How Hailey Van Lith found direction and peace at LSU. 'I'm getting back in the ring' (2024)

ALBANY, N.Y. – This has not been an easy year for Hailey Van Lith. She knows everyone knows that. Her scoring is down from last year at Louisville. Her minutes are down, too.

But she is not down.

“What I’m most proud of is, I feel like it’s been a fight for me all year, but I’ve been willing to get back in the battle every time,” Van Lith said during an introspective moment in LSU’s locker room. “In my head, I’ll have a couple of bad games and be like, I just can’t figure this out. But I won’t give up.’

“I’m getting back in the ring. I’m getting back in there to fight.”

It’s taken Van Lith a while to get to this point — and even longer to be ready to talk about it. But here she is on the cusp of the Final Four, a vital stage for a national championship contender. It sounds like it all worked out, even though it’s been far from a straight line from Point A to Point B.

Van Lith’s life changed drastically last April when she decided to enter the transfer portal and eventually choose LSU. People she thought cared about her — as a person, not just a basketball player — were very vocal and very negative about her decision.

“It really tore me down,” Van Lith said. “I was really starting to second-guess the decision. But it was a decision I had prayed on. It was a very thought-out decision. It was something I needed to do. But I was second-guessing that because of what other people were saying. I was like, ‘Hailey, why isn’t what you feel ever enough for yourself? This is too much.’ I’m 22 now. I’ve got to figure this out.”

But she couldn’t do it privately, like most people can.

“As athletes, we’re out there in the public,” she said. “People judge what we do. It’s part of the profession. And so I needed to learn. I needed to be able to handle that.”

Nice play from Hailey Van Lith to lift and shift to get and stay wide open

SC has to scram that switch quicker though, they have all year pic.twitter.com/9QyS4cFK5i

— Mark Schindler (@MG_Schindler) January 26, 2024

Last summer, Van Lith met Derick Grant, a former Harlem Globetrotter who works as a trainer and life coach. Grant had been hired by Octagon, a prominent sports agency, to run pre-draft workouts, training some WNBA and NBA hopefuls. Van Lith came to work out, too, since she had the same representation. She and Grant talked between drills, connecting almost instantly. Grant could see Van Lith’s talent on the court, but he sensed she wasn’t mentally free. She was afraid of something. Mistakes? Failure? People realizing she wasn’t bulletproof?

They started working together last May. Grant would travel to Baton Rouge every 45 days or so to meet with Van Lith. Otherwise, they’d talk on the phone for an hour per week and text between sessions. Grant texted Van Lith after Saturday’s Sweet 16 game to congratulate her on how well she took care of the ball and the defense that she played. Not the fact that shot 1 of 8 from the field. The two do not dwell on the negatives; she believes that Grant has fully changed her life.

“The big thing with Hailey was realizing the power you have in your perspective,” Grant said. “We get told what a good or a bad game is. Oh, you didn’t score 20? You didn’t get 10 assists? You didn’t do this. That shapes our perspective of ourselves.

“Obviously, this year has not been exactly the way she had expected on the court. But the beauty of it is, you still have the ability to re-shift your perspective. Instead of, ‘How many shots did I get?’ it’s, ‘Am I getting my teammates involved? Am I knocking down the shots that I do get?’ It’s a shift in the way she sees herself.”

She had chosen to uproot her life from Louisville, where she’d been the singular star for three years. She chose a team that had just won a national title, a program with big personalities, a ton of talent (including another incoming transfer in DePaul’s Aneesah Morrow), and just one basketball to share. Van Lith admitted that she didn’t feel very tough mentally. She’d seen therapists and sports psychologists before, but nothing quite unlocked her brain the way it has with Grant – in large part because he told her she was far tougher than she was giving herself credit for.

“I’m like, ‘You are super tough mentally, how you’re able to consciously put yourself in positions that are uncomfortable with the intention of becoming comfortable while being uncomfortable,” he said. “She doesn’t run away from it.”

Grant asked her to think of this season as a new start. “I told her, why don’t we look at this year as if it’s her rookie year in the league, like she’s coming into a team that has vets that are already established, and she has to fit in,” he said. “How do you help the team while still keeping your identity and not abandoning what you know you can do?”

Tigers coach Kim Mulkey pointed out on Sunday that most people who watch her team play don’t realize how valuable Van Lith has been. Take Saturday’s game against UCLA, for example. “Five assists, one turnover, three steals, took a big charge at the end, got her one and only rebound at the end,” Mulkey said. Those things matter when you’re a point guard trying to control a game and hang on to a win.”

Van Lith sees her season at LSU as a difficult but necessary step in her growth as a basketball player and as a person. She’s 5-foot-7 and feisty, her prospects as a pro uncertain. She could have stayed at Louisville and been the focal point of the offense again, known primarily as a shooter. Or she could try something new and hard.

“I had to get better, and this was what was going to make me better,” Van Lith said. “I might not see the fruit of it this year, but I’m going to see the fruit of it at some point in my life. I have faith in that and do not need instant gratification from (the decision). That’s why I believe in God. It’s why I believe in something bigger than myself.

“My truth is that this was a step outside of my comfort zone, and I proved that I could do it. I proved that I could be a point guard and play defense and be on a team with other great players. I proved everything to myself that I needed to prove.”

She’s had to do all this while under the microscope. This LSU team is highly scrutinized, starting the season with a bullseye on its back, ranked No. 1 in the country. Fans have dissected her reaction to being benched at times. A clip of her reacting to the bracket on Selection Sunday — picking Middle Tennessee to upset Louisville in more colorful language — leaked, creating yet another story, another public narrative about her.

She can’t control what others see or how they feel about her. She knows this now. “We’re going to put on blinders like we’re at the Kentucky Derby,” Grant said. “We’re only going to focus on what we think about ourselves and our own perspectives of us because if we aren’t careful — you’ve got the media, you’ve got Kim (Mulkey), you’ve got your teammates — it can eat you alive when you have all of these different perspectives of you if you’ve never taken the time to be intentional about who you are and how you view yourself.”

As Van Lith prepares to play in Monday’s Elite Eight game against No. 1 seed Iowa, she knows she is doing what she can. She may not be scoring like she used to, but she contributes winning plays — and she’d “rather be known as a winner than a scorer” anyway, she said. Van Lith is ready for whatever comes next, in this game and beyond because she knows herself better than she ever has before. She hopes other people see her for who she is, too.

“It’s a part of my life that I’m very willing to share because I know that a lot of athletes go through this,” Van Lith said. “In general, everyone goes through things like this. Verbalizing that we go through having an identity crisis — we don’t know how to differentiate what people say about us and what we think about ourselves — it’s OK. It’s OK to not get angry if people don’t think we’re the best. That is their opinion.

“I’m still going to go out there and play my best.”

(Photo: Sarah Stier / Getty Images)

Nicole Auerbach covers college football and college basketball for The Athletic. A leading voice in college sports, she also serves as a studio analyst for the Big Ten Network and a radio host for SiriusXM. Nicole was named the 2020 National Sports Writer of the Year by the National Sports Media Association, becoming the youngest national winner of the prestigious award. Before joining The Athletic, she covered college football and college basketball for USA Today. Follow Nicole on Twitter @NicoleAuerbach