Mikayla Blakes breaks SEC, NCAA freshman scoring records with 53 points for Vanderbilt vs Florida

Posted by author January 31, 2025 Basketball

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Mikayla Blakes broke the NCAA single-game freshman scoring record and the SEC single-game scoring record with her 53-point performance Thursday at Florida.

Her performance also broke the Vanderbilt women basketball’s single-game scoring record just six weeks after teammate Khamil Pierre previously broke the record when she scored 42 in a home win over Evansville on Dec. 14. Blakes scored her 43rd point with 4:22 to go in the fourth quarter after hitting two technical free throws.

Blakes went 16-for-24 from the field and 16-for-18 from the free-throw line. She also had three rebounds and two assists. Vanderbilt won the game, 99-86.

Blakes said after the game that she did not know she was approaching a record.

“It’s just like the world to me,” Blakes said. “I think for myself, I don’t get too high. Maybe you might get low a little bit. But I’m just going to try and stay level headed with everything, like, yeah, I’m happy I scored these points, but I mostly am mostly excited just that we won this game and that we’re continuing to make history here and continue to win SEC games. So I’m just happy about that performance, but also the team’s win as well.”

The previous NCAA Division I freshman record was 51 by Southern California’s Juju Watkins last year. The previous SEC record was also 51 by South Carolina’s Jocelyn Penn in 2003 and Tennessee’s Patricia Roberts in 1976.

Blakes, a 5-foot-8 guard, came into the game fourth in the SEC with 21 points per game. She was a 5-star recruit in the class of 2024.

Though Blakes had put up several strong performances earlier in the season, including setting the Vanderbilt freshman record with 36 points against Georgia earlier in January, she has leveled up in the past few weeks. She hit the game-winning shot against Tennessee, then scored 24 against Arkansas and 33 at Alabama last Sunday.

“Mikayla had one of the most incredible performances that I’ve ever seen as a coach,” Vanderbilt coach Shea Ralph said. “And I’ve coached a lot of really good players for a long time, and that’s not taking anything away from them. I think you see a player like her do what she did tonight. Sometimes she makes things that are really, really hard to do look really easy.”

Ralph, who previously was an assistant at UConn, compared Blakes’ mentality to All-Americans Maya Moore and Breanna Stewart.

“She is built similarly internally to Maya Moore,” Ralph said. ” … It was unbelievable, the things that (Moore) was doing. She would win games single handedly, like Mikayla did today. … She was our best student. You couldn’t play a game of Uno with her. You couldn’t, it wasn’t fun. It’s like Mikayla. It’s the same thing, because she’s just a competitor. She’s built different and then differently, but in a similar fashion Breanna Stewart, because of how effortless the game looks for her. And that reminds me of when I watch Mikayla, it looks effortless to me a lot of things that she does.

“But I played basketball for a long time, and I didn’t get close to doing some of the things that she does every day. So in terms of some of the greatest performances, I’m not sure I’ve seen one from a freshman with my own two eyes like I saw today, but she shares stacks up there with some of the other players that I’ve coached.”

Blakes is the only freshman in Division I with multiple 30-point games this season.

Aria Gerson covers Vanderbilt athletics for The Tennessean. Contact her at agerson@gannett.com or on X, formerly Twitter, @aria_gerson.