NASHVILLE — Vanderbilt guard Mikayla Blakes likes being the first sophomore since South Carolina’s A’ja Wilson in 2016 to be honored as Southeastern Conference women’s basketball player of the year.
“She’s historic,” Blakes said Wednesday of Wilson, who was the AP female athlete of the year in 2025 and is a four-time WNBA MVP. “She’s killing the WNBA. She’s done college as well. Just to know I’m on a path of a GOAT (greatest of all time), it’s insane.”
Wilson helped lead the Gamecocks to the 2017 NCAA Division I tournament title as a junior and was the AP women’s college basketball player of the year as a senior. Wilson helped set a bar that Blakes certainly hopes to meet, especially if it means getting the Commodores where she wants as a perennial national championship contender.
Blakes sees being SEC player of the year as an offshoot of helping Vanderbilt win, and the sixth-ranked Commodores (27-4) have done just that in setting a program record for single-season victories before the NCAA tournament.
“This was my goal,” Blakes said. “Like I want to be able to bring the program back to competing for Final Four (appearances), back to people looking at Vanderbilt, be like, ‘OK.”
Blakes deals with pressure by simply playing basketball and having fun.
She learned that lesson after setting the NCAA freshman single-game scoring record as the first D-I player to score 53 or more points in multiple games in a season since 1988-89. She followed that up at the FIBA Women’s AmeriCup last summer as the tournament MVP while leading the United States to a gold medal.
Blakes has played even better this season for Vanderbilt. She leads the nation in scoring at 27 points per game. In a conference featuring eight teams currently ranked in the AP Top 25, Blakes led the SEC in averaging 30.5 points a game in league games during the recently completed regular season.
She also has the SEC’s longest active streak in double-digit scoring games with 50 straight, which is third longest in Division I. She has done it by shooting 46.9% from the floor and 39.8% from 3-point range in SEC games.
The 5-foot-8 guard from Somerset, New Jersey, credits growing up playing basketball against her brother Jaylen, who played at Duke, and last summer’s stint with USA Basketball with helping her learn how to handle the physical pounding of playing in the SEC.
“Playing against him, he was like a brick,” Blakes said of her brother. “I couldn’t really move him.”
Blakes has more help this season thanks to freshman point guard Aubrey Galvan, senior guard/forward Justine Pissott and graduate forward Sacha Washington all averaging at least 10.4 points a game. Blakes has averaged 4.4 assists per game this season while being the defensive focus of opponents.
She has averaged 2.9 steals a game as well, often starting fast breaks up the court for the Commodores.
“With the teammates I have this year, it’s really hard just to focus in on me because other people take advantage of that,” Blakes said. “And by all means, I love when they, my teammates, score. I get so excited for them as well.”
Second-seeded Vanderbilt lost its quarterfinal last week at the SEC tournament when Blakes missed her first 12 shots, and coach Shea Ralph was ejected after going to the middle of the court to argue over a foul being called on her star guard. Blakes finished with 24 points in that game while trying to rally the Commodores before they lost 89-78 to seventh-seeded Ole Miss.
“What I know about her is that she is going to fight to win the game,” Ralph said. “Never count her or us out. And that kid fought until the very end because that is who she is.”
Details about the next step comes Sunday night, when the 68-team bracket and sites for the first two rounds of the NCAA tournament are announced. The Commodores are expected to host for the first time since 2012, and Blakes has seen the number of fans filling the Memorial Gymnasium stands grow from her freshman year.
She expects more for the upcoming games, which is all part of the plan for Vanderbilt.
“All of us are just even more locked in,” Blakes said, “and motivated to be able to go further.”
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