Now that the women's college basketball regular season has come to a close, the Atlantic Coast Conference announced its award winners for the 2024-2025 regular season.
Congratulations to the 24-25 All-ACC team!
— ACC Women's Basketball (@accwbb) March 4, 2025
🔗Full team: https://t.co/9eU6ThJpTr pic.twitter.com/P5dllCknRN
Alyssa Ustby led the way for the UNC women's basketball program, earning spots on both the first-team All-ACC along with the conference's All-Defensive team.
A Rochester, Minnesota native, Ustby has created quite the resume for herself as a Tar Heel. Before suffering an injury that forced her to miss the final stretch of the regular season, Ustby was leading the UNC women's basketball program in essentially every statistical category, just another reminder of how she impacts the game in a variety of ways.
Ustby wasn't the only Tar Heel to earn regular season accolades. Both Maria Gakdeng and Reniya Kelly earned spots on the second-team All-ACC team while Lanie Grant was voted to the All-Rookie squad.
Gakdeng has been an absolute force in the paint for the Tar Heels ever since she arrived on campus. In her second season with the program, Gakdeng made life very difficult for opposing post players, as her ability to alter shots at the rim while working her way toward efficient shots on the other end proved to be a matchup nightmare for most of the players who have been tasked to compete against her.
Kelly has taken a tremendous leap in her second season as a Tar Heel, as her absence in the final two games of the regular season showed just how important she is to this year's team. While she thrives as a facilitator, Kelly took on a bigger role in scoring the basketball, as we started to see glimpses of her elite scoring ability at the point guard position.
Grant is one of the youngest players in the country, but don't let that fool you: she is more than ready for the college level.
Remember: she should be just about ready to finish up her senior season of high school. Now, she's just completed her first college regular season and has increasingly earned a bigger role in Courtney Banghart's regular rotation, even starting a few games in the process.
The four players who earned conference honors are just the start of what is one of the deepest teams we've seen in recent memory for the UNC women's basketball program. While the regular season accolades are well-deserved, these student-athletes still aren't satisfied as they hope to make a deep postseason run over the next couple of weeks.