Gone to UConn: Notre Dame misses on former USC guard Kayleigh Heckel from transfer portal

Notre Dame does not have a rivalry with USC in women’s basketball like it does in football, but we’re in an era in which pulling former Trojan WBB players from the transfer portal is probably a pretty darn good thing. In this instance, it would have been a pretty darn good thing for the Fighting Irish indeed.

Swing and a miss.

Notre Dame tried to get former USC guard Kayleigh Heckel to South Bend. She ultimately decided to go to Storrs, Conn., however, playing right into the hands of a rivalry that is and has been a thing — Notre Dame vs. UConn.

Heckel is going to be a Husky.

Heckel was the No. 13 player in the recruiting class of 2024 according to ESPN. The 5-9 former five-star signed with the Trojans to team up with JuJu Watkins, the reigning NCAA Player of the Year, and the rest of the star-studded personnel head coach Lindsay Gottlieb is acquiring in Los Angeles.

Heckel’s stay out west only lasted one year, though. There’s more out there for her than the 7 starts she made in 34 appearances as a true freshman, averaging 6.1 points, 1.9 assists, 1.4 rebounds and 1.3 steals in 16.9 minutes per game. She’s banking on her career taking an upswing under the guidance of 12-time national championship-winning head coach Geno Auriemma.

In a bizarre month of March, Heckel only played 9 total minutes across two Big Ten Tournament games. Then the NCAA Tournament came around, though, and Heckel averaged 19.8 minutes per game in four matchups. Perhaps that was due to Watkins going down with an injury in the second round. Heckel played 24 minutes in the third round, a number she hit just three times in the previous 31 games.

Heckel hails from the same high school as former Notre Dame center Kate Koval. Also a rising sophomore, Koval left Notre Dame after one season to join LSU via the transfer portal. Heckel and Koval were key cogs at Brookville (N.Y.) Long Island Lutheran High School.

Heckel is not a volume-based shooter. She wouldn’t have demanded shots be taken away from Notre Dame junior guard Hannah Hidalgo. But she would have gotten to her spots and been an offensive option when ecessary, and she’s a capable ball handler in terms of bringing it up the floor and getting into a half-court set. She’s not the type of player who takes possessions off defensively, either. Notre Dame is missing out on all of that with her decision to join UConn.

She’s a former top-15 player in her class, and she’s got three years of eligibility remaining to make the most of her college career. Notre Dame fans would have been thrilled to get Heckel out of high school. They’d have been just as thrilled to land her now. Instead, the rich got richer. UConn will defend its national title with the help of Heckel.

Notre Dame has matched four outbound transfer portal players with four signees, the most recent being Vanderbilt’s Iyana Moore earlier this week, but the Irish are still looking for roster additions with summer practices right around the corner. With Moore, Notre Dame still only has eight scholarship players on the 2025-26 roster.