MiLaysia Fulwiley is a masterpiece under construction, the most interesting work in progress in basketball. Her nickname could be “Sometimes.” Sometimes Fulwiley plays magnificent basketball, and sometimes she fails to execute the most elementary tasks. Sometimes she pulls off moves that no other guard in the country would even try, and sometimes she stands still when she should be moving. Coaching her is a thrill but a challenge: Sometimes you can’t believe what she just did, and sometimes you can’t understand what she just tried. Sometimes both happen on the same play.
“That’s what makes me nervous about her: I have no idea [what she might do],” says South Carolina Gamecocks assistant Khadijah Sessions, a former Gamecocks point guard who works extensively with the sophomore. “Sometimes the opponent can say something to MiLaysia, and she’ll probably do something crazy. Sometimes the crowd can get MiLaysia doing things that we don’t really want her to do.”
There is a reason for this: As a child, Fulwiley learned the game from highlights and mixtapes. She did not really watch actual basketball games until she was in high school. That meant she learned the hard parts of basketball before the easy ones.
“All this weird stuff: behind the back, between her legs, up and under, whoop-de-do—she’s been doing that for years,” says Sessions, who first saw Fulwiley play when MiLaysia was in fifth grade.
By the time Fulwiley made the 10-mile journey from W.J. Keenan High School in Columbia, S.C., to the Gamecocks’ practice gym, she was a phenom. But in some very fundamental ways, she still had to learn to play basketball.
Her game was always wily but never full, because she was always more skilled than other players. Then she got to South Carolina, the era’s dominant program, and guess what? She was still more skilled than other players. Yet she played only 18 minutes per game as a freshman, and when coaches explained what she needed to do to improve, she often replied, Sessions says, with “rebuttal. She wasn’t that open to trying to get better in different areas she was weak in.”
Fulwiley cops to it now.
“As a freshman, you think you know it all, and you don’t know it all, actually,” Fulwiley says. “You might try to play the eye test … even if you think that you could be out there and do better than what you see, it’s a team sport.”
Fulwiley had championship dreams but a mixtape mindset, and she didn’t even realize it: “Honestly, I don’t really look to make highlights. I’m an instinct player. I just do whatever I feel at the moment.” Practice, of course, is the exact opposite of doing whatever you feel at the moment. No wonder she didn’t like it.
“Last year, I used to be like, ‘Oh … practice again?’ ” Fulwiley says. “I didn’t understand the growing, the process, the love that you have to have for college basketball.”
In an age when athletes can find plenty of people to tell them what they want to hear, Fulwiley speaks candidly about what she needs to do better. Fans watch her mesmerizing crossovers and around-the-back moves, and they wonder why she averages only 19 minutes per game. They should just ask Fulwiley.
Her effort wanes, for one. She used to think it was a conditioning issue, but then she started working with South Carolina’s sports performance coach, Molly Binetti, and it hit her: “Dang … I’m doing all this extra running, and it’s still not helping me. And then I realized it’s a mental thing. If you tell yourself you’re tired, then you’re tired. I’ve started to learn how to just push through.”
Fulwiley’s stats are virtually the same as last season. But Sessions insists she is “in a completely different headspace.” It is hard to see a player as skilled as Fulwiley as any kind of underdog, but she is trying to accomplish something more difficult than even her most amazing move. She is filling in the blanks of her game while competing for the highest stakes in the sport.
Last week’s regional in Birmingham encapsulated Fulwiley. In a tight Sweet 16 game against the Maryland Terrapins, she was probably the best player on the floor. In a tight Elite Eight game against the Duke Blue Devils, she might have been the worst.
The good stuff was outrageous. She knifed her way through two Terrapins on a fast break, avoiding a steal with a high dribble over thievish hands, then hit a layup. On another break, she dribbled around her back, planted her left foot, and swished a fadeaway. She scored 23 points in 21 minutes against Maryland, and South Carolina needed all of them.
“You put the ball in her hands and you allow her to just create her magic,” Gamecocks coach Dawn Staley said afterward. “I’m thankful that we have such a dynamic, generational talent on our team.”
Two days later, against Duke, that same generational talent lost the plot. In the final 74 seconds of the first quarter, Fulwiley committed two traveling violations and dribbled through the buzzer because she didn’t realize the quarter was ending.
When Staley put her back on the floor in the second quarter, Fulwiley traveled again. On Duke’s next possession, Fulwiley stood still, watching a Blue Devils three-point attempt rather than boxing out the player she was guarding, Oluchi Okananwa. Okananwa had a clear path to the rebound, though she failed to control it.
