The USC point guard, self-described introvert and Clairo fan has lifted a dormant program back to relevancy and become one of LA\u2019s brightest sports stars. And she\u2019s still only 19<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a Tuesday night outside of downtown Los Angeles and I\u2019m in a half-empty Galen Center on the University of Southern California campus. The whole place smells like movie-theater popcorn, sticky spilled soda, and, vaguely, sweat. The cheerleaders jumping up and down on the court, attempting to amp up the somewhat sleepy crowd, look like they could pass for middle schoolers. This is, in unmistakable and almost caricatured fashion, a college campus. But there\u2019s a certain player on the floor, with an oversized bulbous bun atop her head, who is sparkling a little differently than everyone around her. She moves so fluidly, gets to her spots on the floor with such ease. It\u2019s, frankly, just so very clear that she is operating in a different echelon than her peers. Even if you didn\u2019t tell me JuJu Watkins was a budding superstar, I\u2019d know it.<\/p>\n
This year in particular, JuJu (government name: Judea Skies) Watkins\u2019 stardom is markedly transitioning from bud to full bloom. You\u2019d be hard-pressed to find a stretch of road in Los Angeles without the USC sophomore\u2019s image on a Nike billboard, or a commercial block during a national NBA broadcast without her State Farm ad spot<\/a>. With Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese having moved onto the WNBA last year, she\u2019s arguably the biggest remaining name in college basketball, men\u2019s or women\u2019s, and her resum\u00e9 is already impressive: Gatorade National Player of the Year, McDonald\u2019s All-American Game MVP, Unanimous First-Team All American, WBCA Freshman of the Year, the list goes on and on.<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The USC point guard, self-described introvert and Clairo fan has lifted a dormant program back to relevancy and become one of LA\u2019s brightest sports stars. And she\u2019s still only 19 It\u2019s a Tuesday night outside of downtown Los Angeles and I\u2019m in a half-empty Galen Center on the University of Southern California campus. The whole … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33198","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33198","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33198"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33198\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33198"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33198"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33198"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}