The Many Travels of Ta'Niya Latson

The NCAA's leading scorer made the move to South Carolina in the 2025 offseason, aiming to continue to build a legacy that's touched every corner of the country.

The constant in Ta’Niya Latson’s life has been a basketball court. It needed to be. At 22 years old, the backdrop of her life has changed enough for a lifetime. From the endless grasslands of the Great Plains to Hawaiian islands speckled with palm trees, to the rolling hills of Georgia and the white sand beaches of Florida, all she’s ever needed was hardwood or blacktop beneath her feet. With a ball in her hand and her eyes transfixed on an elevated rim, the worries of the world melt away.

Her journey has wound like a river, collecting experiences at every stop. It’s left her steady, immovable and as sure of herself as a rock on the river’s edge. It’s gifted her with wisdom, like a tree that has stood the test of time and watched the world change and evolve around it. And now, as she enters a new chapter of life in South Carolina, Ta’Niya Latson can see the future and the promise of what can be.

On the Pulse of Morning, in the city of Columbia.

I am that Tree planted by the River,

Which will not be moved.

I, the Rock, I the River, I the Tree

I am yours—your passages have been paid.

Lift up your faces, you have a piercing need

For this bright morning dawning for you.

Ta’Niya Latson was born in Miami, Florida. Her father was in the military and thus moving was baked into the calculus of the family. By the time she entered elementary school, a young Ta’Niya was already on her third state. They went from Florida to Texas and then landed in Missouri, where the family would stay awhile.

“I was practically raised there,” she says.

While making friends would prove to be difficult at times, she had plenty of siblings to lean on. Her ethos growing up was to be somewhere for a good time, not a long time. Even as a young adolescent, Ta’Niya knew that her stays were temporary and that a move was always somewhere on the horizon.

“Even now,” she admits, “my circle is so small because I’m so used to packing up my bags and leaving. So I’ve always had my siblings. They were my best friends.”

It was who she first picked up a basketball with. Sometimes, they’d play in the backyard. Other times, their dad would join in. But it wasn’t until fourth grade that she wanted to try and play competitively.

She went to her mom first, to try and join a church league that she had found out about while still at school. It was co-ed and a young Ta’Niya would be playing against boys and girls her age. Her mother gave her blessing. Mr. and Mrs. Latson put their daughter in the league and she realized something that remains true even now: she was pretty darn good at basketball.

Her younger sister was on a cheerleading team that would participate in the games while Ta’Niya would dribble, pass and score on the floor. Good as she was, it wasn’t an instant love affair.

“I didn’t like to be criticized, I didn’t like to be critiqued,” she says with a laugh. “I had a little bit of an attitude problem. I thought I knew it all at an early age and I had to quickly realize that I didn’t.”

It was a headstrong nature that she inherited from her mom and still holds with her today. Her toughness came from her father, whose army experiences instilled a sense of routine, resilience and focus.

The church league eventually brought her to AAU basketball in Missouri, where she joined her first travel team. For a brief moment, things felt stable. But Ta’Niya knew that a move was on the horizon. The Latsons relocated again after she finished elementary school. If Florida was different from Texas and Texas was different from Missouri, then Hawaii might as well have been another world entirely.

“It was either Hawaii or Germany,” she recalls, “and my mom didn’t want to go out of the country.”

How different life might have been if her mother was interested in a life in Europe.

The Latsons arrived in Hawaii and Ta’Niya was enrolled at Punahou, a private school in Honolulu. Since 2009-2010, the school has earned 20 championships and was once dubbed by Sports Illustrated as the best prep athletics program in the United States. Some of their most famous alums include golf prodigy Michelle Wie, NFL linebacker Manti Te’o and President Barack Obama.

In spite of the state’s lack of reputation as a basketball hotbed, a middle-school aged Ta’Niya was surprised to find out how much she had to learn. Her father would take her to play pickup ball on the army base and, on the blacktops of O’ahu, she learned about the physicality of the sport.

“Playing against [Hawaiians and Polynesians], it was a real physical game,” Ta'Niya remembers. “But they could shoot the ball. I had a great time playing in Hawaii.”

She had such a great time that soon videos of her dominating AAU tournaments on the island made their way stateside. Ta’Niya adopted the number 00 at the behest of a coach who likened her to James Bond; Agent 007. Louisville came calling first, then Georgia after that. Eventually, a clip of Latson dominating her opponents made its’ way to Florida State assistant coach Brooke Wyckoff. The Seminoles gave chase while the Latson family was about to be on the move again.

History, despite its wrenching pain

Cannot be unlived, but if faced

With courage, need not be lived again.

Lift up your eyes upon

This day breaking for you.

Give birth again

To the dream.

Despite her gifts and prodigious ability to score the basketball, Ta’Niya was still figuring herself out on and off the floor. It wasn’t anything out of the ordinary for a young girl about to enter high school. But, as always, she could sense a change coming and, sure enough, the Latson’s were headed to Atlanta just as Ta’Niya finished eighth grade.

