On Wednesday, some Princeton women’s basketball players literally leaped out of their seats when they found out that Lauren Gosselin would be their next head coach. Gosselin, who’d been the Tigers’ associate head coach since 2024, replaced Carla Berube, who took the Northwestern job on March 25.
The transition has been smooth enough that the strangest thing for Gosselin and her players has been a matter of inches on the court. When the team circled up before and after Wednesday’s practice, Gosselin moved from her usual spot to Berube’s former spot.
“We have some superstitious kids on the team, and I don’t think they were happy with the move,” Gosselin told The IX Basketball on Thursday. “… We have handshakes and everything that everyone does with each other. So yeah, we’ll workshop that. But that was definitely the weirdest part of yesterday, which is probably a good problem to have.”
The continuity Princeton is getting with Gosselin is huge for a program that went 147-29 and won two NCAA Tournament games in six seasons under Berube.1 And it closes the book on a whirlwind four weeks that began with the Tigers’ Ivy League Tournament title and NCAA Tournament loss to Oklahoma State.
“March is already crazy as it is, with winning championships and March Madness,” Gosselin said. “And you’re at the high of that, and then your season suddenly ends and you drop down, and then you break the news that Carla is leaving, and what does that mean for our staff and the program and these players that are here? So certainly a lot of emotion to start.”
Gosselin (then known as Lauren Battista) was an elite player at Division II Bentley University in Massachusetts. She was a three-time All-American and the 2014 WBCA Division II National Player of the Year. That year, Bentley went 35-0 and won the national championship, and Gosselin graduated as the program’s all-time leading scorer with 2,112 career points.
Back then, she wasn’t thinking about becoming a coach. Bentley is known for its business education and Gosselin’s degree is in marketing, so she figured she’d end up working on the business side of sports. She started her career as a postgraduate intern with the NCAA, helping to plan the women’s Final Four and learning about the NCAA’s oversight process.
But while Gosselin was interning, she did some volunteer coaching with young girls and quickly took to it.
“I really enjoyed it more than I thought I would,” she said. “And so I wanted to try it at the highest level, and I’m still doing it, so it stuck. I think it’s such a good blend of my skill set and my experiences and the opportunity to hopefully pay it forward and make an impact on the players.”
After her internship ended, Gosselin became a graduate assistant at Boston College for three seasons. As graduation neared in 2018, she got a text from Berube, who had just led Division III Tufts University to its fifth straight Elite Eight. Berube had known about Gosselin at Bentley, since the two schools are just 20 minutes apart, and met her when Tufts went to the Final Four during Gosselin’s NCAA internship. So when Berube needed an assistant coach, she decided to see if Gosselin would be interested in the Division III route.
“I think my first impression was, ‘OMG, Carla Berube just reached out to me!'” Gosselin told The IX Basketball in December. “I think I remember where I was when I received the text message, and just being like, ‘I gotta have a good response to this. You know, it’s Carla Berube.’…
“And when she finally offered me that position to join her staff, I was like, ‘Who better to learn from … and just what it takes to build that winning culture and what she does to make it be sustainable the way it was at Tufts?’ So at the end of the day, it was a no-brainer.”
After a season together at Tufts, Berube took the Princeton job in 2019 and brought Gosselin with her. Gosselin has been there ever since. At times, she’s led Princeton’s recruiting and scheduling, and she’s also had lots of success working with the post players and coaching the offense.
“She’s probably one of the harder coaches I’ve had, which I appreciate, of course. It’s how I learn the best,” All-Ivy forward Fadima Tall said on Princeton’s “Get Stops” podcast in February 2025. “But yeah, she really makes sure we’re prepared for any sort of hard [things] we’re gonna see in a game or even in practice. … She’s worked with me a lot. I owe her a lot with, honestly, where I am now.”
“She’s a mastermind when it comes to offense,” assistant coach Jordan Edwards said on another episode of the podcast in February 2025.
Listen now to The IX Sports Podcast and Women’s Sports Daily
We are excited to announce the launch of TWO new podcasts for all the women’s sports fans out there looking for a daily dose of women’s sports news and analysis. Stream on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or anywhere you listen to podcasts, and make sure to subscribe!
