The Creighton women’s basketball team had no answer for preseason Summit League Player of the Year Brooklyn Meyer on Monday as the Jays fell to South Dakota State 78-62 on the first day of the 2025-26 college basketball season.
Creighton dug itself a hole with a four-minute scoring drought to end the first quarter and couldn’t find a way to climb all the way out of it. The Jays trimmed it to two late in the third quarter, but a buzzer-beating circus shot pushed it back to five heading into the fourth and the Jays ran out of steam midway through the fourth.
All 10 healthy players saw the floor before the end of the first quarter and two Bluejays finished in double figures scoring, but the team shot 8-of-29 from deep — not nearly good enough to offset the advantage Meyer gave the Jackrabbits inside.
Here are three takeaways from the game.
No Answer for No. 31
Big, talented post players have given Creighton problems over the year as Jim Flanery often leans skill over size on the recruiting trail. Over the last few years, he’s had the firepower to offset that somewhat on the other end with the likes of Emma Ronsiek and Morgan Maly. That wasn’t the case on Monday as Meyer more than tripled the offensive production of Creighton’s three posts.
“I think it’s pretty easy to say that Brooklyn dominated the game in a way that we hoped she wouldn’t but feared she might,” Flanery said. “I thought she just skewed the game in so many ways. When we when we gave help, we weren’t tight enough with how we rotated. We gave up some dump passes, and they hit just enough 3s … She was really good. We didn’t have a good enough plan, so that’s on our staff. We needed to have a better plan.”
Meyer finished with 33 points on 14-of-20 from the field and 5-of-6 from the free-throw line with eight rebounds, five assists and five blocks. The Jackrabbits finished with 44 points in the paint and 18 points from the perimeter on 6-of-13 shooting.
“She’s just super physical, and then when you double, she knows exactly where to pass it too, and then tonight, they hit the 3, which hurt us,” senior forward Grace Boffeli said.
Creighton started the 6-foot-1 Boffeli next to 6-foot-3 sophomore Elizabeth Gentry, but they both picked up two fouls in the first half. Tara Dacic, a 6-foot-2 freshman, played less than two and a half minutes. Moving forward, Creighton’s double-teams and rotations will need to be much crisper and more connected if this young Jays squad hopes to slow down some of the talented posts they’ll see throughout the season.
New Season, New Faces, New Roles
Creighton lost a lot of firepower from a season ago. It shouldn’t come as a surprise to see them struggle against a talented team like the Jackrabbits. Flanery only had five players with any collegiate experience on his roster heading into the opener, and each of them is adjusting to a new role.
Senior Kenedy Townsend, who came off the bench all last season, led the team in shot attempts and minutes. On the positive side, she finished with 14 points and six rebounds while shooting 4-of-8 from deep. However, she only went 1-for-6 inside the arc. The Jays are going to rely heavily on Townsend this season, and she’ll need to grow into her role as the season goes on.
Fellow senior Kiani Lockett is the team’s only returning starter, and she dished out six assists with only one turnover while nabbing two steals. However, she went 3-for-12 from the field. The buckets she scored were highlight-reel stuff, but she also threw up some wild attempts that didn’t have a chance. The key for her will be to find a way to generate better looks for herself while also continuing to create for her teammates.
Gentry and fellow sophomore Allison Heathcock went from situational subs last year to starters as Flanery rolled with his five non-freshmen at the start of the game, the same as he did in the exhibition. They’re all shouldering more responsibility — and a heavier minutes load.
“Kennedy played a lot of minutes, and Allison, I thought, looked tired late,” Flanery said. “It’s not just your new kids, it’s going from a 20-minute-a-game player to a 30-minute-a-game player, or in Allison’s case, going from a spot player to playing mid-to-high 20s and having to be tight enough … When your minutes go way up, you’re going to lose some of that attention to detail that you have. I’ve got to figure that out a little bit …
“How do I rest Kennedy and Kiani? Because Kiani, her minutes may not be a lot different than last year, but her need to be productive is going to be different than it was last year, and so that’s a different feature too.”
The fifth starter was Boffeli, the Northern Iowa transfer who made her official Creighton debut after missing most of last season with a torn ACL. She contributed six points, four rebounds and three assists in 16 minutes Monday.
“It’s a new offense, and just the more I practice, the better I will be in games,” Boffeli said. “It’s just nice to get out there finally again and play with my teammates. I just need to get a little bit more comfortable.”
Zediker Steals the Show
The biggest bright spot in the loss was the player of freshman point guard Ava Zediker. The 5-foot-10 floor general was the highest-rated player in Creighton’s well-regarded 2025 recruiting class and flashed the talent that made her a top-100 prospect in her debut.
Zediker finished with a team-high 17 points on 5-of-7 from the field (2-of-3 from 3) and 5-of-5 from the foul line while grabbing five rebounds, second on the team, in 27 minutes off the bench. Flanery praised her rebounding and what it can do for the team’s transition attack.
“I thought in that second quarter, the defensive rebounds — and we want her to do that, because if we play her with Kiani, we’ve got two kids that can push it, and so she’s done a good job of that,” Flanery said. “She had not made 3s in practice, so I think the defensive plays that she made got her confidence up, and she got an and-one, and the basket looks a little bit bigger.”
She made her first shot, a short pull-up along the baseline, but the bulk of her offense came in the third quarter when she took over the game. In a three-minute span, Zediker stole the ball in the backcourt and drew a foul for two free throws, forced a 10-second violation with her backcourt defense, converted a three-point play at the basket and knocked down two 3-pointers as well, giving her 11 points in that brief stretch. Zediker said the defense is what allowed her to get into the zone offensively.
“I think it just started with pressuring on defense, doing just those little things to get some stops and to get us going,” Zediker said. “When they had that 10-second call, that fired us up and that got us going going forward.”
Flanery said Zediker is a little behind where they thought she’d be at this point because she missed a month of practice with an injury, but Monday was a big step forward for her and her confidence.
It was a different story for the rest of the freshmen. Kendall McGee scored four points on five shots while the Gessert sisters and Dacic all went scoreless. Neleigh Gessert went 0-for-6 from 3 while her sister missed a pair. Some freshman jitters likely played a factor, and Flanery said a priority this week will be to “get into the headspace” of the freshmen as the Jays prepare to hit the road for game two.
“I think we’re going to need them all,” Flanery said. “Ava’s sitting up here and probably feeling pretty good, Kendall had 18 against Missouri Western and she was probably feeling pretty good, but we’re going to have to lift those guys up and make sure that they know it’s a 30- to 35-game season. I told them about a week ago and I told him in the locker room, individual improvement leads to team improvement, so they’ve got to keep getting better, they’ve got to keep building better habits in practice.
“Not just our freshmen and younger players, but even Kiani, Kennedy and Grace have to. We’ll probably work on ourselves for one day and then get ready for Drake.”
The Jays will travel to Des Moines on Sunday to take on the Bulldogs, who went 22-12 and made the WBIT last season. Drake’s three double-digit scorers were all seniors last year, but the Bulldogs opened this season with an 83-65 win over Eastern Illinois on Monday. Senior Abbia Aalsma and freshman Anna Becker scored 22 points apiece while sophomore Peyton McCabe, a Skutt Catholic alumna, dished out 10 assists off the bench.
Tipoff Sunday is set for 4 p.m. CT on ESPN+.
