Early in her senior season, Cowling already a legend
Colleen Galloway scored more than 2,300 points from 1978-81. Gennifer Brandon grabbed more than 1,200 rebounds from 2009-14. And Brittany Boyd dished out more than 700 assists from 2011-15.
Mikayla Cowling now gets mentioned with those titans of Cal basketball.
“We have had players here with gaudier numbers, but there hasn’t been a player who has given more to the program,” Cal head coach Lindsay Gottlieb said. “She has been ridiculously unselfish. She has been ridiculously willing to sacrifice her body and mind for the program.
“It’s never been about what she can get from Cal. It’s always been about what she could give to this program.”
The senior wing is averaging 9.9 points, 4.2 rebounds and 4.4 assists in a team-leading 31.9 minutes per game, having already joined the 1,000-point club and moved onto the school’s top-10 list for assists.
But it’s the intangible stuff that sets her apart. Before every game, Cowling chats up the ball girls, and after every game she spends time with fans.
During games, she does everything possible to make her teammates look good. Cowling is the team’s best oneon-one and help defender, and she appears hesitant at times to shoot because she gets such joy out of setting up teammates.
“I just like to have fun out there and get my teammates going,” she said, beaming with what Gottlieb calls the “Bay’s best smile.” “I like to see the smiles on their faces when they score, and I like being the person who passed for that score.
“I like doing it all. I don’t want to be good at one little thing. I want to be good at every single thing on the floor.”
Cowling put her all-around game on display Sunday at Arizona. She scored 17 of her 19 points in the second half, hitting a career-best five threepointers, and led the Bears back from a 10-point deficit midway through the third quarter.
Those kinds of outbursts are nothing out of the ordinary in the Cowling family. Each of her three older sisters was a college athlete and her father, Larry, won the 110-meter hurdles national championship for Cal in 1981.
Cowling jokes that her father, a regular in Section 15 who has missed only three of her collegiate games, spends more time at Cal than she does. But she spends plenty of time in the gym, too. Always has. Gottlieb met Cowling at a basketball camp when she was 7 and was watching her sister, Alex, who went on to be the No. 2 all-time scorer in WCC history at Loyola Marymount. Gottlieb and Cowling stayed in touch over the years, and when the coach got hired at Cal, she made it priority No. 1 to recruit Cowling.
Cowling has done everything her coach has asked since committing to Cal as a sophomore at St. Mary’sBerkeley, from being forced into prominent point guard and post roles as a freshman and sophomore to settling in at her natural wing position and becoming a leader the past two seasons.
“We’ve had some rough years, and it would have been easy to think, ‘I might get more shots here,’ or ‘I might get this there,’ but her mentality has always been about giving to the program,” Gottlieb said. “She’s always embraced the idea of: ‘What can I do better?’ That’s one of the reasons I’m so determined to have this year play out well.
“She’s given a lot without asking for anything. In this day and age of a lot of college players wanting to get theirs, she’s been day-in and day-out reflective of wanting to represent and give to the program. I think that will be remembered.”