Richards leads Aggie basketball women
Taylor Richards is in a difficult position.
On one side, her coaches are telling her she is a natural leader and needs to take a lot of responsibility.
On the other, as a freshman on the women’s basketball team, she doesn’t want to make anybody on the team feel like she’s trying to take control.
“I don’t know where I sit,” she said. “I’ve got my coaches telling me, ‘you’re a leader. We brought you here for that. Your team wants to follow you.’
“But I don’t want to step on any toes because I am a freshman and it is my freshman year. I have to find the right spot to sit on the team and it’s hard. I still haven’t found it.”
However, so far this season, Richards has done a pretty good job leading the Aggies to their first three wins. She leads the team in scoring with 11 points per game, assists (4.6 apg), field-goal percentage (52.4) and three-point field-goal percentage (62.5).
The only thing Richards isn’t leading the team in is height. At 5 feet 4 inches, Richards is the shortest member of the team.
Besides trying to find out where she fits in on her new team, Richards has also had some difficulty balancing school and sports.
“It’s hard to balance, especially now that we’re on the road,” she said. “Everyone told me it’s tough, I don’t mean for academics to slip, but its hard [to balance schoolwork and basketball]. When one’s going good, the other is not.”
Despite the trouble she has had adjusting to a new environment, Richards said she loves Utah State and she loves her team.
When she first started thinking about college, Richards said she really wanted to go somewhere outside Utah. However, when the time for making her decision came, she chose Utah State.
“I knew I wanted to come here,” Richards said. “By the end of my [recruiting] trip, I felt like I was already on the team. Now … [the girls] are still exactly the same as they were on the trip.”
Richards, who has been playing basketball for almost as long as she can remember, had other reasons for coming to USU as well. Her brother, Tarell Richards, plays football for the Aggies and Richards thought it would be fun to be close to him and it would help the homesickness.
The fact that Utah State’s program is new was also something that appealed to Richards.
“I like the idea that it’s a new program,” she said. “We’re going to be writing the books for the women’s basketball history here. It’s cool to be in the path of progress and to be able to see it while I’m here.”
As much as Richards enjoys playing basketball, she doesn’t see herself doing it much after she graduates.
“There is a future, I’m sure, with basketball if I wanted to go beyond,” she said. “[But] getting a degree and a career with that degree is what I’m going to live off, not basketball, for my whole life.”
Richards, an elementary education major, has always wanted to be a teacher and work with little kids. She said when she was little and would “play school” she would always want to be the teacher, never the student.
She said that as a teacher she feels like she could be someone for the kids to come talk to – a possible outlet for kids who don’t get everything they need in their homes.
Richards is looking forward to the rest of the season with her new team. One of the Aggies’ main strengths is their team focus, she said. Something Richards likes.
“We’re very team-oriented,” Richards said. “We all know its only going to work if we work together. The team comes first for everyone.
“Everyone’s personality is awesome, so many different girls. There’s no one on this team that I don’t enjoy their company.”
-aedmunds@cc.usu.edu