In basically just three seasons of play, Catherine Kagey has gotten herself into the top 10 in Randolph-Macon women's basketball history in both rebounds and blocked shots. Randolph-Macon athletics photo

By Riley Zayas
for D3sports.com

There was a distinct feeling around Randolph-Macon’s pregame meal on Saturday afternoon. Due to take the court inside the Salem Civic Center that evening for an anticipated ODAC Tournament final, head coach Lindsey Burke-Eberhart observed the team sitting around her. They were loose. They were confident. They were more than ready for the 40-minute battle that lay ahead against Washington & Lee, the ODAC’s two-time defending tournament champion. 

If the vibe of the pregame meal was a sort of litmus test for the quality of performance Burke-Eberhart could anticipate from her squad, the Yellow Jackets seemed right on path to yet another monumental victory. 

• 2025 Division III women's basketball bracket
• NCAA Tournament preview
• Hoopsville Bracket Breakdown show
• More women's NCAA Tournament headlines

“I’ve gone down to Salem with them four times, especially with the majority of them being this group I still have right now,” Burke-Eberhart, in her fifth season leading R-MC, said Wednesday. “I’ve been at those pregame meals before where I could cut the tension with a knife. Everybody feels tight, they’re scared to lose, and there’s a lot of anxiety. 

“But this year at the pregame meal, they were pretty loose, not thinking we had it in the bag, but just ready. They were ready for the moment and they weren’t scared of it.” 

That last statement might sum up the Yellow Jackets’ approach through the entirety of this season, one that can be defined by historic standards and milestones. After taking a 79-47 loss to Gettysburg in the season’s second game, R-MC hasn’t ended up on the wrong side of the scoreboard again. Not once. Heading into Friday’s first round matchup against Piedmont, the Yellow Jackets ride a streak of 26 consecutive wins, the longest in program history. That includes a flawless 16-0 record in ODAC play, just the fifth time in the ODAC’s 43-year history that a team finished its league schedule undefeated. R-MC is 27-1 overall entering its first tournament appearance in Burke-Eberhart’s five-year tenure, one win shy of the 28-3 mark posted by the 2005-06 squad, led that season by Megan Silva, the first D3hoops.com Women’s National Player of the Year. 

Catherine Kagey, the lone fifth-year senior on the roster, sums it up simply: they refuse to lose. 

“We’ve had this ‘refuse to lose’ mindset all year,” Kagey, who was named the 2025 ODAC Tournament MVP, said. “We’ve talked about how special this group can be and really bought into that. In past years, we’ve been somewhat scared of what’s come or had some anxiety attached to it. But we had all the confidence in the world from the five on the floor to everyone coming off the bench. That ‘refuse to lose’ mindset carried us through those tough games.” 

Of which there have been many. A week after losing to Gettysburg, R-MC knocked off then-No. 6 Johns Hopkins in a thriller at home, winning 75-74 in overtime. A month later, the Yellow Jackets opened a Puerto Rico trip with a dramatic 78-77 win over Rhode Island College, taking the lead on Morgan Miller’s free throws with four seconds left. And who can forget the road win at W&L on Feb. 1, when the Yellow Jackets outscored the Generals, 20-13, in the fourth quarter, withstood two overtimes, and won, 86-83? It marked R-MC’s first win over W&L since 2020, the season prior to Burke-Eberhart’s arrival in Ashland. Entering February, nobody on the R-MC roster had beaten W&L. 

By the time they walked out of the Salem Civic Center last Saturday night, the Yellow Jackets had two wins over the Generals to their credit. In a lower-scoring affair than the first meeting, R-MC trailed 55-54, with 3:11 left, and the pride of hoisting an ODAC trophy at stake. Then, true to Kagey’s point, R-MC made a run. They refused to let it slip away, scoring 11 of the final 14 points in a 65-58 win. 

“I’ve had a lot of people ask me if there were any games early on that made me think, ‘This team is going to be pretty good,’ ” Burke-Eberhart notes. “It’s been a lot of little moments, honestly. Beating Hopkins early on, and then Rhode Island College in Puerto Rico was one of those things. It’s been those markers along the way that have fueled the confidence and excitement for this group. 

“It’s such a cliche about being bought in, but I think our seniors are really easy to follow. So they’ve really started to follow whatever their lead was. They lead in the right way, which gets others to want to be led by them.”

Four seniors compose that group: Kagey, Marisa Ziegler, Juliana Park, and Cait Velez. Kagey’s presence on the roster stands out even more so, considering there has not been a team coached by Burke-Eberhart at R-MC that didn’t include Kagey. But going a level deeper, it has been a test of resilience for Kagey, the Yellow Jackets’ leading scorer at 13.2 points per game. 

