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Washington Huskies Women's Basketball Guard Tabbed to Preseason Watchlist
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- Washington Huskies Women's Basketball Guard Tabbed to Preseason Watchlist
(Chris Pietsch/Register-Guard)
The Washington Huskies women's basketball team is set to begin the 2026-27 season at 11 a.m. PT on Nov. 2 at Alaska Airlines Arena in Seattle.
The Huskies will enter the season with a healthy amount of expectations. They won an NCAA tournament game in 2025 and advanced to the Round of 32 for the first time since 2017. In the Associated Press' preseason Top 25 poll , Washington ranked 16th in the country.
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A large part of the hype for the Huskies entering this season is due to the improvements made by the roster in the offseason. The returning talent on the team has also helped result in this preseason view of the team.
Washington had three players receive all-conference honors last season, all of whom returned to the roster this season.
One of those players, 2025-26 All-Big Ten honorable mention guard Avery Howell, was tabbed to a preseason watchlist Wednesday.
Howell, a junior, was named to the preseason watchlist for the Ann Meyers Drysdale award, which is given to the best shooting guard in the country.
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The award is named after Ann Meyers Drysdale, who played with the UCLA Bruins from 1974-78, where she was a four-time Kodak All-American. She was a multi-time representative for Team USA in international games and earned multiple gold medals in the 1975 and 1979 Pan American Games, the 1979 World Championship and the 1979 Jones Cup. She was the first overall pick in the one of the earliest women's professional basketball leagues, the Women's Professional Basketball League (WBL) and played two seasons from 1979-81 before the league folded.
Drysdale was inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in 1993 and had a long career as a broadcaster where she was in the booth for several Olympic games.
As for Howell, she transferred to the Huskies last season after spending her freshman year with the Southern California (USC) Trojans .
The Boise, Idaho, native had a solid freshman season with the Trojans. She averaged 7.5 points across 35 games (three starts) on 43.1% shooting from the floor (39.9% from 3-point range). She also averaged three rebounds per game.
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Howell's numbers dramatically improved across the board in her first year in the Pacific Northwest. Her sophomore season, she averaged 14.2 points on a 50.8% clip from the field, including a 43.1% mark from beyond the arc. She also led the team in rebounding (8.3) in addition to dishing 1.4 assists and swiping 1.4 steals per contest.
