Texas freshman Madison Booker is already everything the Longhorns hoped she'd be | Bohls

Madison Booker has always been wise beyond her years.

Heck, who wouldn’t be when the girls high school basketball coach once approached her and wanted her on the varsity team.

As a seventh-grader.

But her mom didn’t think she was ready. So they waited a whole ‘nother year until her eighth-grade year when Madison relented and joined the varsity. And, just a few games in, she not only cracked the starting lineup, she helped lead Germantown High School to the school’s first Final Four in its history. And to another the next season but not until her senior year did the team in Ridgeland, Miss., cut down the nets after the final game.

And that long delay ticked her off plenty.

That’s just how she is.

“One of the commentators at the game said she does not look like she’s afraid of the moment,” Stephanie Booker said this week. “Basketball is her happy place. Maddie is a perfectionist.”

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That hasn’t changed since the McDonald’s All-American and No. 12 recruit in the country joined Vic Schaefer’s program as a freshman at Texas. She’s still every bit the perfectionist even though she has been forced to move from her natural wing position to point guard after All-America candidate Rori Harmon was sidelined for the year with a knee injury a dozen games into the season.

'She hates losing. Absolutely hates it.'

She'll return to small forward next year when Harmon returns. But for now, Booker has taken to the role of quarterback and helped the No. 11 Longhorns stay on course, most recently in a 91-56 rout of a Kansas club that just beat Baylor. Her mom’s not surprised.

“She hates losing,” Stephanie said. “Absolutely hates it.”

Madison’s mother learned that early on. Her drive and passion to be the best at everything were also big reasons that Stephanie didn’t want to teach her oldest daughter in high school English.

“I’m a very stern teacher,” said Stephanie, taught English for 21 years before moving on to computer science and technology. “I did not want to teach her, and she absolutely did not want me to be her teacher. I didn’t want us to have a poor relationship when we got home.”

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Her push for excellence is also a major factor why Schaefer has entrusted this team to Madison’s very capable hands as a rookie the last seven games. He’s had to alter his offense a bit because the skill sets of Booker and Harmon aren’t exactly the same.

Need a point guard? No problem

At 6-foot-1, Booker's a bigger guard, can see over opposing guards for her teammates and is also a better shooter than Harmon. But she doesn’t have the same lightning quicks and defensive ability and fast pace of her older teammate.

Booker may be as equally adept at facilitating the Texas offense as Harmon, and she has more size and strength to guard bigger players. She’s not exactly a great deep threat, witness her 21% accuracy behind the line, and Texas assistant Blair Schaefer has chided her about taking step-back threes as Booker did at Kansas State when she air-balled one and clanged the other two off the scoreboard.

That said, she hit a couple of threes Tuesday night and reminded Schaefer she shot them in the flow of the offense. Didn’t step back once, she teased her coach

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“It feels good,” Booker said playfully. “I’m cooking up a little bit.”

Vic Schaefer’s doing the same with his 17-2 team, albeit with a few different ingredients without Harmon and the recently injured power forward DeYona Gaston.

'She doesn't realize how good she is and can be'

Booker doesn’t assert herself into the offense as much as Harmon did, but is always in control with uncanny poise. She’s got a sweet pull-up jumper from mid-range, hits 83% of her free throws and often passes up an open shot for a teammate as she did in connecting with Shay Holle for a timely trey from the corner Tuesday.

“I’m just fascinated by her,” said awestruck teammate Aaliyah Moore, who celebrated her 21st birthday with 17 points, four rebounds and three assists in the game. “She doesn’t realize how good she is and can be.”

The staff and her teammates do. They’re fully aware that this 18-year-old former Gatorade player of the year in Mississippi has entered the conversation with USC’s Juju Watkins, Notre Dame’s Hannah Hidalgo and LSU’s Mikaylah Williams in discussions of the 2024 national freshman of the year. She’s in the mix.

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Blair Schaefer works separately with Booker as the two break down every game in hour-long film sessions. Blair will point out her good and bad possessions and work on everything from her defensive stance to her footwork on defense.

Every session starts with clips of her turnovers.

“She cringes when I do that,” Blair said. “She’ll say, ‘Are there any good things?' I’ll say yeah, I got 74 clips.”

