The women's basketball team may be getting a surprise addition to next year's squad.

Michelle Marciniak, a former standout at Allentown Central Catholic High School, said she will transfer after her freshman year at Notre Dame and is considering Penn State among her alternatives.

Marciniak is also considering Tennessee, Rutgers and Virginia. Those schools, along with Penn State, originally recruited the 5-foot-9-inch guard out of high school.

About one week ago, Marciniak announced that she would be transferring out of Notre Dame but did not give any specific reasons.

It was thought originally that Marciniak was homesick and was unaccustomed to living in the Midwest. Notre Dame assistant coach Dave Glass said that it was tough for Marciniak to cope with being away from home.

"With any high Division I program there are adjustments that have to be made," Glass said. "She struggled a little bit. Things hadn't worked out the way she planned them to."

However, family members and teammates have said that it might have been her lack of playing time and a possible struggle with Coach Muffet McGraw.

"She was said to be homesick because she was unhappy," her mother, Betsy Marciniak said. "She's travelled with all the U.S. teams and she was homesick but it didn't make her unhappy."

There has been speculation all season that Marciniak was upset about her lack of playing time and that she wanted to go to a school that would let her start.

Marciniak, who was a USA Today first team selection in both her junior and senior years, started 16 out of 27 games, but most were early in the season. She averaged 12.2 points per game and played the second most minutes on the team. Marciniak, though, was said to have been angry in the change of her role on the team.

After the early season starts, Marciniak was replaced by sophomore walk-on Kara Leary. The Irish coaching staff felt that Marciniak was more important to the team as a reserve.

"(Marciniak) was most valuable to us coming off the bench as a spark," Glass said. "She just wasn't giving us that spark as a starter." Marciniak scored 21 points off the bench in Notre Dame's 93-72 loss to UCLA in the first round of the NCAA tournament.

Senior captain Margaret Nowlin was very critical of Marciniak in an interview with The Observer, the Notre Dame student newspaper. Nowlin claimed that Marciniak was difficult to play with because she wasn't a team player and only cared about her minutes.

If Penn State has an edge in the race to get Marciniak it would be that the Lady Lions play only about three hours from her home in Macungie. Her mother stated that Marciniak also gets along well with Lady Lion Coach Rene Portland.

The spring signing period starts April 15. Marciniak's mother said that her daughter will announce then what school she will transfer to on that day. Notre Dame also said that they will release Marciniak from her scholarship so she will only have to sit out for one year after transferring.