Kate Koval’s basketball dreams got a lot more rooted in reality two years ago, when Brookville (N.Y.) Long Island Lutheran High School girls basketball coach Christina Raiti convinced the Ukraine native to move to the United States.
On Wednesday morning, those dreams merged with Notre Dame women’s basketball coach Niele Ivey’s evolving vision for her own program, as the nation’s top center prospect in the 2024 class verbally committed to the Irish.
“This changes everything,” said Dan Olson, women’s college basketball analyst and owner/director of the website College Girls Basketball Report (girlsbasketballreport.com). “That’s a hell of a get for Notre Dame.”
And just what is Notre Dame getting in the 6-foot-5 center, who ESPNw rates as the nation’s No. 5 overall prospect and Olson ranks even higher, at No. 2?
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“She’s as skilled a post player as I’ve seen come along in quite a while, actually,” Olson said. “Not only is she a quality player, she’s got versatility. I mean, she’ll get down and pound down low and be efficient with her back-to-the-basketball game.
“But she’ll go outside. She’s now stepping out to the 3-point line, elbow area, so you’ve got to respect her out there. And I think that’s something that’s something she’s kind of added as she’s come along the way — that face-up game.
“It may have been there all along, because she’s European, but she didn’t really show it at certain times. She plays on a loaded high school team that has a couple of really, really good guards on it. But when she gets the ball down low, she’s the most efficient finisher among any of the centers in the 2024 class. Period. She gets it done.”
The early signing period for women’s basketball is Nov. 8-15.
Koval’s recruitment came down to ND and reigning national champ LSU, but she also took official visits to Miami and Stanford. Her visit to South Bend was the weekend of Sept. 23 and coincided with the Irish-Ohio State football game in primetime.
“It’s tough to find quality centers in women’s basketball,” Olson said.
In high school, too, which is why Raiti was so enamored when a longtime contact sent her video of Koval playing in Europe.
"He's sent me a lot of film before, but when I saw Kate I called him and said I need to Zoom with her tonight," Raiti told Aaron Williams of MaxPreps. "When he said ‘You've never taken me up on anyone I've sent' I told him ‘You've never showed me Kate before.’”
On a team loaded with Division I prospects, Koval averaged 15.1 points, 11.7 rebounds and 3.4 blocked shots for the New York high school federation Class AA state champs, who won the state title game by 41 points.
She was MVP of the Nike Tournament of Champions in December, and put up 38 points and 16 rebounds in the Geico Nationals semifinals last spring. She’s the reigning New York Gatorade Player of the Year and a Naismith All-American.
Long Island Lutheran finished last season as the nation’s No. 2 girls basketball team, per MaxPreps, and Koval and her teammates will start her senior season in the No. 1 position.
“Defensively, she’s light on her feet for a girl her size,” Olson said. “She’s got body power. She’s nimble and a quality defender down low. She’s not one of these kids that’s a bouncy, quick leaper that’s going to reject shots, but she’s just one of those players like, well, Bill Laimbeer — big, strong, efficient. You know she’s there. She makes smart plays on both ends of the floor and can get up and down.”
She’ll be added to a guard-heavy Notre Dame roster next season that is expected to start this coming season in the top 10 in the national polls, when they open up in Paris, France, against South Carolina on Nov. 6.
Guards Jenna Brown and Anna DeWolfe and forward Becky Obinma are the only players on the Irish roster who will exhaust their eligibility after the 2023-24 season.
Koval is the fourth straight top 20 high school prospects Ivey will have recruited over the past two cycles, joining guards Hannah Hidalgo, Cass Prosper and Emma Risch. And she’s just the seventh top 5 prospect that ND will have signed since ESPNw started its rankings in the 2008 recruiting cycle.
The others are Skylar Diggins, Jewell Lloyd, Taya Reimer, Brianna Turner, Erin Boley and current Irish freshman Hidalgo.
Academics were a major factor in Koval’s decision as well as a family feel. Her own family is all over the globe, with two brothers in the United States, her mother in Canada since war broke out in Ukraine, and, notably, her father and grandmother still back in Kyiv.
It was her father who introduced her to ballet and made her take lessons, which she hated initially and eventually grew to love it. Then basketball became her second and persistent love. And a welcome distraction to the separation from her family.
“It probably won’t take Koval very long to get past that initial learning curve,” Olson said. “Notre Dame is going to realize they’ve got someone who’s got a solid low-post game that can put up double-double numbers if given enough playing time throughout the course of the game.
“That’s going to make Olivia Miles happy, because she’s got someone she can give the ball to down low and doesn’t have to rely on their guard play as much. Not that guard-reliant offenses can’t be good. But now they’ll have balance in their offensive scheme. And there’s not a lot of teams that can say that.”
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