Gosselin said on Thursday that she has felt ready to be a head coach for a while, but she had turned down some previous opportunities. She’d gotten some head coaching responsibilities under Berube, and she wasn’t eager to leave Princeton, which she called “one of the best places in the world to coach.”
So when Berube left for Northwestern, Gosselin decided not to follow her mentor and to try instead to stay at Princeton.
“It’s a dream,” she said. “I’m so honored and appreciative for the opportunity, [and] it just made sense to pour myself into this place even more. … So I wouldn’t say it was an easy decision, but … it felt right: the readiness for the role [and] the opportunity of a lifetime.”
Gosselin went through a rigorous interview process where she talked with Princeton’s senior administrators, including athletic director John Mack; people from the human resources, compliance, marketing and fundraising departments; some alumni; and men’s basketball head coach Mitch Henderson. In those conversations, she got to explain how she planned to build on what Berube had accomplished.
“It was very thorough, and I think it was a really good opportunity for me to just express my voice,” Gosselin said.
“Lauren has quickly established herself as a rising star in the coaching ranks,” Mack said in Princeton’s press release. “… Lauren is a tremendous recruiter, and a first-class developer of talent who has been instrumental in the growth of our student-athletes. … I have been fortunate to watch Lauren grow and excel as a leader and colleague over my time at Princeton and I am supremely confident in her.”
Gosselin plans to keep a lot of things the same as during Berube’s tenure, especially because Princeton is expected to have four All-Ivy starters back next year as seniors. She’ll maintain Berube’s focus on defense, but she’ll lean on her own offensive instincts, too.
“I think of offense kind of like an orchestra,” Gosselin said. “You can’t have one instrument playing off beat and then another instrument — it’s just not going to sound good. So the same thing is with offense. So just teaching that side of the ball to make sure that they are ready for game day, to know the shots they should be taking not only for themselves, but for their teammates, and getting those actions and getting the ball to the people that need it.”
Gosselin also wants to maintain Princeton’s culture off the court and continue to connect with alums, both of which Berube emphasized. Some of those alums reacted nearly as effusively on social media as the current players did in the team’s meeting room.
“We ride with you,” 2022 Ivy League Player of the Year Abby Meyers wrote in an Instagram story, tagging Gosselin.
“Big Lauren Era,” three-time All-Ivy guard Julia Cunningham wrote, distinguishing the taller Gosselin from former Princeton assistant coach Lauren Dillon.
Gosselin will also look to empower her staff like Berube empowered her. She hasn’t hired anyone yet, but she plans to retain Edwards, according to The Daily Princetonian. As she fills the other positions, she’s looking for coaches who bring energy, fit the Tigers’ culture and understand how the Ivy League differs from other Division I conferences.
Once she hires her staff, she said she’ll have to get used to looking at the program like a head coach rather than like an assistant coach. She compared the head coach’s perspective to a CEO zooming out to get a big-picture view of their company, whereas assistant coaches are often zooming in on the details of scouting reports and player development.
Though that’s something Gosselin hasn’t done before, she’s confident she’s ready. She’s built up that confidence since she and Berube arrived at Princeton in 2019.
“Coming into a place like Princeton that has had so much success, your first thought is, ‘Oh my gosh, can I uphold the standard at a place that is as elite and [where] winning is so synonymous with the name Princeton in any sport?'” she said about her mindset back then. “… There’s that intimidation of, ‘Can I do this?'”
Not only could Gosselin do it, but she did it for years alongside Berube as they made five straight NCAA Tournaments. So now, as she takes over as head coach, she isn’t intimidated. She’s prepared.
“I understand what needs to be done,” Gosselin said. “And now it’s just my job to put the pieces together to do it.”
“Becoming Caitlin Clark” is out now!
Howard Megdal’s newest book is here! “Becoming Caitlin Clark: The Unknown Origin Story of a Modern Basketball Superstar” captures both the historic nature of Clark’s rise and the critical context over the previous century that helped make it possible, including interviews with Clark, Lisa Bluder (who also wrote the foreword), C. Vivian Stringer, Jan Jensen, Molly Kazmer and many others.
- Berube was at Princeton for seven years, but her statistics cover six seasons of competition. That’s because the Ivy League did not play in 2020-21 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. ↩︎
