“There’s only 200 minutes in a game. We want to play everyone.”
That, Michael Meek says, is Portland’s “biggest challenge this year” as he enters his eighth season. I’d bet half the coaches in the country would swap problems with him tomorrow.
More than 1,500 Division I women’s basketball players entered the transfer portal this spring. You know how it goes by now: rosters get torn up in April, rebuilt by June, and coaches spend the summer introducing their players to one another.
Portland hasn’t played along. Two Pilots have entered the portal in the last three years. Two. For three straight off-seasons, including this one, Meek hasn’t lost a single player who saw the floor the season before to another school. This summer, he added four newcomers on top of that.
I went back through the last four rosters to check. Neither of the two players who entered the portal had played the season before she left. Nobody from the rotation has left for another school.
“Going into our eighth year, our staff has been here, and we’ve retained all of our key players,” Meek told Basket Under Review. “Over these last three or four years, we’ve really kept everyone.”
Winning helps
It’s a lot easier to keep players when you win, and Portland wins a lot. Meek has six 20-win seasons in seven years, including the last five in a row. His teams have never finished under .500 and have reached the postseason every year he’s been there.
Portland won WCC Tournament titles in 2020, 2023, and 2024, and received three NCAA Tournament bids, though COVID wiped out the first.
Then there’s the 2024-25 season, the best in program history. Portland went 31-5, 17-3 in league play, and split the WCC regular-season title with Gonzaga. It also became the first team to win 29 regular-season games and still miss the NCAA Tournament. The Pilots responded by going on the road in the WBIT and beating Stanford in overtime, then Seton Hall.
My favorite stat from it all: Portland has won seven postseason games in program history, and Meek coached all seven.
Not just the wins
Plenty of winning programs still lose players every spring. A team can win 25 games and still watch its eighth, ninth, and 10th players leave for schools promising more minutes. Today, entire rotations can enter the portal.
Ask Meek what’s different at Portland, and you’d expect him to start with the record. He doesn’t.
“I think as a staff we really try to focus on the experience for our players,” he said. “We deeply care about them enjoying what they get to do.”
That could be coach speak, though. So how is Portland actually different?
“If you came to a practice, we treat everyone as equally important as far as coaching them, helping them get better and helping them improve,” he said. “I’ve heard of a lot of programs that maybe focus on the top seven or eight, and that’s just not the way our culture is.”
The payoff is easy to miss. When good players graduate at Portland, the ones behind them have spent years getting real coaching instead of just filling out practice, so they’re ready. And a player who isn’t getting many minutes still feels like part of the plan, which is a big reason she doesn’t start looking elsewhere.
Development might be Portland’s best pitch, because players can see it happening.
“I’ve had kids tell us, ‘There’s no reason for me to go. I’m getting better every year and I like it here,’” Meek said.
Senior Lainey Spear put it this way:
“One thing that I’ve appreciated about this program is that the coaches continue to develop you each year, and because of that I’m able to make big jumps every year.”
The clearest proof came in May, when Alex Fowler signed with the New York Liberty and became the first Pilot to make a WNBA roster. A recruit notices that. So does a sophomore at the end of the bench.
Being straight with players
Playing time drives most transfers, and it’s the easiest thing for another school to promise. Portland can’t promise minutes to everyone, so the conversation has to be honest from the start.
“I think athletes often want to feel like it’s the coach’s decision,” Meek said. “But really, I think so much more of it is on the athlete and the work they want to put in.”
Honesty doesn’t guarantee anyone stays. Sometimes a player hears where she stands and decides she wants more somewhere else.
“We have had a few players through the years who have left, and the few who have were seeking opportunities to maybe play more than they were,” Meek said. “And I get that. It was their choice. It’s their journey at the end of the day.”
Rhyan Mogel, one of Portland’s four seniors, was asked whether she ever thought about entering the portal herself.
“Maybe after the first year I was asking myself if I wanted to go somewhere I would get more playing time,” she said. “Maybe another year I was asking myself if I should go get more money. Ultimately, the grass isn’t always greener and there is something special here at Portland.”
Spear’s answer was simpler.
“The thought of entering the transfer portal has never even crossed my mind,” she said. “The coaches here really care about me not only as a basketball player but also as a person, and I think that’s hard to come by these days. They also do an amazing job of recruiting great girls, which makes the team environment so special and so fun to be around every day. I just never saw a reason to leave.”
Recruiting kids who want to stay
Look at this year’s roster, and you’ll notice something unusual for 2026: all 16 players started their college careers at Portland. The Pilots have taken transfers before, including Natalie Fraley from Utah State and Nicole Anderson from Loyola Marymount last season.
“Our preference always would be to recruit them as freshmen, and have them want to stay with us and believe in our ability to develop them and help them get better,” Meek said.
Nearly every high school player he signs is local, and he recruits them for the long haul.
“This four-year, now five-year span is an experience they only get one shot at,” Meek said.
Meek also holds the title “dad.”
“Having a daughter who’s played in our program, and having two daughters who have gone on to play, that to me is paramount for what we would want for them too,” he said, “to be somewhere you can enjoy the people you’re around and the experience you’re having, growing as a player and growing as a person as well.”
