Ta’Niya Latson has done exactly what she wanted to do this year. When the Florida State guard set expectations for herself at the beginning of the season, the junior decided that she wanted to lead the nation in scoring, and she believed that she was ready for it. Latson averaged more than 20 points a game in each of her first two college seasons. She committed to averaging even more in her third.
“That was a goal of mine,” Latson says. “I knew I could be the best scorer in the country.”
And she has been. It can feel as if Latson has flown somewhat under the national radar in a year largely defined by stars playing elsewhere. But no one has been able to score like her as steadily as she has. With striking consistency, Latson led the nation in scoring nearly all year in Division I, finishing the regular season on top with 25.4 PPG. (She dropped 20 or more points in all but three games this year.) Yet what stands out the most to her coach and her teammates are not those point totals so much as what she has done alongside them.
Latson achieved her scoring goal this season. But she grew just about every other area of her game, too, becoming a more capable facilitator, a more aggressive defender and a more vocal leader on the floor. It’s that development that has made her the engine of No. 22 Florida State as tournament season rolls around.
“I am so, so proud of all those increases,” Florida State coach Brooke Wyckoff said of Latson. “Her voice is developing, and her knowledge of what it takes to play on this level is developing, and she's able to lead others in that way, too.”
Latson has been the best player on this roster as long as she has been on campus. Forged by a childhood experience of bouncing from team to team and state to state while moving around in an Army family, Latson cultivated a flexible, dynamic game with the ability to score on all three levels. She won national Freshman of the Year awards in 2023 and was made a team captain as a sophomore in ’24. But she used last summer to drill into what she wanted to change as a junior. She wanted to expand her game—to get more reps from beyond the arc, to grow stronger in order to drive more forcefully in the lane, to restore the defensive identity that she honed in high school but got away from in her first years of college. And she wanted to learn to speak up more.
“I always said I would lead by example,” Latson says. “But I felt like I needed to be more vocal and more confident.”
A shift was evident in her from the first team practices of the season. Florida State spent those early weeks overhauling its defense: Wyckoff’s teams had always pushed the pace on offense, but she wanted to start doing more to match that defensively, introducing some faster, more disruptive schemes. First on board was Latson.
“Just her focus in practice on the defensive end in our drills, before we even started playing games, it was noticeable,” Wyckoff said.
Her teammates also saw the change, and they heard it, too.
“She just stepped up, and she’s always talking on the sideline, encouraging us,” says Florida State senior forward Makayla Timpson. “And being vocal to our newcomers who didn’t quite know the system when they got in here, helping the PGs understand where to cut, spacing, how to attack effectively, she’s just been a great leader.”
The scoring came for her this year as it always has, if slightly more efficiently, and with more trips to the foul line. It was the focus that Latson had applied to the rest of her game that made the biggest difference from seasons past. While she had scored in double figures almost every game of her college career—the instances in which she had not could be counted on just one hand—but she had never recorded a double-double. She got her first this year in the opening weeks of the season, dropping 34 points and 10 assists on NC Central, and then picked up her second one soon after, with 30 points and 11 rebounds against Texas Tech. A few days later, she got her third, and she made it a triple-double: 24 points, 10 rebounds and 10 assists versus Gonzaga. The calendar had yet to hit December. She had proved more forcefully in that one month than in the past two seasons combined that she could be more than a scorer.
She has improved in every major statistic over last year. Latson has recorded more assists, fewer turnovers, more rebounds, more steals, more efficient shooting both in the paint and from three. Her season has been headlined, naturally, by her position as the scoring leader. But it’s the rest of her stat sheet that best reflects her work.
“I’m very proud that she’s the nation’s leading scorer, obviously, that’s an amazing thing,” Wyckoff said. “But it’s across those other statistical categories… I’ve seen her grow in every single area.”
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Ta’Niya Latson Is More Than Just the Nation’s Leading Scorer .
