A little over 24 hours before playing in her first career NCAA Tournament game, Joyce Edwards sat in her locker before practice. It was just after noon the day before South Carolina’s game against Tennessee Tech, and the first open locker room media session of the weekend.
Like most players, she was on her phone in between interviews. Some undoubtedly texting friends or family members, others scrolled through social media.
Edwards? Watching the first half of the Louisville vs. Creighton game in the men’s tournament.
“She is the absolute biggest basketball junkie,” fellow forward Sania Feagin said. “Every time I look over she’s either watching basketball or scrolling on Instagram looking at basketball.”
Watching everything
The talent is glaring. She has the size and force of a dominant post player combined with the ball-handling and shiftiness of a guard. Even on a team with ten McDonald’s All Americans, her skillet is one of one. Dawn Staley said she had elements of both A’ja Wilson and Aliyah Boston to her game before she ever even stepped on the floor.
You don’t lead a Final Four team in scoring as a true freshman by accident.
“Joyce is going to be the best player in college basketball one day,” Staley said back in January. “I say that only because of her work ethic and her intellect and her want. She’s very Aliyah-like in terms of what she pours into her game.”
Such a relentless desire to improve is not exclusive to Edwards. Basketball — and sports in general — has plenty of tales of players up in the gym early, staying late or grinding on film.
But the wholesale, persistent obsession she has with basketball is what makes this unique.
Edwards doesn’t just watch her own film to see how she can improve, or the tape on future opponents. She watches everything, everywhere, all the time.
“A lot,” Edwards said when asked how much basketball she watches. “I feel like I watch a lot of men’s basketball, a lot of women’s basketball especially. I feel like I watch college basketball and WNBA a lot.”
When Houston men’s basketball coach Kelvin Sampson called a unique baseline inbounds play to help his team win at the buzzer, she saw it and brought it up the next day. While her teammates basked in the glow of securing another Final Four bid on Sunday, she had thoughts on the first half of the UCLA vs. LSU Elite Eight game.
A first half she watched on her phone from the victorious locker room, of course.
“It’s been a good game actually,” she said. “It’s been closer than I thought.”
Any basketball, anywhere, any time. All she wants to do is pick up one move, one skill, one technique from someone and she doesn’t care where it comes from. She is just as likely to learn something that could help her in a future game from the WNBA Finals as she is from a high school tape. Her processing about what she sees and who she wants to emulate is meticulous.
Women’s college basketball, excluding her own teammates? JuJu Watkins, Paige Bueckers and Hannah Hidalgo jumped to mind. Men’s tournament? Auburn guard Tahaad Pettiford, although she did admit she “watches Auburn a lot” in general just because of how well the Tigers play? Professional ranks? It always comes back to Wilson and Naphessa Collier as two forwards she wants to model her game after.
“It’s really important,” Edwards said. “You just learn from everything they do, boys and girls. You see something in a game and you think you can do it, and you try it out.”
Learning through struggles
Edwards is struggling right now, and she knows it.
Through four games, the phenom’s NCAA Tournament has not gone to plan, at least individually. The last three in particular have been brutal, the lowest scoring trio of games in her college career so far with just 15 total points. It started with the second-round game against Indiana, when the Hoosiers fired a double team her way every single time she made a catch on the block.
“There are teams that are going to come up with game plans that will limit people’s production,” Staley said after the second-round game. “So Joyce just has to take the next step in her journey to adjusting.”
So if you are Edwards, and you have hit a snag while playing in the most important games of your career to date, where do you turn? What is the move to make sure she finds herself again before South Carolina takes the floor against Texas in the Final Four?
Ask others. Talk about their experiences. And always, always learn.
“I was just talking to Joyce,” Raven Johnson said after the Sweet 16. “She was talking to me about how she was getting doubled. I was telling her about the post player that came before her that got double-teamed like Aliyah, A’ja, Kamilla [Cardoso], you’re in that type of company getting double-teamed. She was like, ‘I don’t know what to do.’ And I was like, ‘That’s why you have people like that, go reach out to them.’”
This is the game within the game for Edwards, the opportunity to grow her mind along with her physical abilities. It stands to reason the Honors College student — South Carolina created an Environmental Engineering major to help land her during the recruiting process — would take the same approach to basketball.
It’s this desire to grow, the thirst for knowledge and the understanding that basketball is an evolving creature which always has something new to pick up on, that maintains her hunger.
“It’s nice to see because I feel like people kind of grow out of an obsession with basketball once you get to college,” Chloe Kitts. “It’s nice to see that she really, really loves the game.”
Nobody is saying the struggles are good, or even that South Carolina can win a National Championship without her snapping the slump.
But the challenge? That’s the motivation
