St. John's women picked to finish No. 6 in Big East poll
St. John's women's basketball coach Joe Tartamella speaks during Big East Media Day at Madison Square Garden on Oct. 23, 2024. Credit: Errol Anderson
St. John’s was placed right in the middle of the 11-team Big East in the poll of conference women’s basketball coaches announced Tuesday at the Garden. It’s hard to say whether the sixth-place projection is good news or bad news for the Red Storm because they’ve recently overachieved when expectations were low and underachieved when they were high.
The release of the poll and the preseason all-conference teams were typically good news for defending national champion UConn, which opens the season with the No. 1 national ranking. The Huskies were tabbed to win a sixth straight conference title, Sarah Strong is the pick as Player of the Year, four other Huskies are preseason all-conference selections and Kellis Fisher is preseason Freshman of the Year.
Marquette was picked second and Seton Hall, which took one first-place vote away from UConn, third. No Red Storm players were named all-conference.
St. John’s was tabbed at No. 4 in the Big East before last season and finished eighth. In 2023, they were thought by coaches to be in the bottom half and finished third. The year before that, they were tabbed seventh and finished fourth and made the NCAA Tournament.
The margins in the middle group are tight. St. John’s — 16-15 and 5-13 — lost five of its conference games by a total of 10 points.
“It’s more of those swing games [and] . . . most years we’re winning those games and you’re moving up,” Storm coach Joe Tartamella said. “But I see [the trend].
“You’re always going to have that beast at the top and then a middle group and then another group [at the bottom] . . . You want to be in that middle one that’s fighting tooth and nail to get [seeded] two through six.”
Roger Rubin returned to Newsday in 2018 to write about high schools, colleges and baseball following 20 years at the Daily News. A Baseball Hall of Fame voter since 2011, he has covered 13 MLB postseasons and 14 NCAA Final Fours.