Spear, who played at Beaverton High, is one of those local recruits.
“I love playing in my hometown,” she said. “My family comes to all the home games so it’s great to see them.”
Selling a five-year experience is harder than it used to be. A freshman can now hear from a dozen schools after one good season, and the people around her may have their own ideas about what she should do next.
“I think you’re seeing more and more outside influences involved in athletes’ recruitment,” Meek said. “Some very much have the athlete’s best interests at heart, and some are looking at it through what they think is important for the athlete, not necessarily what is best for them.”
Mid-majors can’t win every bidding war. Portland bets that a player who’s happy, improving, and winning won’t want to listen.
Last year was the reset
Keeping a roster together doesn’t mean nobody ever leaves. Players graduate, and after the 31-win season, Portland lost four grad students and two more seniors.
“It was literally a brand-new team last year, and even the few returners we had were in much different roles than they had been the year before,” Meek said.
Seven newcomers came in, and only one was a transfer. That’s what stands out to me. With a whole starting lineup gone, plenty of coaches would have reloaded through the portal. Meek mostly went young.
It wasn’t always pretty. The Pilots went 18-14 in the regular season before catching fire in March. They beat Sam Houston and Lamar at home to reach the WNIT Super 16 for the first time in program history and notched their fifth straight 20-win season along the way. Montana State ended the run 72-54 in Bozeman.
Sure, it was a step back from 31 wins. But nobody left afterward, and now every one of those players is a year older with a March run behind them.
The deepest team he’s had
Portland brings back 12 players. The core consists of four seniors who have never played anywhere else: Dyani Ananiev, Lainey Spear, Rhyan Mogel, and Florence Dallow, in her fifth year. Together, they’ve won a league title, posted a 31-win season, come through a full rebuild, and made a postseason run.
“They’re all great to coach, and we feel like, in different ways, they’re all league-level players,” Meek said.
Behind them, the sophomores are the ones to watch, especially posts Julia Dalan and Jada Kennedy.
“Julia missed almost the whole second half of the year, and Jada came in and had a great six or seven games for us. I feel like both of them have made a really big jump,” Meek said.
Pair them with the seniors, Brynn Smith, Tiffany Barbosa, and the rest of the returners, and it’s a long bench.
“This is going into our eighth year, and there’s zero doubt that this is the most depth of talent we’ve had,” he said.
Which brings us back to the 200 minutes. Depth is great until somebody has to sit.
“Some people say, ‘Well, that’s a great one to have.’ And it is, but when you care about your players, you feel bad that they’re not getting to play as much as they’d like, or at all at times,” Meek said. “We’re going to have some really good players who are probably just outside of our rotation this year.”
That’s where the culture gets tested.
“As athletes, are you still going to be there for your teammates and encourage them?” he said. “And if your number does get called, are they going to give you that same respect?”
Mogel’s advice for recruits gets at the same idea. When asked what she would tell a high school player choosing a school, she started there.
“Basketball is a huge part of the decision, but it isn’t everything,” she said. “What if you aren’t playing as much as you thought, or what if you get hurt? When it feels like the reason you came is gone, what do you have left?”
Keeping everyone was the easy part. Keeping them all happy with fewer minutes to go around is harder, and it’s exactly the situation that sends players into the portal at other schools. This season will show whether Portland’s culture holds up under that kind of pressure.
“In a culture of individualism throughout college athletics, Portland has definitely built a team-first reputation, and it shows up through retention,” Mogel said.
A different WCC
The conference around them looks different, too. Gonzaga is gone, and so are Oregon State and Washington State after two years in the WCC. That matters for Portland specifically: Gonzaga split the title with the Pilots two years ago and beat them twice, and Oregon State knocked them out of the conference tournament last March.
Portland was picked to finish second in the WCC preseason coaches poll.
“The fact that we got picked second, I think, was a bit of a surprise based on what other teams have brought in,” Meek said.
With those three programs gone, the nonconference schedule carries more weight, and with the NCAA Tournament expanding to 76 teams, an at-large bid is more within reach than it used to be. The schedule isn’t a soft one, either. The Pilots’ first road trip takes them to BYU and then straight back to Bozeman to face the Montana State team that ended their season. Stanford visits the Chiles Center in late November, and December brings road games at Washington State, Princeton, and Oregon. For a team this experienced, that’s an early chance to show what all that continuity is worth. Win a couple of those, and the resume looks a lot different in March.
Every day is a new day
Most programs are building one season at a time now because that’s how long their rosters last. Portland is still building for five, and that’s how Meek ended up with 12 returners, four seniors who never left, and not a single transfer on the roster.
There are still only 200 minutes in a game, and someone good will sit this year. At most programs, that’s how the portal finds its next name. At Portland, it’s the next test.
“It’s great to have everyone back,” Meek said. “I also know there are a lot of other teams out there that have a really great core back. So we’re hoping we can make a jump because of it, but we also know that every day is a new day. We’ve got to keep getting better.”
