# @chapelboronews on Instagram

- **Type:** Image
- **Original URL:** https://www.instagram.com/p/DMvN4GGOamQ
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/32954186-chapelboronews-instagram
- **Thumbnail:** https://img.gondola.cc/tr:w-,h-,fo-auto/postThumbnails/4bab536a8d.jpg
- **Posted:** 2025-07-30T15:56:59.000+00:00
- **Account Owner:** Chapelboro.com (@chapelboronews) — https://gondola.cc/chapelboronews

## Caption

Less than four months before her team opens up its 2025-26 season, UNC women’s basketball head coach Courtney Banghart is already forecasting the group as one of the deepest and most competitive rosters she’s ever assembled.

“I would be very surprised if our rotation was anywhere near as tight as it has been,” Banghart told reporters Tuesday afternoon. “I have absolutely no idea who our first group is gonna be, because we can go a couple different ways with it.”

Banghart’s team lost three starters to the professional ranks following the end of the 2024-25 season: Lexi Donarski, Maria Gakdeng and UNC’s all-time leading rebounder Alyssa Ustby have all departed, taking multiple years of starting experience with them. Guard Reniya Kelly and wing Indya Nivar are the Tar Heels’ returning starters. Rising sophomore Lanie Grant, a 2024-25 ACC All-Freshman honoree, appears primed to inherit a starting role after filling in for the injured Kelly late last season.

“She had a really big step, and she showed a lot of promise and a lot of potential,” Banghart said of Grant, who skipped her senior year of high school and reclassified into UNC’s 2024 recruiting class. “She has to take another step. She’s got to shoot the ball better, she has to finish better.”

Though Grant will be a sophomore in name, she is still the youngest player on a roster featuring three true freshmen. One of them, Brazilian wing Taissa Queiroz, spent the 2025 spring semester with the team as an early enrollee. Queiroz spent the early offseason touring with the Brazilian national team, with one stop being an exhibition against WNBA’s Indiana Fever and Caitlin Clark.

Born in Belo Horizonte, Queiroz played at Cardinal Newman High School in Santa Rosa, CA, about an hour’s drive north of San Francisco. While building herself into a four-star recruit, Queiroz schooled herself in English during the COVID pandemic, changing the language on her phone and watching English-language films.

“That’s just Taissa. She is so committed,” Banghart said. “She just finds a way.”

Full story on Chapelboro.com.
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#uncwbb #uncwomensbasketball #coachbanghart #goheels #gdtbath #tarheels #unc

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## Tags

tarheels, coachbanghart, gdtbath, uncwomensbasketball, uncwbb, goheels, unc

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