Adah Hupfer leads Pendleton Heights into senior season, eyes new heights

Adah Hupfer has spent her rise turning expectation into evidence. The 6-foot-3 Pendleton Heights forward entered her senior season after a junior year that produced 20.5 points and 13 rebounds per game, a 1,000-point milestone and the kind of production that has made her one of the most watched players in Indiana girls basketball.

That spotlight has only grown because of what Hupfer means to Pendleton Heights and to Madison County. The county has recently produced players such as Tyra Ford, Jacklynn Hosier, Laniah Wills and Kaycie Warfel, and Hupfer now sits in that same line of players who have given the area statewide relevance. With Warfel gone, the burden shifts even more heavily onto Hupfer, who has already shown she can carry it.

Her recruiting résumé reflects that ceiling. By July 2025, Hupfer had collected 19 Division I offers, starting with IU Indianapolis after her freshman season and most recently adding Northern Kentucky at that point. She had averaged 12.1 points and 12.5 rebounds across her first two high school seasons, then took another step as a junior by shooting 53 percent from the floor and 40 percent from 3-point range. For a frontcourt player, those numbers point to more than size. They point to touch, range and the ability to stretch a defense.

Hupfer’s trajectory has also been tied to winning. Pendleton Heights captured its first sectional championship since 2011 in 2025, then repeated as sectional champion in 2026 and shared the Hoosier Heritage Conference title in the 2024-25 season. In March 2025, when she was still a sophomore, she helped deliver that long-awaited sectional breakthrough while averaging 13.5 points, 13.6 rebounds and 1.2 blocks. That early production set the stage for a junior year that confirmed the program’s turnaround was real.

Her place among the state’s elite was reinforced again when she was selected to the 2026 Indiana Junior All-Stars roster. The Junior All-Stars faced the senior All-Stars on June 3 at Mt. Vernon High School in Fortville, another marker in a sport that has crowned girls basketball as a statewide fixture since 1976, the same year the IHSAA fully sanctioned the game and the girls Indiana All-Star game began. For Hupfer, the senior season is not just another year on the schedule. It is the year that could define how Pendleton Heights, and Madison County, remember this run.