After winning their second straight Missouri Valley Conference regular season title — this one outright — and coming into the MVC tournament as reigning champions, Murray State head coach Rechelle Turner is still cautiously optimistic.
“I’m really proud of our team, obviously, for being able to take what we lost to graduation and be able to mix newcomers and returners together to be able to pull off what we pulled off this season,” Turner told reporters in a MVC coaches Zoom call Monday. “But a very good friend of mine and mentor to me sent me something this week that says it all: March doesn’t care. March doesn’t care if you’re ranked. It doesn’t care if you’ve won a conference championship. It doesn’t care what you think you deserve. It is starting over. So that is the message this week to our team. It is 0-0, it is one-and-done, and you better embrace the madness.”
Murray State enters the 2026 Credit Union 1 MVC Women’s Basketball Tournament to be held March 12-15 at Xtream Arena in Coralville, Iowa, as the top seed with a 19-1 conference record. They will play the winner of No. 8 Southern Illinois vs. No. 9 Indiana State at noon Friday.
The Racers dominated the MVC awards announced Wednesday morning. Turner was named 2026 MVC Coach of the Year — the first time in Turner’s tenure that she has been voted a Conference Coach of the Year. For the second-straight year, Murray State notched a program record for total wins, entering post-season play with a 28-3 overall record.
Murray State junior guard Halli Poock was named the Missouri Valley Conference’s Jackie Stiles Player of the Year – the first Racer to earn the honor.
Poock leads the league in scoring, averaging 22.2 points per game — 25.5 ppg in conference games. She has recorded 20-plus points in 17 of 20 MVC contests this season and a league-leading six games with 30-or-more. Nationally, Poock ranks 11th in Division I in points per game and total points, with 688 on the year, which puts her 13th in the MVC record books for a single season.
After Murray State’s all-time leading scorer and rebounder Katelyn Young and last season’s MVC Most Improved Player Ava Learn graduated, some wondered how this year’s team would stack up.
“Everybody wants to know, how are you going to replace Katelyn? How are you going to replace Ava,” Turner said in Monday’s Zoom meeting. “And they can’t, and they didn’t. But in their own way, they came in and they did what we needed to do to help us be successful.
“Our guard play is exceptional,” she added. “I mean, Halli just been unbelievable offensively throughout the year, and especially throughout conference season. And Haven [Ford] — I could go on and on about what that kid’s been through this year, but she’s just the glue. … When you have Halli and Haven running your team, you’ve got a chance every night.”
Murray State’s Sharnecce Currie-Jelks, a junior guard who transferred from Indiana, was voted the MVC Newcomer of the Year. She is the only player in the league averaging a double-double, sitting at 18.3 points and 11.7 rebounds per game. She leads all Division I in double-doubles (24) while ranking sixth with 364 total rebounds — the eighth most in a single season in Valley history.
Belmont stays in the mix
Since joining the MVC in the 2022-23 season, Belmont has consistently finished in the top three. This year is no different, as the Bruins are the second seed after finishing 16-4 in conference play. Belmont will play the winner of the No. 7 UIC vs. No. 10 Evansville game at 6 p.m. Friday.
Head coach Bart Brooks said the team has gained valuable experience over the season which welcomed new players.
“This team has been unique in that we’ve had a lot of maybe, unproven players, have to take on roles that maybe they have never had before in their careers, whether they’ve been with us or other programs, and so there’s been some inconsistency in performance because of that,” he said in Monday’s Zoom meeting. “But I’m thrilled with where we are right now. I think we’ve been slowly progressing and building and getting better and more competitive as the season has gone and I think we’re really close to playing our best basketball.”
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The Bruins had an extended postseason last year, advancing to the WBIT Championship game in which they lost to Minnesota, 75-63. Although he has some new faces on the team, he believes that experience will help them in the tournament.
“There’s probably an excitement going into the tournament that obviously having that feeling of going on a run and winning some close games, and playing on the road and winning games against really good teams,” Brooks said. “I’m not sure how much that’s impacting anything that we’re going to do this week. I think there’s too many new players and too many new faces on our team, that they don’t have any recollection of what happened last year. But for us as coaches, I think there’s an excitement that we get to get back and play tournament basketball.”
Belmont sophomore guard Sanaa Tripp was named the MVC Sixth Player of the Year. She averaged 25.9 minutes off the bench during the regular season, while ranking second on the team in steals, fourth in assists and fifth in scoring. She made in appearance in all 31 games.
Bradley impresses in three-way tie for third
There was a three-way tie for third place in the regular season among Illinois State, University of Northern Iowa and Bradley who all had a 13-7 conference record. After finishing ninth in the conference last season with a 7-13 record, Bradley’s surge came as somewhat of a surprise
But certainly not to head coach Kate Popovec-Goss.