This time, however, it came as a result of her basketball prowess rather than her father’s military obligations. Her star was rapidly ascending and she found herself coveted by multiple top college programs all over the country.

To say arriving in Atlanta was a culture shock for Ta’Niya would be an understatement.

While she was born and spent her earliest years in culturally diverse communities filled with people that looked like her, the stops in Missouri and Hawaii exposed her to a world entirely different than her own.

“Part of me was raised around white people, then [Hawaiians] and then back to black people,” she says, “but I feel like everything happened for a reason.”

Missouri taught her about the game. Hawaii taught her about physicality. Atlanta was about to teach her how to hoop.

She enrolled at Westlake High School in South Fulton, Georgia and linked up with a young guard named Raven Johnson. The two, as Ta’Niya remembers, initially met at Blue Star Basketball, a camp that showcases some of the top up-and-coming women’s players. Throughout the course of conversation, the two discussed the possibility of playing with one another and became close friends in the process. As luck would have it, Johnson was already enrolled at Westlake.

“She’s still one of my best friends,” Ta’Niya mentions.

Through Westlake, she was exposed to some of the best high school competition the country had to offer. She joined an AAU team — FBC in Georgia — and was regularly tested against some of the top players in the nation. It was a bit humbling to no longer be dominating opponents without breaking a sweat the way she was in Hawaii, but it also drove her to be better each and every day.

“I’m playing against other girls that are elite too and I’m playing around that competition,” Latson explains. “So it really did shape my outlook on the game.”

While in Georgia, she also was caught the eye of an Atlanta based trainer named Bernard Pitts, who had become well-known in the area for working with the top women’s basketball prospects from Flau’jae Johnson to Chazadi ‘Chit-Chat’ Wright.

“I’m watching her be able to destroy people with the talent she has and I’m starting to notice ‘this kid doesn’t get the love she kind of deserves,’” Pitts says of Ta’Niya. “We just kind of linked up and [I said] ‘I want to and I will be a part of your journey, be a part of the development.”

From there, the sky was the limit. Florida State came to Latson with a scholarship offer after seeing her play future Seminole teammate Brianne Turnage one-on-one. She was always holding out that UConn, the program that she loved when she was young, would reach out to her but they never did.

“I never got recruited by them,” she says of the Huskies. “I felt like I’ve always been underrated. I was the number one shooting guard in my class but people don’t know that.”

While Lauren Betts, Kiki Rice and Janiah Barker took up much of the recruiting spotlight in 2022, Latson was right there too. She was ranked 14th in the nation, the top shooting guard and given a five star rating with a 97/100 prospect grade.

Some evaluations called her an ‘ultra athletic combo-guard [who] defends in pressure, deflects and coverts plays from turnovers. Later analysis would describe her as an ‘aggressive defender, disrupter [who] finishes plays from turnovers; [an] emerging perimeter game threat’.

“She’s like a sponge, you know?”, Pitts says. “It’s so fun training her. She picks up everything.”

Everything seemed like it was finally stable in a way it wasn’t before. There wasn’t an expectation that the army was going to whisk her family away again, nor was there a belief that there was some other piece of adversity lurking around the corner. But life has a funny way of upending comfort, particularly when one may finally be letting a guard down. In Ta’Niya’s case, it was when she heard the news that her uncle had cancer.

“I honestly didn’t want to move,” she recalls, “[My mom] wanted to be around her family. It was something she wasn’t able to do being with my dad and moving around so much. And I kind of felt I owed her that because she moved to Atlanta for me.”

So, at long last, she returned to Florida where she was born and played her final season at American Heritage School just north of Miami-Dade county. Atlanta was a cultural mecca of women’s basketball, where the level of competition was high and the infrastructure was in place to develop talent. Florida, as Ta’Niya puts it, was “kids just playing for fun”.

But she bought into her coach’s defensive philosophy and immediately was the best player on her team.

“I think I averaged like 27 that year,” she says.

She led American Heritage to a Florida Class 5A state championship and swept every state Player of the Year honor. By now she had offers from powerhouses like Baylor, NC State and Virginia Tech. But the bond she had built with Brooke Wyckoff, and their early identification and interest of her talent, was solidified. Ta’Niya Latson was going to make a name for herself and put Florida State on the map the minute she walked on campus in Tallahassee.

Each new hour holds new chances

For a new beginning.

Do not be wedded forever

To fear, yoked eternally

To brutishness.

The horizon leans forward,

Offering you space to place new steps of change.

Here, on the pulse of this fine day

You may have the courage

To look up and out and upon me, the

Rock, the River, the Tree, your country.

After three years in a Seminole uniform, Ta’Niya had done just about everything she could. She was the WBCA National Freshman of the Year in 2022-2023, breaking the single-season freshman scoring record and leading all freshman nationally with 21.3 points per game. Her numbers stagnated a bit in her sophomore season, but she still managed to become only the second player in program history to score more than 700 points in a season.

