STARKVILLE — Standing alone on the left wing at Bud Walton Arena, Myah Taylor squared and fired.
With her right foot squeezed tight into her maroon sneaker and the skin on her ankle tinted black and blue due to an injury she suffered in practice the day before, Taylor was a gametime decision ahead of Mississippi State’s Thursday night loss at Arkansas. But after donning a medical boot in the hours prior to tipoff, she was given the go-ahead, splashing home a 3-pointer from the wing on MSU’s second possession of the contest.
Gutting through the swollen ankle, Taylor finished with a career-high 22 points, including a 5-of-12 mark from beyond the arc. She herself attempted more shots from 3-point range than an Arkansas team that ranked No. 8 nationally with just under 10 made 3-pointers per game heading into Thursday.
“She’s a warrior,” MSU head coach Nikki McCray-Penson said Friday. “She’s going to do whatever she needs to do to play in any game.”
In passing, Taylor is focused, tempered and even keeled. She’s the quiet kid in a class filled with boisterous abilities like those of reigning second team All-Southeastern Conference selections Rickea Jackson and Jessika Carter.
But for a team that’s struggled in finding its identity, Taylor is the steadying figure amid a year that has amounted to, at least by MSU standards, a complete tear-down.
“I feel like I’m really confident in my game now,” Taylor told The Dispatch on Wednesday. “Which I haven’t been the past couple years.”
Her father, John, long held she’d succeed on the hardwood from an early age. Biweekly, he sat alongside Jason Thompson, then the head girls basketball coach at H.W. Byers High School, at Kuttin’ Up Barbershop in Olive Branch, talking his ear off that Myah would play for him someday.
As the years wore on and Myah grew older, accolades followed. In and around the Memphis Area, everyone knew her capabilities. Double-teams and triple-teams were thrust at her nightly in MHSAA competition. All she did was adjust. There were nights she’d score as many as 40 or 50 points. Other evenings it was her eye-popping assist totals that jumped off the pages of local newspapers.
After averaging 13.7 points and 6.2 assists per game and a freshman, Taylor’s numbers jumped progressively. She peaked as a scorer during her junior season, notching 26.2 points per night — an eight point per game improvement from the year prior. She finished her high school career with a 3.31 assist-to-turnover ratio, thrice earning Gatorade Player of the Year in Mississippi for her efforts.
“See the thing is, she drew so much attention,” Thompson, who left Byers for Olive Branch and coached Taylor her senior year, said. “Because it didn’t matter where we played or who we played, everybody, when she walked in the building, knew Myah Taylor and then they knew about Olive Branch.”
Yet for as dominant an offensive force as Taylor was in her public school play, there were bits and pieces of the role she’s since carved at MSU that shone in her AAU endeavors.
Playing for Doug Bush and the Alabama Southern Starz, Taylor filled a more complementary role. Scorers like Auburn forward Unique Thompson and Missouri guard Haley Troup shouldered the load Taylor otherwise took on at Olive Branch. Instead, she grew as a facilitator while her quiet, but determined demeanor carried her to a level of discipline and execution that thrived under former coach Vic Schaefer’s regime upon arriving in Starkville.
“She was playing on an AAU team with elite level, high level players,” Bush said. “And so it enabled her to then showcase even more of her playmaking skills and her passing abilities and that sort of thing maybe versus what she did in high school, because you’ve got just more talent around you and it’s more like a college team.”
Since arriving at MSU, Taylor has been part of the seismic shifts in expectations that were mere pipe dreams in previous decades. Redshirting her first winter on campus, she was a member of the 2018 Final Four team, one that came an answered prayer away from a national championship against Notre Dame.
Working behind first Morgan William and later Jazzmun Holmes, Taylor carved out a niche as a pass-first point guard rarely tasked with taking a shot of her own. Within Schaefer’s system, it was exactly as he’d commanded. But in practice, it masked the offensive ability Taylor had shown at the high school level.
Hired in April to replace Schaefer, who departed for Texas, first-year head coach Nikki McCray-Penson has challenged Taylor to closer mimic the game she flashed as a prep standout. Amid a global pandemic and a roster of players unfamiliar with their new head coach, McCray-Penson’s and Taylor’s bond started with Zoom calls, progressing toward meetings and has since evolved into a nightly phone call between player and coach.
Sometimes they talk basketball. Other times, they discuss life. It’s this balance that’s seen Taylor pushed beyond preconceived ceilings of past seasons as she’s learned to be more vocal amongst her teammates when needed.
“Whether it’s in a low shot clock situation, or when the game’s on the line, she’s got to have a voice to where when she says, ‘Give me this ball,’ they know to get this ball to her,” McCray-Penson explained Wednesday. “So I think it started with her finding her voice.”
In McCray-Penson’s dribble-drive, up-tempo system, Taylor is tasked with taking and making more shots. Taylor has done that, and then some. Her points, assists, field goal percentage, free throw percentage, 3-point field goal percentage and 3-point attempts are all up. Taylor’s 21 makes from 3-point range are also nearly double as many as she made in her first two seasons combined.
The former Olive Branch star hasn’t completely abandoned her past roles, though. Her assist-to-turnover ratio currently sits at 2.9. Taylor is also on pace to surpass her rebounding total from a season ago in nearly 13 fewer games.
But personal accolades aside, Taylor remains keyed on the moment at hand. Final Fours and Elite Eights are things to reflect on later in life. At this second, she’s the leader of a team with a shaky NCAA tournament resume riding a four-game losing streak. In the 2020-21 squad, Taylor sees promise. It’s a matter of molding that promise into on-court productivity, the same way she reshaped her own game to fit with what’s asked of her.
“Me, personally, it’s great evolving as a player,” she said. “But we’re not winning right now, so that’s what I’m focusing on right now.”
Ben Portnoy reports on Mississippi State sports for The Dispatch. Follow him on Twitter at @bportnoy15.
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