Ranking the best players in the D-III Women's division in 2026.

May 7, 2026 by Ultiworld in Opinion

There’s no shortage of talent in the D-III college women’s division. We look a lot at team success, and often see familiar names and faces in those discussions. But who are the best individual players? Who brings the most value to winning a championship? Figuring out which stars shine the brightest is more art than science, but perhaps there’s democratic power in numbers.

So who are the best players in the division right now? To try to clear away as much of the white noise created by circumstance as possible and get to the heart of each individual’s value and contribution, we asked a diverse group of five members of our coverage team to weigh in on the following prompt:

If you were starting a college team today with the singular goal of winning a theoretical D-III Championship this May, how would you rank the players within the division? You aren’t building a team of all of your selections, so don’t worry about how the players complement each other. Consider each pick the first pick of a team, drafting in order, only you can’t pick the players you’ve already ranked above. With regards to injuries and absences, we will include all rostered players unless there is confirmation a player will not be competing, or would not be able to compete, at Regionals and/or Nationals.

This year’s balloting process initiated after regionals began, but finalized before the final regionals weekend. Rankings reflect information available up to that point.

The Scoring System (Methodology)

All staff ranked between 15 and 20 eligible players, and went through multiple rounds of revisions, and make their ballots visible to the public.

This year, we changed to a normalized scoring system. We converted raw point totals into a grade (0-100). This represents the percentage of total possible points a player could have received from that specific voting group. A player who was the unanimous #1 choice of every ballot, for example, would receive a grade of 100.

Our tiebreaker procedure is removing the highest and lowest scores for each player and recalculating. The next step is head-to-head on a per-ballot basis, followed by total number of ballots, then highest rank. Final decision is editorial.

We’ll start with our top 5, and discussion about that group. Then we’ll reveal the entire top 15, followed by the complete ballots, and additional conversations about the rankings.

The Top 5

Player	Composite Pts.	Anna Browne	Keith Raynor	Theresa Diffendal	TJ Lee	Zack Davis
Ella Widmyer (Middlebury)	95.00	1	3	1	4	1
Erica Collin (Haverford and Bryn Mawr)	94.00	4	1	2	2	2
Milo Brown (Wesleyan)	91.00	3	2	3	3	3
Scout Noble (Wesleyan)	83.00	5	5	4	1	7
Rufus Helmreich (Haverford and Bryn Mawr)	76.00	2	6	7	9	5

There were three players who appeared in every ballot’s top 4: Ella Widmyer, Milo Brown, and Erica Collin. How did you decide to order these three?

Keith Raynor (Senior Editor, Wesleyan Coach): I’m the lone voter with Erica Collin (Haverford and Bryn Mawr) first. Maybe I’m shell-shocked from having her steamroll Wesleyan at ECI, but her offensive game looks like it has taken a real leap after a club season with AMP and a semi-pro season with the Surge. She can now successfully drive an offense from both the deep space and behind the disc. Obviously, her defensive value is immense.

It is really splitting hairs with Milo Brown (Wesleyan) and Ella Widmyer (Middlebury). Do you want more offense, more breaking the mark? Take Widmyer. Want more defense, a bit more power in your game? Take Brown. I went the latter because of the versatility, but the argument for Widmyer is very sound; all three are in the same tier.

Zack Davis (Senior Staff Writer): Keith, how much are you factoring in your coaching?

Keith: If anything, it should boost Wesleyan players. They are even better than you think and I’m like ankle weights making them worse.

Theresa Diffendal (Associate Editor): I went with more of an “MVP” approach. While I agree that Collin’s game has taken a big step forward — I have her above Milo Brown — the load Widmyer has been asked to carry and her productive output were more impressive in the limited ECI film available. Look at any upwind Middlebury drive; all credit to Zora DeSilva and Cece Rhyneer, who hit holes in the cup and reset capably, but it is truly Widmyer going every other, receiving a one-yard negative reset and sinking into a flick for positive yards. Could Collin do the same? Quite possible with how her throwing repertoire has grown, but she has not needed to flash that skill set to the same dominant degree.

Zack: Widmyer is just more confident with the disc in her hands than anyone else. This is kind of the QB-tunnel-vision equivalent (best center handler = most value), but Widmyer is the most consistent player. She and Milo are very comparable, and it might be a detriment to Milo’s ability to demonstrate their peak ability because they can rely on Maggie Brown, Sofia Canoutas-Nadel, and Scout Noble to help carry the load. Whereas when I think of Middlebury, I think of Ella.

Erica Collin’s ability to eat space on the field on both offense and defense is invaluable. It’s not just that she’s tall; her radius of effect is farther than anyone else’s. Watching Claire Lee (Macalester)‘s Donovan video makes me think she deserves to be in this convo too.

This is our first official D-III rankings. What was your process? What were you looking for? Are there unique wrinkles to the division that altered the way you rated players?

Includes responses from both the D-III Men’s and Women’s division voters.

Josh Katz (Staff Writer): With less film available for D-III, there’s more reasoning, trusting of others’ opinions, and guesswork when making my list. Someone like Jonas Geere (St. Olaf), I’ve seen exactly once since 2024 Nationals. But he was great at that tournament, St. Olaf is having a great season, and others have said he’s one of their best players. So he makes my ballot. Similar thoughts put Theo Barton and Zach Widmyer on my ballot, though we do have one game of film for them this season.

Keith Raynor: I’ve come to accept that we are going to have to stretch to make this work. We have less film (most of which is infected by intense wind that warps the game), fewer reps, and decreased access to utilize. I’ve been doing this exercise for years and always used how players perform in club and National Team settings to help inform evaluations, so I’m certainly leaning on D-III Nationals last season to help make judgments. So is D-III a little more vibey than D-I? Yes. And that’s why we haven’t done it in years past. But maybe we shouldn’t let perfect be the enemy of good, as Charlie Eisenhood likes to say.

Calvin Ciorba (Staff Writer): I have the slight advantage of having played against all these players in college and club, and used my experience with that as well as tape and listening to the D-III chatter. I have a slight bias against people I haven’t actually played (sorry Randy Lahm and Nico Martinez). Combining this with the prompt of who I would want to build my D-III team around—not just individual skill—helped me devise my rankings.

The Top 15 and Beyond