On South Carolina’s next possession, Fulwiley missed a contested layup—and then jogged, rather than sprinted, back down the court to play defense. A minute and a half later, she recognized the shot clock was winding down, so she fired up a three-pointer … but when it bounced off the rim, she stood by the Duke bench watching it rather than getting back on defense. Teammate Bree Hall ran back to guard the player Fulwiley had been guarding, Reigan Richardson. When Fulwiley finally got back, she went looking for Richardson, only to discover that Hall was guarding her. Fulwiley looked around for the Blue Devil who was left without a defender. She found Duke’s Toby Fournier too late: Fournier drove past her and drew a foul.
Fulwiley played two minutes in the second half. She sat the entire fourth quarter. She looked miserable, perhaps because her performance contradicted her self-image. “I’m a winner. I love to win. I don’t really lose,” she said. “I won four [state] championships in high school. I’m not a loser.” South Carolina beat Duke, and Fulwiley jubilantly celebrated with her teammates. Her season and her hoops education would go on.
When Larry Brown started coaching Allen Iverson in Philadelphia, he marveled at his new superstar’s fire: He wants to kill his man on every single possession. Fulwiley is like that. She has an extreme competitive streak, and she knows she can score on anybody: “My defender, they can’t guard me. Only I can guard myself.” But that mentality can be her undoing.
“It takes you away from all the things that you say you’re gonna do,” she says.
Although Fulwiley’s mental approach is much better this year, her performance remains inconsistent. That can be frustrating—for her.
“I practice like an all-around great player,” she says. “I rarely make mistakes in practice. And then I get in the game and I just—I don’t know, I just start messing up.”
There is a logical explanation for this: Fulwiley is more conscious of everything she is supposed to be doing, but is still learning to do it under game pressure. This shows up in ways both obvious and subtle.
Fulwiley says this year, “I realized that defense is bigger than offense, and it’s always been the other way around for me.” She plays some great on-the-ball defense, but away from the ball, she still spends too many defensive possessions on her heels, with her hands by her side—the opposite of the defensive stance most players are taught as kids. She is also still learning that defense begins with hustling back after a missed shot, and it ends when you snare a defensive rebound.
Sessions drills Fulwiley on what she calls “Kyrie finishes.” Kyrie Irving is his generation’s premier practitioner of driving bank shots. “When we’re working out, she uses the glass a lot,” Sessions says. “But then in the game, she doesn’t use the glass.”
Fulwiley is trying to blend her otherworldly moves with sound basketball principles. But it’s a process. If a player is a lousy three-point shooter, she can simply stop shooting threes. But Fulwiley’s talent is constantly baiting her into trying something spectacular. Sometimes you can practically see the wheels spinning in her head: I’m not supposed to do this … but I can … but I shouldn’t … but I can …
“We never work on taking the ball behind her back, and then a one-leg transition finish,” Sessions said outside the South Carolina locker room the day after the Maryland game. “From my angle [on the bench], I didn’t see that she took the ball behind her back. When I went back and watched it, I’m just like, ‘Why would you do that?’ ”
When a reporter said he could not remember seeing that particular move, Sessions said, “Me neither.” As she said it, Fulwiley walked past and cracked, “Me neither.”
It’s all fine when it works—and it often does. But truly great players do all the little things even when the big things aren’t going well, and Fulwiley isn’t there yet. Her game unravels too easily. It is so predictable that Sessions can sense it before it even happens. She turns to Staley on the bench and says: It’s time to get her out.
“She’s either going to take a bad shot or she’s going to give up a good shot,” Sessions says.
Even within her dominant performance against Maryland, Fulwiley made some critical mistakes, earning a chewing-out from Staley.
“She was dying on screens a little bit,” Staley said, “and then, you know, the guards were posting her up, and she was playing behind and allowing just direct entry passes into her player. And we just can’t afford to do that.”
In the game’s final minute, Staley instructed her players to foul. Fulwiley forgot. Then she saw Staley waving her hand from the bench to remind her, and she misunderstood what the coach was saying. But to be fair to Fulwiley: “I’ve never been in the game in that situation.”
If she keeps working, Fulwiley will always be in the game in that situation. Her talent is too great. Her drive is too strong. College players are now product-endorsing celebrities—Fulwiley has a deal with Under Armour’s Curry brand—but they are still college players. Fulwiley is only 19. She has a long way to go, but plenty of time to get there.
“Ever since I’ve been a kid, I just wanted to be a star,” she says. “And I know I will one day.”
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Predictably Unpredictable, MiLaysia Fulwiley Is South Carolina’s Next Star in the Making.
