(USC Athletics)
If I was asked what qualities I would want a superstar on my team to have, I wouldn’t have to think too long to come up with an answer. I’m no Head Coach but here’s what I would say:
They would need to have a humble confidence and be killers on the court.
18-year-old Juju Watkins from USC embodies these qualities about as well as anybody. You might have seen her break the internet this past Friday when she dropped 51 points against the fourth-best team in the country, Stanford. 51 points broke the USC single-game record.
She scored 76% of her team's points which is the most of any D1 player in the last 25 seasons. The lists of records she broke on Friday are all over the place, but this isn’t anything new for Juju, who has been tallying accomplishments for years now. In 2021 she helped Team USA win the gold medal at the FIBA Under-16 Americas Championship. She was the tournament MVP as well. The next year in the FIBA Under-17 World Cup she also led her team to the gold and won another tournament MVP award.
After this success, she became the first female athlete to sign with Rich Paul’s ‘Klutch Sports Group’, which is one of the biggest agencies in all of sports and especially in the NBA. Klutch Sports has athletes such as Lebron James, Trae Young, and Lonzo Ball, and in 2022 they added another superstar in Watkins.
On October 10th, 2022, she signed an NIL deal with Nike before even playing her first game at the collegiate level. She did this at the same time as Bronny James and Caitlyn Clark, two of the bigger names in College Basketball.
In terms of her 51-point game, the most impressive part of the night didn’t come on the court. It wasn’t the pull-up threes in transition or the one dribble jumpers that hit nothing but net. It was her post-game interview.
She had just set a school record as an 18-year old Freshman, and all she could do was talk about her teammates and how she couldn’t believe that what she did was record-worthy. She stayed humble in what was going to be one of the most seen basketball moments in her life, but at the same time was confident in herself, saying that there would be “More to come”.
At the end, the interviewer remarked, “Caitlyn Clark who?” and Watkins laughed and said “None of that, none of that. Much respect to her.” Not often can you learn more about someone after their record-breaking performance than during it, but Juju shined off the court and did exactly what you would want your leader to do. She has an extremely bright future ahead of her and we will be hearing of her a lot during her collegiate and WNBA career.
Who is Juju Watkins? She’s one of the brightest young stars in all of basketball, she has a humble confidence and a killer instinct that makes her great, and she is an exciting young story to follow both on and off the court.
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