Cougar soccer head coach Todd Shulenberger announced the signing of forward Jordyn Young Monday, a grad transfer from Cal-Berkeley, the 16th and likely one of the final members of a large signing class for the 11th-year head coach.

Since the season concluded, Shulenberger and his staff have been slowly adding in a mix of high school, club and transfer recruits to fill out the spring roster. The flurry of moves comes after 10 seniors graduated after the 2024 season, including program cornerstones and co-captains Grayson Lynch and Reese Tappan, who were both named to All-WCC First Team last year. Shulenberger lost seven starters, including Lynch and Tappan.

Wazzu’s young core also took a hard hit, losing six players to the transfer portal including WCC All-Freshman Kendall Campbell and a pair of sophomore All-WCC honorable mentions in Megan Santa Cruz and Reagan Kotschau. The Cougs also lost sophomores Naomi Clark, Nathalie Lewis and Georgia Whitehead.

Campbell transferred to SEC-contender Kentucky who made the NCAA tournament last year as a five-seed and advanced to the second round. Kotschau returned to her home state to play for Colorado who also made the second round and Santa Cruz committed to Purdue, who the Cougs played in the first game of the 2024 season. Clark transferred to Pac-12 rival Oregon State, Lewis headed to Oklahoma and Whitehead traveled eight miles east and across the border to play for Idaho.

On the current spring roster, only nine players are confirmed to return from last year’s team. Only three of those players are seniors, including starting defenders Maggie Mace and Peyton Price, and redshirt goalkeeper Keara Fitzgerald. The lack of returners and the gutting of Shulenberger’s youth movement prompted the program’s shopping spree this winter.

In an effort to build up the experience on a roster thin in that area, five of Shulenberger’s 16 additions were transfers. Among the transfers are Young, goalkeeper Zora Standifer, defender Meg Devall and midfielders Audrey Shackelford and Brooke Brown.

The most recent addition, Young, played for Cal for two years before missing all of last season. She has only appeared in 18 career games and with 13 of those games coming as a freshman. Young will be a redshirt junior.

The most experienced of the group is Standifer, a redshirt senior who will likely challenge Fitzgerald for the starting job in front of the net. Standifer played for Long Beach State for three seasons before not seeing any action in net last season. Standifer was a two-time All-Conference honorable mention in the Big West and recorded the fifth-most career saves in program history. If she starts, she will have big shoes to fill in replacing former All-Pac-12 first team and Pac-12 goalkeeper of the year Nadia Cooper who ended her career tied for third in career saves at WSU.

Devall will look to shore up a defense that lost several key pieces. Devall is a junior from Portland State who started 17 of 18 matches last year.

Shackelford is the youngest of the transfers but is coming from the best program in Arkansas. She only appeared in eight games as a freshman, but the Razorbacks made the NCAA tournament quarterfinals as two seed before losing to three-seeded Stanford. Fellow midfielder Brown played the last three years at Cincinnati but spent her freshman year at West Virginia. She started 18 of 19 matches in 2023. Because she only played three games last year and in her first season, she is listed as a redshirt junior and has two years of eligibility remaining.

The majority of the Cougs’ offseason moves have been concentrated in replenishing the core of underclassmen. Shulenberger added 11 recruits to the freshman class, giving a huge boost to the team’s depth. The class includes mostly West Coast high school and club players, with three from California, two from Idaho and two staying in state. WSU also added players from Montana, Hawaii, Utah and Canada.

The likely highlight of the class is goalkeeper Sidney Venier, a British Columbia native who played for the Vancouver Whitecaps youth program and won a league title last summer. Many of the clubs that freshman play for are strong programs, but given the Whitecaps association with Major League Soccer and the Canadian national team, Venier comes from one of the best backgrounds out of any newcomer.

The Cougs also added a pair of prolific goal scorers in local product Rebecca Skinner and Delanie Corcoran. Skinner scored over 100 goals in a record-setting career at Clarkston while Corcoran scored 63 goals for her club team.

In all, WSU added six midfielders, five forwards, three defenders and two goalkeepers. The roster limit is 28, so there are three spots open and more players could try out.

To cap off a busy offseason, the Cougs hired a 2017 graduate in Mason Portalski to serve as an assistant coach. Portalski has had stints at multiple schools previously, including Army, Coastal Carolina and Northern Colorado.

“We are really excited to welcome Mason and his fiancé to our Coug soccer family,” Shulenberger said in a press release. “It’s been great watching Mason grow as a coach over the years from Northern Colorado to Coastal Carolina and now Army. His hard work and commitment over the years has set himself up nicely for this great opportunity. Welcome back to the Palouse, Mason.”

After going 8-5-6 and finishing fourth in the WCC,  the Cougs will look to improve in 2025 with a completely revamped roster.