TAMPA, Fla – MiLaysia Fulwiley was the best player on the floor in South Carolina’s Sweet 16 win over Maryland. Her ballhandling, speed and creativity at the rim made things impossible for Maryland Terrapins coach Brenda Frese to find a way to slow down.
But there was a point in the second half when South Carolina coach Dawn Staley had to pull her standout sophomore out of the game and talk to her. Staley didn’t like what she was seeing defensively from Fulwiley.
South Carolina was in a tight game, trailing at two different moments in the fourth quarter. Staley wanted to get her point across and didn’t have time to mince words.
“She’s grown to the fact where it gets hot, it gets hot,” Staley said. “Everything is not spoken in a soft tone. Kitchen gets hot when you’re trying to survive in the NCAA Tournament.”
Fulwiley’s talent has never been a question, she’s the best pure scorer on South Carolina’s roster. Her weakness, at times, was maintaining consistency and recovering from coaches’ criticism, but against Maryland she showed growth.
Fulwiley took what Staley said to heart, made the correction and went back in to seal the game for the Gamecocks. She scored a game-high 23 points, 11 of them in the fourth quarter.
As a freshman last season, she wouldn’t have been able to bounce back from that. There would’ve been times, even early this season, when that coaching would’ve derailed her whole game. In this moment, though, she showed the growth Staley has wanted to see. “She took it and found a way to really respond. I’m most proud of that,” Staley said.
That’s the Fulwiley experience, though.
(2) UConn vs. (1) South Carolina
The 2025 Women’s National Championship is set 🏆 pic.twitter.com/R9yXsnFNRr
— The Athletic (@TheAthletic) April 5, 2025
At any point, Fulwiley’s capable of taking a game over with her speed, ballhandling and ability to take defenders off the dribble to make a play, either for herself or a teammate. But there are also the turnovers and missed defensive assignments that can put her back on the bench.
The growth for Fulwiley comes in how she’s been handling both of those situations during the NCAA Tournament, and it’s her own realizations that are paying off right now as South Carolina enters Sunday’s national championship against UConn. The Gamecocks have a bevy of talented players — so many, in fact, that Fulwiley has come off the bench in all 38 games. Yet as the SEC Sixth Woman of the Year, Fulwiley has been as pivotal as any player in their well-rounded cast.
To be a guard for Staley, an All-American point guard at Virginia in the 1990s, doesn’t mean you have to play exactly like Staley. But she expects her point guards to compete like she did. She wants them to be excellent on both sides of the ball and not take things to heart. Fulwiley has done that this tournament, serving as the Gamecocks’ X factor.
“It’s a mindset of being able to control your thoughts during the game,” Fulwiley said. “I’ve been training my mind to be stronger than my thoughts and my feelings.”
Everybody has an eye-popping moment when watching Fulwiley play. For teammate Sania Feagin, it came when she played against Fulwiley in grassroots youth basketball. “It was always an, ‘Oh, wow’ play,” Feagin said.
For many, though, their first introduction to Fulwiley was Nov. 6, 2023, in Paris against Notre Dame. The then-freshman had a fastbreak behind-the-back layup that went viral.
But point guard Te-Hina Paopao thought of a different play. It was an assist that Fulwiley fed to her.
In her regular-season debut, Fulwiley stood on the wing before taking Notre Dame guard Hannah Hidalgo off the dribble into the middle of the paint. Out of the corner of her eye, Fulwiley saw Paopao, who fell moments before, open underneath the basket. Fulwiley then sent a no-look pass to her, fitting it between three Notre Dame players. Paopao caught the pass and got an easy basket.
Fulwiley is a hard player to put into a box, because she’s pure flash and juice on the court. She can snake into the smallest lanes of the paint. Once she gets there, nobody knows what’s coming. She could make a flashy layup or floater, but could also drop off a pass that comes out of nowhere. It’s why Paopao was so glad she caught the pass in Paris.
“She has really cool highlights, but unfortunately, some of us don’t make the layup or catch, so it doesn’t make it on the reel,” she said.
Fulwiley’s creativity reminds Staley of herself as a young guard, but so do the turnovers. In two years, Fulwiley has 155 assists and 135 turnovers.
Staley was the same. The Hall of Fame coach had the creative plays in her bag, but early on, she had to find the balance between flashy plays and knowing when the right time to break them out.