That’s the kind of critical game review Booker welcomes and one that will speed up her already rapid development. She’s the only freshman to have three 20-point games against ranked teams and averages eight rebounds to boot.

“She has the humility to look in the mirror and see her weaknesses so she can be elite in every category,” Blair said. “She has no interest in being good. She wants to be great."

That’s music to the ears of her mother, who’s come to Austin four times to see her daughter play. Of course, Stephanie picked up on her daughter’s passion for basketball at an early age.

The two talk regularly, and Stephanie once considered moving to Texas when Madison and her sister, Morgan — also a talented basketball player who’s playing on the eighth grade team as a 5-10 seventh-grader — were young to expose them to better basketball. But Maddie wasn’t on board.

She may be a momma’s girl to a degree. But she also takes after her father, Carlos, who was a thin, 215-pound, 6-10 center at Southern Mississippi and is glad she didn’t inherit her daddy’s height. “She was terrified about getting as tall as her dad,” Stephanie said. “Why? Because it’s not girly.”

Carlos first bought her a plastic Tyco goal when Maddie was 4. It wasn’t much later till they gravitated to a regulation goal outside when she was 7. And while Stephanie didn’t necessarily agree with her since-divorced husband’s ways, Carlos routinely blocked Madison’s shots. That only fueled Madison’s drive to excel and toughened her up.

She did in quick fashion. In her rookie season in college, she has evolved quickly into a seasoned point guard whose primary motivation is to involve her teammates.

While she’s accumulated 91 turnovers already, her 52 turnovers are a concern. But all expect her to shorten the learning curve.

“I give her a lot of credit,” Kansas coach Brandon Schneider said. “Rori’s the best two-way guard in the country, but for a freshman to come in and assert herself … she’s a terrific player. I thought Texas was Final Four national-championship-good with Rori, and they can probably still be that good, given the amount of time they have to make adjustments.”

Vic Schaefer is gratified by the sentiments, but he isn’t quite ready to make the same pronouncement.

“My heart’s broken for Rori,” he said, “but a big positive is how the kids have responded and bounced back. That’s encouraging. And Madison has been absolutely remarkable in my mind the way she’s taken the reins. She has her teammates’ confidence and trust in her.”

When she was asked what’s the best compliment she’s received from her fellow Longhorns, Madison said, “They’ve said I’m doing good.”

Good, huh?

Yeah, try great.

For Madison Booker, it starts with practice

It doesn’t always show up in the box score. She helps direct traffic on defense. She’s one of the first to pick up a teammate after one has taken a charge. She’s a team-first player, a big reason she was picked to play for USA Basketball on three gold-medal teams overseas. Her mom plans to frame them someday.

“She’s really an introvert and always been a goofball,” Stephanie said. “But she’s not an arrogant kid. She’s extremely humble. The only thing that makes her mad is when I call her by her middle name, Claire. She hates it.”

Asked if opposing players ever trash-talked her that way, her mom said, “Only if they want her to really score a lot of points.”

Madison doesn’t need any more incentive than she already has.

She spent many of her formative years, playing on otherwise all-boys teams called the Young Starz until she was elevated to the high school girls varsity team and played on the traveling Mississippi Lady Hoopers with her best friend, Kennedy Davis.

Those experiences helped make her the physical, all-around player that made her the object of so many recruiters’ desire, including those at Duke and Tennessee as well as Ole Miss and Mississippi State. Stephanie has never seen Madison dunk the basketball but “personally I think she wants to very much.”

“Her scoring is not what got her recruited,” Stephanie said. “It’s her tenacity and all the little things. Rebounding. Blocking shots. Being able to make good passes. Maddie doesn’t have to have the spotlight. She just wants to win.”

That comes shining through on a daily basis at practice.

Blair can’t keep from gushing about this young phenom, who is only getting started. She and Booker’s teammates were slack-jawed Tuesday after Madison flashed a behind-the-back dribble for a wraparound layup.

“I thought what in the world,” Blair said. “She has so many tricks in her bag. She’s just naturally gifted. She can run the team but also create her own shot. And she’s just so approachable. Nothing gets in the way of her pure joy for basketball.”

Not even if someone calls her Claire.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Texas basketball is happy it has freshman Madison Booker to lean on