This past year — with an even bigger chip on her shoulder and feeling like she was being overlooked by a media apparatus more content to spotlight players at more established programs — she shined even brighter. By the end of the season, Latson was the nation’s leading scorer with 25.2 points per game. She had a buzzer beater game winner on the road against No. 13 North Carolina and dropped 23 points. Then, in a pivotal late season matchup against No. 3 Notre Dame, Latson scored 10 of FSU’s last 12 points in the final 4:55 in regulation to power the Seminoles to a signature ACC victory.

But Florida State was still a tier below some of the top teams in the country from a depth and talent perspective. They blew out 11th seeded George Mason in the opening round of the NCAA Tournament and then faced off against 2023 national champ LSU. Ta’Niya got to face off against another of Pitts’ trainees, one she was quite familiar matching up against: Flau’jae Johnson.

FSU entered the half trailing by one point before the Tigers took advantage of ice-cold Seminole shooting in the third quarter. The lopsided 31-6 frame doomed Florida State and Latson to an earlier-than-desired exit in the NCAA Tournament this year.

By the end of the year it may have been easy to continue the same patterns. To embrace the role of underdog, maintain the chip on the shoulder and return to Florida State. But that isn’t who Ta’Niya Latson is.

“I’m always thinking of my next steps, and how I can improve as a player,” she said during the season before she transferring. “I think that comes from moving around a lot, just being able to adapt. I’m always thinking ten steps ahead, what I want to do with my life.”

Through all those stops and journeys, the adversity and oversights, Latson is still inherently optimistic. A believer in the idea that the next move might not alleviate the pain of the past but provide a window into a brighter future.

So she made a fateful choice after the Tournament ended. She entered her name into the transfer portal and chose to go to South Carolina.

Here, on the pulse of this new day

You may have the grace to look up and out

And into your sister’s eyes, and into

Your brother’s face, your country

And say simply

Very simply

With hope—

Good morning.

In 1993, Maya Angelou stood in front of the United States capitol and began to speak. ‘On the Pulse of Morning’ was just the second poem ever recited at a presidential inauguration and the first time that an African-American and woman had ever been given such an honor. The piece, which reads as more of a manifesto, is Angelou’s biographical take on the history of the United States, told through the three constants in its’ history: a rock, a river and a tree.

Angelou aimed to present America as she knew it, with all its’ glory and shortcomings on display. Yet in spite of its’ nature, there was a promise that it was capable of greatness. The rock, the river and the tree speak to the reader, as does Angelou herself, describing the many iterations of the world they have watched come and go and the possibility of growth as the horizon welcomes a new morning sun.

Through all her travels, as she’s seen and experienced nearly every version of America and of basketball, Ta’Niya Latson sees the promise of possibility in her newest home in Columbia. She’s reunited with her former Westlake teammate and best friend Raven Johnson. The chance to compete for a national championship and prepare for the WNBA is another allure. But the excitement lies in discovering a new place and it teaching her something new about herself.

“A lot of the other places I’ve lived,” she says, “I didn’t really get to build relationship because I knew I was moving and I was really close-minded. I felt like Atlanta opened my mindset a lot and it’s helped me going into college.”

Nowadays, Ta’Niya is a lot more openly confident about herself and her journey. She’ll proudly and happily discuss the newest LEGO set she’s built or the comic books she reads in her downtime. When asked about her on-court achievement and the attention (or lack thereof) around it, she’s comfortable discussing it without any animus.

“I knew it was kind of going to happen on a collegiate level,” she says. “I just had to stay down and put the work in and show that my numbers can’t be denied. So I feel like I was a little bit on track of where I wanted to go in life.”

Pitts, who still works with Ta’Niya to this day, sees the same. The expectation to win a title at South Carolina has already been set by some prognosticators while the WNBA is likely to come calling at the end of this season. To Pitts, who has watched Latson develop, and seen the ups and downs of her career since the tenth grade, everything is unfolding exactly as it should.

“It's just exciting watching somebody get what they finally kind of deserve,” he says. “To watch the grind, to be underrated, even through college like that, and just keep your head down and just keep working.”

“Even when it got hard, even those long conversations at night, the next day, you’re still working,” he continues. “You’re still going out competing. You’re still fighting to show people, ‘No, I am elite. I am the best’. I know how much hard work she actually put in it. I watched the overshadowing. I have seen her just go through so much just to see it come back to her and be a blessing. It's going to be just amazing to watch.”

As the long journey, winding like a river, now meanders into Columbia and into the waiting arms of Dawn Staley, Ta’Niya Latson carries her past stops with her. It’s given her the wisdom of a tree that’s watched the ages go by and the steadiness of the rock who calls forth all who will listen that a new day is on the horizon.

“I’m still achieving,” she finishes. “And I have a lot more to achieve.”

And even as the landscape shifts in front of her eyes, presenting the boundless possibility of a new destination, the hardwood remains firmly under Ta’Niya Latson’s feet.

As it always has and always will.