Despite the devastating wildfires in Los Angeles, USC women's basketball star JuJu Watkins delivered a transcendent performance against Penn State, leading her team to a 95-73 victory. Watkins' artistry on the court brought joy to fans seeking a respite from the chaos.
USC guard JuJu Watkins, as her assistant coach Beth Burns marvels, is an artist. She holds the brush. And she does her best work when she has, when her dribble flows from one hand to the next without a thought flowing in her mind when she paints with joy. Joy, recently, has been hard to come by in the only home she’s ever known. Outside the Galen Center’s walls, on Sunday, her city was suffering. Outside Galen’s walls, ash drifted from Los Angeles sky, and Palisades and Eaton fires rampaged.
Her own family, even, was forced to temporarily evacuate – all is fine now – as parents Bobby and Sari Watkins told the Southern California News Group. But the people of Southern California still streamed into Galen Center Sunday night for USC’s game against Penn State Sunday, to see her. To see her program. It was nice, as fan Lia Eleopoulos said pregame, to disconnect. It was nice, as fan Jason Ito said, too, to get away from “the craziness of the world right now.”\She was transcendent from buzzer to buzzer, as USC beat Penn State 95-73 Sunday, putting together perhaps the best all-around performance of a USC career loaded with all-around performances. The numbers spoke for themselves: sophomore Watkins started the night 11-of-11 from the floor, showcasing the kind of mature efficiency in pace and shot selection that occasionally eluded her in her freshman year, finishing with 35 points on 13-of-15 shooting, 11 rebounds, three blocks and five steals. The true eye-catcher Sunday, though, was not the black ink itself but the way Watkins wrote it. She threaded a right-to-left dribble between her legs, no sense of stress in her shoulders, as she pulled up for a buzzer-beating first-quarter three to put USC up 27-18 after a frame. She hit a second-quarter hesitation with mouth agape, crossing back and ducking through a thicket of Penn State arms for a pro-move layup. She nabbed a steal to end the first half and took off with time waning, finishing through contact for a righty layup with seconds before the break, Watkins beaming at a jumbotron camera as Galen erupted and fellow star Kiki Iriafen lifted her up in a bear-hug. She was joy, personified, on a night where those who’d come out Sunday needed some “semblance of normalcy,” as former program legend Cheryl Miller said pregame. \Hours before USC-Penn State tipped off, as Miller recounted to the Southern California News Group, USC head coach Lindsay Gottlieb entered the Founders Club and kicked off a speech to program family and friends to thank them for their attendance. Sunday night’s contest easily could’ve been rescheduled, as a slew of sporting events around Southern California were rescheduled or axed in the wake of the week’s devastating fires. Former program legend Cherie Nelson, who once held USC’s single-game scoring record before Watkins broke it last year at Stanford, saw her mother Irene’s home lost in Altadena to the Eaton Fire. But Penn State, still, made the trip to Los Angeles. And Nelson and Irene still made the trip to Galen Sunday, along with a host of USC women’s basketball alumni, coming together for a long-planned on-court halftime celebration of the program’s history. “When one falls, we all fall, and when one succeeds, we all succeed,” Miller described to the Southern California News Group, of Gottlieb’s messaging. “And we just want to make sure that we’re here for everyone that’s going through this devastating time.”\They all watched, together, as a USC women’s program continued to make its trailblazers proud Sunday
USC BASKETBALL WATKINS WILDFIRES JOY
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