South Carolina’s Aliyah Boston: ‘Every time we step on that floor, everybody wants to beat us’

A liyah Boston, the frontcourt phenomenon for the University of South Carolina’s women’s basketball team, comes across as a genuinely humble person in conversation. A polished speaker (she is a communications major who plans on going into broadcast journalism once her playing days are over), Boston redirects much of the praise surrounding her own success toward her family. “My mom told us, my sister and I, that we need to pick what we wanted to do,” Boston tells the Guardian. “She talked to us a lot, even when we were younger, about going to college and coming out without any student loans. So, she wanted us to get really good at something … so we picked basketball.”

What started as a method for securing university scholarships, however, has since morphed into the start of a potentially great basketball career. Boston’s future in professional basketball is promising – she is the consensus No 1 pick in next month’s WNBA draft – but, as she and her teammates begin their NCAA tournament title defense on Friday against Norfolk State, it’s worth taking the time to appreciate everything Boston has accomplished at the college level over the last four years. In March 2023, Boston is the Everything Everywhere All at Once of women’s college basketball – she has won just about every award there is.

Cataloguing all of her personal accolades would require its own article, so to give just a partial list: Boston is the reigning Naismith College Player of the Year as well as, simultaneously, the reigning Naismith Defensive Player of the Year. She is the first player, male or female, to win both national awards in the same season. Boston is also the reigning Most Outstanding Player of the NCAA’s women’s tournament and, while her