Postseason WNIT | 3/19/2025 1:26:21 PM

Even if his Coastal Carolina women’s basketball team plays with a hair-on-fire approach at times, head coach Kevin Pederson won’t be tempted to water down the mood.
 
In his third season running the show with the Chanticleers, Pederson has seen his hyper-aggressive roster meet multiple challenges in the 2024-25 season, posting a 23-8 record while leaning on a roster fueled by six transfers who all came from programs that had losing records. That group brought a certain urgency to Coastal Carolina’s mindset, forcing more than 20 turnovers per game, good for 21^st in all of NCAA D-I basketball.
 
As energized as ever, Coastal Carolina will look to stamp its brand on the 2025 Postseason WNIT, hosting Campbell (21-12) in Round 1 on Thursday. The winner will play at Southern Indiana (22-12) on Sunday.
 
After a successful 17-year run at D-II Lander University, Pederson took the job in Conway, SC., knowing there was work to be done as Coastal Carolina had won four conference games in the previous two seasons. After going 14-16 and 12-21 in his first two years, Pederson was ready to fully reset the player mix for this season.
 
“When we took over, we had good people in the program, maybe not necessarily the fit for the system. We said here’s what we’re trying to do, then proceeded with seven or eight from the team we inherited, and for those two years you go through it,” Pederson said. “After that, we go to the portal and know we have a chance to make the team in more our flavor. We had a great high school class the year before, the best in Sun Belt with three top-200 kids (Riley Stack, Alancia Ramsey and Dalanna Carter).
 
“With the portal kids, we’ve reshaped our team. Every kid came from a losing program. We realized we had a great group of kids desperate to be part of a winning team, and a lot more talent than the year before. This team jelled quickly; four of them out of the portal took starting roles. You build a team year-by-year nowadays, and that’s what we did this year.”
 
Coastal Carolina established a base of operations with point guard Jayden Marable, a grad transfer from Northern Illinois whose assist-to-turnover ratio (120 to 51) has been massively important along with her 10 points per game. Junior guard Savannah Brooks, an import from Delaware State, set an ultra-competitive tone and leads the team in scoring (13.2 ppg) while setting the right tone defensively, taking charges and pacing the group in steals (65).
 
Another key guard, Kristin Williams (from UMass) will shoot from just about anywhere and has 80 made 3-pointers on the season. Ramsey has provided some gravity inside as a 6-foot sophomore forward (12.4 points and 6.5 rebounds per contest), and the group has embraced a scrambling defense that has held opponents below 40 percent shooting from the field and 30 percent from long range.
 
“We call it ‘Coastal Chaos.’ That’s been our theme all year long,” Pederson said. “We try to play at a pace that makes you uncomfortable. We try to speed you up, we like the chaos, we don’t mind a bad shot here or there. We’d rather be aggressive.”
 
That furious hunger to play for a successful program, and an eight-game win streak in Sun Belt play, actually left the Chanticleers a bit vulnerable in one moment when they coughed up a 16-point home loss to Old Dominion on Feb. 26. Having defeated ODU on the road earlier, Coastal Carolina found that setback quite unnerving.
 
“ODU is as good of a defensive team as there is in the league. You know, when we took over, we knew that Coastal just had never been relevant in the Sun Belt, and I felt this was a school and a location that should compete at a higher level,” Pederson said, “One of our goals was, to be relevant we had to find a way to get into the top four. We made the jump, but in that Old Dominion game, they do what good teams do, what perennial powerhouses do. They came to our place on a mission and went through us.
 
“We had a rough time in the locker room after that, kids didn’t handle it well, and I felt like things were unraveling. I said, flush it and put it behind you, but they were very emotional. We had another game two days late, which is the best thing for that situation, and we beat App State by 37 points.”
 
For Thursday’s game, it’s a contrast in styles as Campbell prefers to play with steady discipline – it’s one of the rare groups that has more assists than turnovers on the season. The Camels got a great win in the Coastal Athletic Tournament over College of Charleston and were just a basket away from winning the tourney, falling just short to William and Mary in the title game.
 
Pederson and Campbell coach Ronny Fisher have a lot of history between them as longtime coaches in the state.
 
“Campbell will be extremely well prepared,” Pederson said. “We’re going to have to give them different looks; if we let them stay comfortable, they will be in great shape. We cannot let their point guard (Gemma Nunez, 200 assists this year) control things, because she can be really tough.”
 
PEDERSON ON THE POSTSEASON WNIT – “We’re so excited. When the season ended, this is what I talked about, how this is an incredible tournament. A chance to play schools you’ve never played, travel to places you’ve never been to, and continue to have that chance to be one of the last teams playing basketball in the country. From where we’ve started, this is just so exciting. We’ll hang an WNIT banner in the gym, and for mid-majors it’s kind of becoming our NCAA Tournament … that tournament is skewed to the Power 5’s with their metrics, and in this tournament, you’re getting some of the best mid-majors in the country. It’s an incredible opportunity to compete with these schools and get new experiences moving forward and hopefully jumpstart things for next season.”