The weird, turnover-heavy first weeks of the college basketball season should be watched with a strong stomach and a roving eye. Navigate them the way you might an overstuffed museum wing: Sidle up to whatever looks interesting, scan the rest, and trust that you can always circle back later to see what you missed. Champions of the women’s game like to talk up that last point. On this side, where the best players stick around for three or four years, star power burns slow.
But if there’s an industry poorly served by this arrangement, it is blogging. We do not need to develop intricate parasocial relationships which players can leverage into brand deals; we need new people to post about! We need interesting new youths to wring through our take machine! We need, of course, freshmen, and already a couple have caught my eye. Think of this as an unofficial, non-exhaustive list of future stars. JuJu Watkins and Paige Bueckers, the season’s headliners, are plenty compelling themselves. All the more reason to place some novel obstacles in their way.
For Bueckers, trying to end UConn’s eight-year title drought in her final season as a Husky, the hotshot young freshmen aren’t all obstacles, though. Sarah Strong, the top-ranked player in the freshman class, joins the Last Dance cause. Aside from her sick name, which (spoiler!) may not even be the best alliterative name in this post, what struck me about Strong in her UConn debut was her resemblance to the versatile MVP candidates in this year's WNBA Finals—the type of player Geno Auriemma’s program has churned out for decades. Auriemma himself has compared Strong to Maya Moore, a lofty comparison for an 18-year-old to live up to. (Her equally ambitious high school coach once offered Nikola Jokic and Magic Johnson as comps. No pressure.) Strong’s mother, Allison Feaster, played in the WNBA for years and works for the Celtics front office now.
Strong is already hitting threes, dribble driving, kickstarting plays in transition, and finishing in the post. She's shown off startling offensive polish for a freshman. Her eight steals through two games suggest her IQ will translate to defense, too. In that sense, the smart 6-foot-2 forward feels like both a player from the positionless future and a UConn throwback. You can watch some highlights at the 6:40 mark below:
Maybe it’s old-fashioned, but there’s something endearing about programs with “identities,” and especially about freshmen who seem to have found the right place. Though she hasn’t played many minutes on a stacked South Carolina team, the mobile Joyce Edwards feels perfectly at home in that temple of frontcourt athleticism. She also really is at home, being a local kid and former Gamecocks mop girl. “I would mop the floor and literally take a picture of A'ja Wilson right after the game,” Edwards said when she committed.
If she is not also literally at home, Nashville native Jaloni Cambridge is spiritually at home at Ohio State, where every player operates at full steam all the time. This week, the team announced it was hiring two former Buckeyes to the coaching staff: Hall of Famer Katie Smith as an assistant coach, and recent grad Jacy Sheldon, who will oversee player development now that she's finished her rookie season with the Dallas Wings.
A veteran of Ohio State’s full-court press system, Sheldon makes a perfect mentor for Cambridge. “She’s special, man,” Sheldon said at her introductory press conference. “To be that fast and to stop on a dime—very few players can do that.” On one of the fastest, best-conditioned teams in the country, Cambridge’s speed set her apart when she debuted against Cleveland State. Cambridge put up 31 points on 12-of-14 shooting, impressive numbers for a 5-foot-7 guard, even without the six rebounds, six assists, five steals and two blocks. She came by a lot of those points on an assortment of driving floaters, each its own delight. With her unassuming defenders' backs to her in transition, Cambridge could twist through the lane and beat them to the other end. Sheldon hardly needed to say it: Any freshman given a green light this early in her career is must-watch.
Oh, interesting—I'm hearing that there’s another incredible freshman in the Big Ten, one who could justify the Michigan women’s basketball homerism I have thus far nobly resisted in my coverage? And her name is Syla Swords, which is way cooler than “Sarah Strong?” And she was the youngest-ever Canadian basketball player to compete in the Olympics this past summer, but her skill belies her age? And she opened the season with 27 points and 12 rebounds in a six-point loss to No. 1 ranked South Carolina, the defending national champs? And her quick release and motor make her the consummate wing? And her dad is Long Island Nets associate head coach Shawn Strong? And some bloggers have been counting down the days since she committed, eating whatever random scraps of Nike EYBL and Team Canada tape they could find for more than a year, and now she is finally, finally here? And she is going to save my entire life and fix my skin?
That’s interesting. I’ll have to check her out sometime.
