but absent a detailed talent evaluation, all you have is recruiting rankings.  And I think that here we might have been able to do better.  The average team with players with similar recruiting rankings should probably be a borderline top-25 team, and we are a bit away from there.  So the question is whether this is was mis-ranking the players or failing to get enough out of them.  I think you need multiple seasons and a variety of different players to know for sure, but as I said, the early indicator is that this team should be doing better.

BC

[BostonCard]

Also, you have take these rankings with a grain of salt: in the 2023 class, Madison Booker was ranked 12th (hah!), Tessa Johnson 25th, and Hannah Hidalgo (5th) was one spot below Cierra Toomey (4th), who played five minutes and went scoreless against us last weekend when UNC visited.

You should take all rankings with a grain of salt; players over and under perform all the time, and that's why I said these are early returns.  At the end of the day, collegiate coaching is a mix of who you get and how much you get out of them.  So far, we are doing alright in terms of who we've gotten (recruiting) under Paye in terms of the class of 2025, though all those recruits started being recruited while Vanderver was still the coach, and a single season does not a long term trend make.  But we got a good class of 2025 so that's a start.  Figuring out the second part of the equation is harder, because it's really hard to judge the counterfactual (how much a different coach would have gotten out of this same group of players).  The best you can do is project how what might have expected given the talent, but absent a detailed talent evaluation, all you have is recruiting rankings.  And I think that here we might have been able to do better.  The average team with players with similar recruiting rankings should probably be a borderline top-25 team, and we are a bit away from there.  So the question is whether this is was mis-ranking the players or failing to get enough out of them.  I think you need multiple seasons and a variety of different players to know for sure, but as I said, the early indicator is that this team should be doing better.

BC