After two dominant championship runs in as many years, the NYU women’s basketball team graduated over half of its starting lineup — including Natalie Bruns and Belle Pellecchia, two players that made permanent marks in Violet history. Now preparing for a new season, the team is finding its identity with a fresh slate of players.
Bruns and Pellecchia’s historic careers helped lead the Violets to two undefeated seasons and back-to-back national titles. Bruns, the 2025 MBWA and WBCA Division III Player of the Year, graduated as the Violets’ all-time leading shot blocker and sixth on NYU’s all-time scoring list. Pellecchia, following Bruns as seventh on the scoring list, was named UAA Defensive Player of the Year for four consecutive years and earned the title of Final Four Most Outstanding Player in the 2025 NCAA D-III Championships.
Ahead of the offseason, one of the biggest challenges faced by the team’s coaching staff was filling in those gaps in the roster.
“There’s no replacing Belle and Bruns,” head coach Meg Barber said. “That’s the thing that our team needs to be aware of. Replacing and trying to make comparisons to previous years is not going to work in our favor.”
This year, the women’s basketball team added six first-years to its roster, all standouts in their high school programs. Aizlyn Albanese graduated as the all-time leading scorer at her high school, Sofia Corral led in assists and steals, and Aila Kaibara earned three state championships and was named conference Offensive Player of the Year three times.
Despite these impressive stats, Barber wasn’t just looking for technical skills on the court. The prospective Violets had to prove that they could handle NYU’s rigorous academics while also competing in the top program in D-III athletics.
“I just think that they’re college ready,” Barber said. “That sounds like something really simple, but it’s really difficult to, after your high school season, train by yourself and get prepared for the unknown of college athletics.”
Going into the upcoming season, the coaching staff isn’t looking for a major overhaul — Barber said they try to stick with the values that earned them their spot in the first place. What matters is consistency, chemistry and repetition, not the streak looming over their heads.
“It has a lot to do with character, and who our players are as people, first,” Barber said. “Their work ethic, their resiliency, and obviously the maturity that it takes to balance academics and basketball at this level is not for everybody.”
And at the forefront of those values is sisterhood.
The Violets’ culture of sisterhood has a long history, stretching back to Barber’s tenure as a player from 1998 to 2002. Selflessness is something that they pride themselves on — the players aren’t just there to be a beast of a team on the court, they’re there to challenge each other’s growth and support each other as people.
“Knowing that the sum of our parts is always going to be greater than any one person is the biggest sticking point for us as a staff,” Barber said.
An NYU alum herself, Barber turned the program on its head when she became head coach in 2017. Barber has earned numerous accolades during her tenure as head coach at NYU, including 2024-25 D-III Coach of the Year. Barber also coached for USA Basketball in 2024, an opportunity that she said helped her develop versatility as a leader. Associate head coach Nettie Respondek and assistant coach Annie Barrett were named UAA Coaching Staff of the year alongside Barber in 2025.
As pre-season training ramps up, the coaches are taking it day by day, a familiar mentality for the team. Through the Violets’ last 62 games, focus was on each piece of the puzzle leading up to the championship trophy. This one-game-at-a-time mindset led the team to the longest active winning streak in the NCAA, and the team doesn’t intend to drop it when it comes to practice.
Senior Caroline Peper and junior Brooke Batchelor, two returning starters from the previous year, are serving as leaders for the team. Thanks to NYU’s double-digit scoring margins, the first-year and sophomore classes of the last couple of years were able to play in regular season and NCAA games, allowing them to hone their skills and help guide the incoming first-years in the same spot they were years before.
The program’s core values have remained consistent throughout history — but now, with the Violets’ back-to-back championship wins and active winning streak, the team has attracted the attention of local and national news, putting NYU Athletics in the spotlight in a way seldom seen before.
No matter the shape of the roster or the length of the team’s streak, one thing the Violets can be sure of is the program’s place in the history books.
“It’s New York City, so you really have to make a splash to stay in the headlines,” Barber said. “It’s felt very empowering for the young women in our program to know that they’ve been a historical footnote amongst these incredible women’s basketball stories over the past few years.”
Contact Kiran Komanduri at [email protected].