“It took probably 300 turnovers in my freshman year,” she said. “I don’t know how many I had, but I had a lot of them. It took that much for me to realize, that’s a really good pass, that’s a turnover.”
Staley’s resume as a player is well-documented. She was a WNBA All-Star, two-time Naismith Player of the Year and the 1991 NCAA Tournament Most Outstanding Player.
That excellence on the court has transferred well as a coach. She’s won three national championships and is coaching in her third title game in four years in Tampa. Players have come and gone in Staley’s programs, but her high expectations never change, especially with her guards.
Raven Johnson, who is searching for her third title in four years on Sunday, said being a guard for South Carolina can be hard because of Staley’s expectations, but those have made her better.
“I get screamed at for other people’s mistakes or for the little things, honestly,” she said. “I just have to take it on the chin.”
Early in Fulwiley’s career, she struggled with responding to coaching. She came to a realization one day, though: “It’s either I do it or I don’t,” she said.
“I felt like I wanted to do it. It’s been working for me lately,” Fulwiley said. “The standard that Dawn has got here is great, and I think every player should want to play under this standard. It just brings out the best in each and every one of us, and I think it definitely brings out the best in me.”
South Carolina has three losses this season; one of them was a 77-62 loss to UCLA in November. Fulwiley played just two minutes in that game. She missed two shots, had a turnover, missed a defensive assignment and got benched by Staley.
She was visibly frustrated on the bench as South Carolina’s 43-game winning streak came to an end at the hands of the Bruins. That moment got national coverage as social media began saying that Fulwiley needed to transfer, as she was being overlooked for other players.
Behind the scenes, though, Fulwiley told assistant coach Khadijah Sessions that she would never let that happen again. “And she never has,” Sessions said.
Sessions, who formerly played for Staley, has played a major hand helping develop Fulwiley’s mentality. In part, because she knows firsthand what Fulwiley is going through.
“It’s a tug and pull thing for four years,” Sessions said. “Once you get to your senior year, you see the (training) she’s been doing for four years, and since she’s been here. It’s a four-year groom. She stays on top of these players, and it makes them better people.”
Fulwiley is just two years into her journey with Staley, but is already seeing changes. She became more intentional about her mentality since the UCLA game. As much film as she watches and work she puts in on the court, she understands that her attitude also needed work. Her emotions sometimes got the best of her. Now, she said she knows that she has to stay calm because the team needs her.
“It’s about sacrificing how I feel for wins,” she said.
MiLaysia Fulwiley’s bag is DEEP 🎒
Tough 🔥 pic.twitter.com/WZ9skiPedR
— ESPN (@espn) April 4, 2025
There have been frequent conversations between Staley and Fulwiley, and even Sessions and Fulwiley. South Carolina needed Fulwiley at her best this season, but Sessions knew she couldn’t rush it.
“It’s a process over time,” she said. “If she feels it again you try to get it fixed right there and then you have conversations after the game. It all comes from a place of love because she just wants to win.”
This postseason, even when things have gone poorly, Fulwiley has shown growth.
In the Elite Eight win against Duke, Fulwiley had just five points and four turnovers, three of which were travels. Instead of losing herself, she went to the bench, sat next to Sessions and went over what she was missing on the floor.
“She wants to know the good adjustments and the bad adjustments,” Sessions said. “Sometimes she’s going to go out there and make (mental) mistakes.… She comes over and I’m letting her hear it so we can fix them right away so they don’t compile from quarter to quarter.”
That helps Fulwiley now, as South Carolina is chasing back-to-back national championships, but also for the future. “The only time she will be shut down is herself,” Paopao said.
Sessions went a step further in her praise of Fulwiley.
“She, honestly, might be the best person in the country when she can lock in on both sides of the ball,” Sessions said.
That’s the next step for Fulwiley. She’s shown how special she can be in flashes this season. She could play an essential part in the title game. But South Carolina will need her even more next season. The Gamecocks are losing both starting guards, Johnson and Paopao. That means more minutes and responsibility for Fulwiley, so everything she’s learning right now will be amplified.
Watching her push through adversity against Maryland was a big step.
“She understands now, in that moment, that it’s bigger than her and her team needs her,” Sessions said. “It showed everybody on our staff and our team that she can do what she is capable of doing and take hard coaching.”
(Photo: Carmen Mandato / Getty Images)