Ja’Leah Hickmon had a dream of playing in the WNBA ever since she started playing basketball.
“As I got older, I realized that I had to start thinking about what was going to happen next,” Hickmon said. “When I started gaining offers and started looking into to everything that was coming my way, it was an eye opener, but I am just thankful.”
While it’s uncertain if she will earn a professional opportunity at this time, she will be continuing her basketball career at Jackson State University.
In addition to having offers from nearly all of the JUCOs in the state, Hickmon had offers from Grambling State, Jacksonville State and Wichita Baptist. But the fact Jackson State felt like home to her.
“When I was younger, like in the ninth grade, I used to always go there to visit,” Hickmon said. The atmosphere really was like home to me. And it's crazy. Cause once a Tiger, always a Tiger was my motto. So being able to go to a university that is a Tiger school says, I love it.”
Hickmon said each year she took on more of a leadership role, especially after the senior classes that graduated after the 2019 state championship. But she transitioned into a new role this year.
“And this year, I was able to follow and lead and help everyone else to join the train because everybody else, it was kind of a struggle,” Hickmon said. “But once you put your faith in the people around you, you have start to believe that they can do the same thing that you're doing and play their part in the correct way.”
Hickmon said it was difficult not winning district after entering the district tournament with the No. 1 seed, but she didn’t let it get her or her teammates get them down. They rallied and made it to Jackson for the Final Four.
“Not coming in first in the district tournament was a heartbreaker,” Hickmon said. “It really had us down, but at the end of the day, district is just those people within your area. You can beat anybody outside of your district. That's going to depend on how far you get. So it really, wasn't a big deal for me. I knew that we couldn't put our head down and lay down.”
Hickmon said Coach Marcus Stribling helped her become a team leader and to help the team come together as a family.
“Coach Strib has taught me how to confide into myself, as well as my teammates,” Hickmon said. “We haven't argued. We talked to each other. It's like, we're talking to sisters, younger sister, big sister. It is not any hate or some people in a clique or anything. We're all together as one family. And because Coach Strib didn't cuss at us, he talked to us like we had sense and like, we were just human to human. So it really, it didn't put a dent into any relationships.”
Stribling said that he didn’t to have to do a lot of yelling because if he needed to send a message to the team, all he had to do was talk with Hickmon, and it would get done.
“If I thought we were having a bad practice, I'll walk to her and say, ‘OK, we need to pick it up.’ And she would try to bring that energy to the rest of the team. So I didn't have to yell a whole, whole lot. I'm not a yeller, so I didn't have to yell a lot.”
Hickmon’s scoring stats went down in her senior season, but Stribling said she would find other ways to help her team.
“Like I said, a lot of people tried to do come up with defenses to just hold her down. She still found a way to score for us,” Stribling said. “We saw box-and-one, double teams, just don't let her catch the ball, just all kinds of stuff, but she still, she, she did what true basketball players do and do other things to make her help her team win, like the blocks, the steals, the rebound. So she just didn't harp on just the points. She played the entire game, both ends of the floor.”
Hickmon plans to study education with a minor in math. While the WNBA dream might still be there, her focus now is to become a teacher.
“My lifetime plan after college is to be a teacher, but if I could coach any high school, middle school, college, maybe I would pursue that dream with the side of teaching tutoring, anything that God sees fit for me,” Hickmon said.
