Madison Booker always gets catfish when she goes home to Mississippi. The University of Texas superstar and reigning SEC Women’s Basketball Player of the Year doesn’t get it from any restaurant or roadside food stall. Instead, it’s made at home by her aunt, accompanied with a healthy dose of hot sauce.
“She has to do it,” Booker says with a smile. “My aunt has to make the catfish. Like, it's no restaurant, no place. It's like, I go to my house, I'm back home.”
The chance to head home for a brief period of time was a respite amid a busy summer of basketball. Booker went with Texas to take on the Canadian national team and represented Team USA at the FIBA Americup. It wasn’t her first time playing at the national level but her first senior team call up. Typically, the Americup is the first major international competition for Team USA’s top collegiate talent. Booker, who has lined up against a lot of elite players over the course of her last couple years, got a chance to play with some for a change.
“I would say one person was like, one person I enjoyed playing with was Hannah Stuelke,” adds Booker. “I think she's a great vibe off the court too. I think when she gets on the court she’s different. She's got a dog mentality, very, you know, fiery, just make the right plays, hustle plays, the extra plays. So it was every fun playing with her.”
It challenged her to be a different kind of player and flex a few different muscles. Especially after three losses last season that she’d like to forget: a slate of games against South Carolina in which the Gamecocks targeted Booker specifically. After the Longhorns Final Four exit, she took some time to think about what needed to improve.
“I really think I try to avoid them games, even, even watching film of those games,” Booker says. “ I think after those losses, we kind of just talked about it and just said, ‘we understand that they're focused on one person and basically, we all need to step it up.’”
“Whatever happened in that game, we needed to change. We needed to do something different, spacing details, focus on details more, focus on timing more. It's little things that wins the game. And I think that's why we kind of got stomped them two losses to South Carolina and I think it was more of a team thing, just, you know, we need to do better as a collective.”
Over the summer, instead of stewing in that feeling of loss, Booker got to work. With Team USA, she put a bigger focus on her effort on the defensive end. She knows that she can score but playing under head coach Vic Schaefer at Texas, you can always do more on the other side of the ball. Additionally, the talent pool for the Americup roster was so deep that Booker found herself able to approach the game a different. Not just as a number one option but someone that could focus on refining their own game without worrying about having to win every possession.
“Even my first year when [Texas teammate] Rori [Harmon] went down with her ACL injury, I had to go from the wing to a point guard position,” reflects Booker. “I think there was a kind of learning how to balance being a point forward and being a scorer for the team.”
“I think I'm still learning how to balance that,” she continues. “I think that's a very hard thing to balance because you don't know when you're passing too much. You don't know where you’re needed to give it up. Sometimes you do know when to give it up, but I think it's just part of me wanting to get my teammates involved too.”
In her downtime, Booker has found other ways to keep her mind sharp while also refilling her mental cup. She tried golfing briefly this past summer, heading out with the Longhorns golf team, but that tested her patience in more ways than one.
“I hated it,” she jokes, “You won’t see me doing that again.”
Instead, she spends her time putting together Lego sets. It’s an activity that’s become more and more popular with women’s basketball players, from Ta’Niya Latson to Angel Reese to Booker’s Texas teammate Rori Harmon. Her most recent purchase was a model of the Eiffel Tower, arriving in a box a little over two feet tall.
She’s put together everything from a small typewriter to one of the ‘super cubes’ from Super Mario World. It takes her away from her phone, keeps her hands moving and living in the present. In some ways, it even reminds her of playing basketball.
“It kind of correlates with a sport too,” Booker explains. “You have instructions. Your instructions are kind of equal to your coach. They kind of give you this playbook. Your playbook is all these different types of these bags that come. The bags that come with the numbers on it and stuff like that. And you just have to put it all together, basically, like playing, like a a game plan in together.”
It’s a solitary thing for her, something that is handled on her own.
“I couldn’t deal with anybody,” she says with a smile.
But on the floor, Booker knows that this year it will take a team effort to finally raise a trophy that has eluded Texas since their perfect 1986 season. While she is the conduit through which so much of the Longhorns offense runs, she is excited to see who among her supporting cast will step up this year.
If they all manage to put it together, she thinks that Texas may finally be able to get over the hump and compete for an NCAA championship at long last, once again.
“I think it'll be more of an aggressive mindset,” she says of what’s she’s expecting of herself this year. “I think sometimes, this past two years, I've been waiting. The game comes to me until it's my time. I think I'm trying to get active early. I think that's one thing I'm still working on but you know, like doing the right way too, not doing it in a more selfish way. But it doing the right way where I get my teammates involved. That's the Juggle. That's the Juggle being passive or like scorer mindset. But, yeah, I think that's one thing I want to be bringing to this season.”
If winning SEC Player of the Year was what it looked like before an aggressive mindset, then heaven help the NCAA world if Booker unlocks that next level this coming season.
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