College BasketballCollege BasketballThe USC star’s torn ACL isn’t just a devastating blow to her ascending career, but also to the top-seeded Trojans, this year’s NCAA tournament, and women’s basketball as a whole
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By Seerat SohiMarch 25, 1:07 pm UTC • 6 min
She’s Picasso with the transition Euro-step, a cardinal-and-gold blur in the open court. It’s her signature move, defense turned into offense with force and creativity, skill and fearlessness. Everything JuJu Watkins did before she crumpled to the floor Monday night was ordinary for her and extraordinary for any other player.
In the first quarter of USC’s second-round NCAA tournament game against Mississippi State, Watkins galloped up the floor with the ball after a missed shot by the Bulldogs. She tried to split through the gap between two defenders chasing her, cradling the ball and making her move toward the rim before her right knee gave out and she fell to the floor in agony. She lay there for minutes before disappearing into the tunnel with USC staffers, who held her up on each side like pallbearers or pillars.
A few hours later, ESPN’s Shams Charania confirmed what everyone feared: Watkins, likely to become the fifth sophomore ever to win the Naismith National Player of the Year award, had torn her ACL and would require season-ending surgery, delivering a devastating blow that will have ripple effects for the Trojans, the no. 1 seed, and the rest of the NCAA tournament.
Injuries can come for anybody at any time, but there’s something particularly jarring about Watkins, young and beaming and seemingly invincible, going down in such agony. She’s used to hitting the floor and shaking off neck tweaks and jammed fingers, and she’s never missed a game. In USC’s first-round win against UNC Greensboro, she rolled her ankle on a drive, hopped on one foot to the corner, and nailed a 3, in a manner reminiscent of LeBron James, the bionic counterpart she is often compared to.
She is not only the face of the Trojans but also the face of the tournament—the headliner in Nike and Gatorade campaigns featuring Paige Bueckers and Cooper Flagg, one of the players who could be the heir or challenger to Caitlin Clark. Last week, Jemele Hill wondered whether Watkins or Flagg is the bigger star. Google, for what it’s worth, gives Watkins the edge in every state but Maine, where Flagg is from. Somewhere along the way of Watkins’s ascent, we collectively did what we do to all people we rely heavily on: We assume they are unbreakable. The collective plans of the women’s basketball world were banking on the idea of her perpetual growth, and they have now been dashed by a tear in the 33 millimeters of ligament that connect the shin to the thigh.
Since she was a teenager going viral on YouTube, Watkins’s talent has always inspired bold projections. Even in the midst of an incredible season, we wondered in awe about how good she could be as a senior and as a WNBA player. After the bracket was released, our attention fast-forwarded to a potential Elite Eight rematch between Watkins and Bueckers and what it could mean for the growth of women’s basketball—last year’s clash attracted 6.7 million viewers, and this year’s regular-season rematch averaged 2.2 million viewers, making it the most viewed women’s college basketball game of the year. If Bueckers goes pro as expected, we’ll likely never get another college matchup between the two.
To be clear, the story of women’s college basketball this year hasn’t been the story of one player, like it was last season. This year, the headline was the collective celebrity of Watkins, Bueckers, Hannah Hidalgo, Flau’jae Johnson, Madison Booker, the South Carolina dynasty, and more. The sport has never been more competitive, as five or six teams could realistically win the title this year. It might be the ultimate compliment to women’s basketball that the tournament will go on without Watkins, although her game, energy, and swagger will be missed.
A self-proclaimed introvert, Watkins came out of her shell this season, adapting to the public demands of superstardom while learning to guard her joy by disconnecting from the game when things felt too burdensome. Last season, a difficult performance would leave her shooting late into the night to process her emotions, but now she’s a little more likely to throw on Severance before getting a good night’s sleep.
JuJu Watkins has learned, she tells @seeratsohi, to not take basketball so seriously. To just relax and remember her joy.Lately, when she steps away from ball for a bit, she’s watching Severance.
(Same.) pic.twitter.com/d4DCb67hWl
— Ryan Kartje (@Ryan_Kartje) February 27, 2025
Earlier this season, when I asked Gottlieb about JuJu finding balance, she quipped, “Don’t let her fool you. She is still in this gym a lot when I’m not here.” Now, JuJu will have to find a way to cope while spending extended time away from the game she loves.
This is the growth that the crowd at the Galen Center, who witnessed her development all season, was mourning. They watched JuJu endure the struggle of building something elite where nothing of relevance had existed for decades. They watched a sophomore blossom into a National Player of the Year candidate and a group of talented but disparate parts form into a team. Before the Trojans made the pilgrimage to Spokane for the regional, in hopes of winning their first title since 1984, they wanted to watch Watkins one last time at home, dancing and driving in this playground she had conjured from her own dreams.
After Watkins went down, the crowd—suspended in the space between prayer and grief—turned their anger toward the refs and then toward the opposing players, who were booed every time they touched the ball. The foul on Watkins that led to her injury wasn’t intentional or dirty. But the collective impulse wasn’t logical, either. It was primal, defensive. Because JuJu belongs to them, and they belong to her. She is the flower of Watts, 7 miles from the Galen Center, where she grew up shooting at the Ted Watkins Memorial Park, named after her great-grandfather. On her official visit to South Carolina, she squinted upward at the larger-than-life statue of A’ja Wilson, partially concealing the sun, and realized she wanted to set down her own roots in her own home and carve out her own legacy, so she committed to the Trojans instead.
“The energy of the crowd and how angry they were with the other team and how much they were for our team is so much about what JuJu has given to this arena, to this program, to this city,” Gottlieb said before the injury was confirmed as a torn ACL, adding that she’s “heartbroken if there’s a serious injury for JuJu, but at the same time, I hope she can at some point see just the significance that she has here goes so far beyond just her talent and abilities. That’s really what is generational about it: the way she’s galvanized everyone.”
Rather than cower after losing Watkins, USC quickly adapted. Clarice Akunwafo, like the manifestation of hope, sprang into the air and blocked an opponent’s jumper to prompt the crowd’s first cheer since Watkins went down. USC’s huddles, according to ESPN’s Holly Rowe, eventually turned back to pure X’s and O’s. Watkins’s absence put a pause on all prognostications, but there was a game to be played, here and now, and it was distilled into its original form: distraction. Freshmen Kennedy Smith and Kayleigh Heckel (affectionately nicknamed K9 because, you know, she’s got that dog in her) got their hands on loose balls. Rayah Marshall banked in a 3 at the first-half buzzer, and the arena exploded in jubilation. The kids who’d hoped to snap pics of JuJu had their phones in the air again. KiKi Iriafen, the extroverted and energetic yin to Watkins’s yang, lit up the arena, hitting the hardwood and splitting double- and triple-teams en route to a season-high 36 points, perhaps her finest performance as a Trojan. When Marshall later had a physical interaction with a Mississippi opponent, Iriafen separated the two, held on to Marshall’s hand, and started dancing with her. By the end of the USC’s 96-59 win, multiple “KiKi” chants were breaking out through the arena.
It was a momentary reprieve, made a little bittersweet by the reality that Iriafen and Watkins will never share the court again. Neither will Watkins and Marshall, who confronted the Mississippi State player who fouled Watkins after the game.
In the midst of all the dreams that have been pinned on her, Watkins is also just a person with a dream—to play basketball, to win titles at USC—that’s now been deferred. And all we can do, as ever, is wait for JuJu.
Seerat Sohi covers the NBA, WNBA, and women’s college basketball for The Ringer. Her former stomping grounds include Yahoo Sports, SB Nation, and basements all over Edmonton.