“I knew when we kept 10 of our players and kind of the way that we were able to end last year, it just felt really good. We retained, and I felt like I had a little magic,” Popovec-Goss said Monday. “We were picked to finish seventh in the league and we ended up tying for third in a very crazy three-way tie. Very proud of our efforts. I felt that this was a season where we could really kind of turn the corner, and our kids have really committed to that.
“[We had our] 20th win for the fifth time in program history, tied for the record of conference wins, tied for the highest finish in the league in our university,” she added. “While all that stuff is fun and celebratory, hopefully what it did is it prepped us to make a run in March which is the ultimate goal.”
The future looks bright for Bradley as freshman guard Maya Foz was named the MVC’s Freshman of the Year. Foz ranks second on the team in scoring, averaging 14.4 points per game on 43.6% shooting from the floor.
As the fifth seed, Bradley will play No. 4 UNI at 2:30 p.m. Friday. UNI, which had its youngest roster in more than a decade, also had a better than expected regular season.
“I’m really proud of what this team was able to accomplish,” UNI head coach Tanya Warren said Monday. “We lost four 1,000-point scores, over 60% of our scoring, and we only had five kids on our roster that had Division I experience, and three of those kids with significant experience. I’m just really proud of how we were able to gel and come together and just grind out some gutsy wins throughout the course of the season and just play together.”
UNI senior forward Ryley Goebel was named the MVC Defensive Player of the Year. Goebel, who is averaging the second-most blocks per game (2.80) and has the fourth-most blocks (84) total in Division I this season, is tied for the sixth-most in a single season in Valley history. For her career, Goebel has 200-plus blocks and steals, making her the only player in league history to accomplish the feat.
Predicted to be in the top 3 in the preseason poll, Illinois State quietly held their own in the conference.
“I’m so proud of this group to finish third. If you think about we essentially lost four starters from last year and to be where we’re at, I just think our identity, we’ve just grown, we’ve logged a lot of minutes of sweat equity. We’ve gotten onto the floor. We’ve been through battles,” head coach Kristen Gillespie said Monday.
“We’re just a team that is having fun. I think people kind of forget about us, they count us out,” she added. “But we just want to be that pest that just hangs around and hangs around. And we want to go in and surprise some people this week.”
Illinois State forward Doneelah Washington was named the MVC’s Most Improved Player. The sophomore doubled her playing time from her rookie season, averaging 30.7 minutes per game in 2025-26. She went from averaging 4.9 points per game to a 17.8 ppg this season.
The Redbirds will play the late game at 8:30 p.m. Friday against the winner of No. 6 Drake vs. No. 11 Valparaiso.
Iowa feels like home to several teams
In the second year of its three-year rotation with the Ford Center in Evansville, Indiana, and Vibrant Arena at The MARK in Moline, Illinois, the 2026 MVC Women’s Basketball Tournament will be held this week at Xtream Arena in Coralville, Iowa.
For Cedar Falls-based UNI and Des Moines-based Drake, the tournament will have a natural home-court feel.
“What I’m really looking forward to is just how our amazing Iowans can welcome the Missouri Valley Conference to Coralville, being able to host this tournament, really in the heart of Iowa,” Drake coach Allison Pohlman said Monday. “What I’m hopeful is what we see is a number of very passionate basketball fans that show up to watch some really gritty, really competitive teams go head to head.”
Warren of UNI is also excited about playing in her home state.
“About the tournament being in Iowa, I am so excited. I mean, an hour-and-a-half from home, the Big 10 tournament’s over,” she said. “We know people love Iowa basketball in the state. I cannot be more excited to see how people come out and turn up for this tournament. Coralville, what a great place to have it, the arena, everything to do around it. And they’ve really embraced us.”
First-year Valparaiso head coach Courtney Boyd is also excited about coming home to Iowa where she grew up and played on a national championship team, Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids, just 20 minutes north of Coralville.
“Myself and two others on the staff are also from Iowa. So, we don’t veer too far away from each other,” she said Monday. “I do think there will be some outside support, whether it was from past institutions or just people that are in the area, alumni. I am excited for it to be where it is.”
“I do think that it’s a really great venue, but I do think that the convenience of where I’m from, where some of our staff is from, and where our support has come from in the past, throughout our careers, I do think that there might be some familiar faces that we haven’t been able to see too much in Indiana this year,” she said.
Expect MVC Player of Year Halli Poock of Murray State to also have a loud fanbase as she is a native of Waterloo, Iowa, about an hour-and-a-half from Coralville.
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