She came to Ashland as a freshman expected to make an early impact, starting the first game of the COVID-shortened, four-game slate in 2020-21. But it also turned out to be the only one she played in, an ACL tear eliminating any chance of seeing the floor again that spring. Three years later, after making 55 starts as a sophomore and junior and helping R-MC to an ODAC title game appearance in 2022, Kagey appeared on track for another year at the forefront of the Yellow Jackets’ charge. In R-MC’s fourth game — an eventual 58-31 win over ODAC foe Eastern Mennonite — Kagey had a double-double in her first 15 minutes on the floor. But then adversity hit yet again in the form of another ACL tear, and she had no choice but to spend the rest of the season confined to the bench. The void was felt, as R-MC clawed its way to a 13-5 ODAC record, but saw the season end in an ODAC Tournament quarterfinal loss to Roanoke. 

Already committed to return in 2024-25, Kagey worked back to full strength, going through the long recovery process for a second time in four years. By the time the Yellow Jackets stepped on the floor for their Nov. 13 season opener, Kagey’s mindset was clear. In her final collegiate season, she would do whatever necessary to bring R-MC the most team success it was capable of.

“I had this mindset of, ‘Whatever it takes to win, that’s what I’m going to do,’” Kagey, who hails from Roanoke, Virginia, said recently. “If that’s scoring 20 points with a double-double, or scoring two points and dishing it to my teammates, I kept that ‘Whatever it takes’ mentality. I just wanted to keep the winning going. With four years of experience and the adversity I’d faced, I knew I was coming back this fifth year as a new person and player, and I wanted to buy into that.”

Burke-Eberhart thinks back to the moments before Kagey’s first ODAC title game appearance as a sophomore, a true win-or-go-home contest against Shenandoah. Already a star as R-MC’s leading scorer and rebounder, Kagey knew she’d be relied on heavily in the biggest game of her college career up to that point. And it showed in her nervousness just before tip-off. 

“I remember before the starting lineups, her leg was bouncing, and she looked pretty nervous,” Burke-Eberhart recalls with a laugh. “I leaned over and told her, ‘It’s just a game,’ and she went right back to taking some more very deep breaths.”

Kagey struggled for most of the afternoon, going 4-of-19 from the field in a 56-43 loss. Fast-forward two years to last Friday’s ODAC semifinal and the Yellow Jackets’ rematch with Shenandoah in Salem. This time, Kagey didn’t just play well; she took control. Playing just 20 minutes from where she honed her skills as a high schooler at Roanoke’s Faith Christian School, Kagey scored 20 points, grabbed 17 rebounds, blocked four shots, and came up with four steals. She was on the floor for all but two minutes of the 62-49 victory. 

A day later, it was W&L struggling to slow her down. Her 25 points were a season-high, she recorded a fourth-consecutive double-double with 10 rebounds, and went 11-of-14 at the free throw line. That included four straight makes that took R-MC from trailing by one to leading by three. The Yellow Jackets never looked back after that point. 

“Catherine has sometimes struggled from the free throw line during her time here, and I think probably the biggest full circle moment for me is that during that championship game, she was locked in from the line,” Burke-Eberhart, who is 87-24 at R-MC, said of Kagey. “It shows how much she has grown during her time here.

“Then at the end of the game, Sam Smith gets fouled, and Catherine, organically, I didn’t say anything to her, she walks right up to Sam, puts her arm around her, and they walk to the free throw line together. She’s leading her in that moment, whereas three years before, I was the one leading Catherine and trying to get her to not be so nervous. But she was being that person for Sam now because of how she’s grown in her time here.” 

Kagey averaged 21.3 points, 12.7 rebounds, and 3.3 assists per game in the Yellow Jackets’ run to their ODAC crown, adding to what has been a season full of memories. Her success at R-MC has an added layer of significance as well. She isn’t the first Kagey to star on the court for the Yellow Jackets. More than two decades ago, her father, David, made his mark inside Crenshaw Gym for Hal Nunnally’s squad, scoring 1,478 career points and earning the ODAC Player of the Year award in 1990-91, twice appearing in the NCAA Tournament. He was inducted into the R-MC Athletics Hall of Fame in 2008. 

“It’s a really neat story,” Kagey said. “I think my dad has done a really good job of separating what he did and accomplished here at Macon from my story. I never felt any pressure to perform a certain way, following him and his career.” 

It appears she is well on her way to joining her father as a future R-MC Hall of Fame inductee, considering she has managed to rank No. 8 all-time in blocks, No. 9 all-time in rebounds, and surpass 1,000 career points in essentially just three seasons on the floor. 

But the team success of this season remains what she has pursued since the preseason. And here they are. 27-1 entering the national tournament, hosting an opening-weekend regional in Ashland, and playing fearless in the season’s most pivotal stretch. 

It will be the first time anyone on R-MC's roster has experienced firsthand the emotion, intensity, and magic that comes with the NCAA Tournament. But, as Kagey notes, they’ve been inside the gym numerous times to see the Yellow Jacket men capture NCAA Tournament victories in recent years. Now it’s their turn to keep the postseason success inside Crenshaw Gym going. 

“I think Coach said it at the beginning of practice yesterday,” Kagey said. “Making it to the tournament and hosting, we don’t want that to be the end of our story. It means a lot that we can bring teams here to play in the first two rounds, but we don’t want to just get there. We want to play Friday, win, and advance.”