Joyce Edwards sat nervously on the bleachers in the gym in Colorado Springs, Colo., flanked by the best under-17 girls basketball players in the country. A year earlier, she had been in this same position, waiting to hear whether she had made Team USA’s under-16 squad, but she didn’t make it past the first cut. A year later, a year older, a year stronger, certainly things would be different, she reassured herself as she listened to the team director rattle off other names. Certainly, she could get through the first cut and be considered one of Team USA’s 18 best prospects. Certainly, it would be different this time.
But she waited. And waited. Her name didn’t come.
With about a dozen other players, she got up, left the gym, returned to her dorm, packed her bag and headed to the airport to catch a flight back home.
Now, it’s hard to imagine that Edwards — the No. 2 player in the 2024 class, the Gatorade national player of the year and the gem of South Carolina’s 2024 signing class — ever went to a tryout in which she didn’t make the team (let alone not be the star).
In most achievement-based settings all of her life, she has thrived. Academically, she’ll enter South Carolina’s honors college this fall to study environmental sciences after graduating high…
