How a foreign tour might have solved one of Yale’s top challenges from last season

“That was so much fun,” Capstraw told The Next. “And that was at the point in the trip where we really started to get each other and understand one another. And I’ll always remember that feeling. … It was like the perfect game-day mojo.”

That team bonding was also a perfect start to the 2025-26 season for Yale, which struggled mightily last season. After winning the season opener against Monmouth, the Bulldogs lost 21 of their next 22 games. They finished the season 4-23 overall and 3-11 in the Ivy League.

“I felt like it took too long for our team to actually bond with each other [last season],” head coach Dalila Eshe told The Next. “And the best part of our season was probably the last five or so games of the season, and the team also felt a lot closer. So just being able to have this [trip] … I think is incredibly valuable.”

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Because of the foreign tour, which the NCAA allows teams to take every four years, the Bulldogs got to spend time together over the summer. That’s rare for Ivy League schools, which otherwise aren’t allowed to have summer workouts and, in many cases, don’t even offer summer classes. Eshe said she usually doesn’t see her players at all over the summer unless they work the program’s camps.

This summer, however, most of the players worked Yale’s camp sessions in late July, just before the five practices that Ivy teams are allowed to have before foreign tours.

“Spending time with them and seeing their faces and stuff in the middle of the summer felt kind of shocking, but really, really valuable,” Eshe said.

In those practices, Eshe and her staff emphasized fundamentals and implemented some basic sets and principles. But with seven returners, six first-years and two incoming transfers, the coaches didn’t get too deep into the offensive and defensive systems. Instead, they wanted the players to develop on-court chemistry by playing what Eshe called “controlled pickup.”

A few players were unavailable to play due to national team commitments — notably, first-year Dorka Kastl was busy winning the FIBA U-20 EuroBasket Division B championship with Hungary. But every player joined the Bulldogs before the trip ended on Aug. 14.

Having everybody on the tour allowed the Bulldogs to see cultural attractions and build their own culture at the same time. They took walking tours and saw the Sagrada Família, a Catholic church in Barcelona that has been a work in progress since 1882.

“You always see it in pictures, and now you’re like, ‘Wow. Wow,’” Capstraw said. “And it’s still being built. So that was awesome.”

They spent as much time as possible at the beach and enjoyed local foods, including croissants and steak frites. And Eshe enjoyed seeing players get more comfortable with each other and develop friendships.

The Bulldogs’ first game was on Aug. 8, their third day in Spain. The score was tied with under four minutes left before El Pacto went on a late run to win 73-66. Sophomore guard Ke’iara Odume led Yale with 15 points, and classmate Marisa Chapman added 12.

Three days later in France, the Bulldogs tried to pull off their own closing run, scoring 27 points in the fourth quarter, but they fell to Antibes Select 76-65. Sophomore guard Ciniya Moore had a team-best 16 points, Capstraw had 14 and Odume had 13.

In both games, Eshe pushed her team to play fast, even though she had just eight players available. The Bulldogs averaged 53.2 points per game last season, which ranked in the bottom 5% of Division I. They usually tried to slow games down and rely on their execution, but Eshe thought they were more effective when they played faster. This year, she has a larger roster and more players who fit that style of play.

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A lot will hinge on the sophomores, who all played important minutes last year and are progressing both on the court and as leaders. Chapman, who started 22 of 27 games as a first-year, won every shooting competition in the practices before the trip, Eshe said. Odume and fellow guard Magdalena Schmidt are more confident after a summer of development. And Eshe expects Moore, who played the most minutes of any Yale reserve last season, to make “a significant impact” this season because of her consistency.

“I think that they’re in a good place where they’re confident,” Capstraw said about the sophomores. “… They’re talented athletes overall and incredibly skilled basketball players. So I think with them, their ability to score the basketball and to play together, I think it’s the start of something special for Yale women’s basketball.”

Hopes are also high for Capstraw, who has shown the potential to be one of the Ivy League’s top players but struggled mentally throughout her junior season. She averaged just 5.8 points per game, about half of what she’d averaged as a sophomore, and lost her love for the sport. But she spent the summer working through that and now feels “confident and prepared” to compete again.

Capstraw and Eshe believe that the faster pace will benefit Capstraw, both because it’s how she instinctively likes to play and because there is less time to overthink. And Eshe hopes to take some pressure off Capstraw, the team’s captain and lone senior, so she can be the best version of herself.

“She’s naturally a very, very good leader,” Eshe said, noting that Capstraw is also the president of Yale’s Student-Athlete Advisory Committee this year. “… I think that she’s going to have an incredible season, but only if we can figure out a way to kind of alleviate some of the pressure and allow her to just lead.”

At the other end of their college careers, three first-years played their first minutes for Yale on the trip: guards Radhika Garapaty and Olivia Kim and forward Sophia Gibson. Garapaty scored 15 points across the two games, Kim had 12 and Gibson had 8.

“All three of them, in different moments, looked really good,” Eshe said. “I thought that that was a lot of fun to watch, and [to] watch them kind of go through their ebb and flow of feeling uncomfortable and settling into the game and playing at the pace that we wanted.”

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That learning on the court will be a stepping stone for Yale this season, as the Bulldogs layer schemes and complexity on top of the basics they implemented for the trip. However, the bonds they created off the court will be even more important as they look to turn the program around.

“When we get back to campus and class starts … the weight is off [our] shoulders of, ‘Oh, I gotta meet my teammates and I gotta meet my professors, and I gotta start this. I gotta do this,’” Capstraw said. “… You know who you have. You know what you’re doing. … I think we were able to lay a foundation in August that a lot of Ivy League teams can’t.”