Maddox determined to make most of final season
Joiya Maddox stepped behind the 3-point line for the first time as a fourth-grader. She was unfazed by the distance from the arc to the basket, and she heaved the basketball toward the rim.
She made the shot and was hooked.
“My shooting ability kind of came naturally to me,” said Maddox, now a senior guard for the Hoover High School girls basketball team.
Maddox began intensely developing her long-range shooting once she reached middle school. That deft touch is what garnered her varsity minutes at Hoover as early as her days as a freshman.
It’s also what caught the eye of legendary Rutgers University coach C. Vivian Stringer, who recently surpassed 1,000 career wins as a collegiate head coach and will be Maddox’s future college coach. Maddox signed with Rutgers in late November.
“Joiya is an excellent shooter with great range,” Stringer said in a release. “She will be able to extend the defenses that we face, allowing our inside players more opportunities to score. Her athleticism and length on defense will continue to allow us to put intense defensive pressure on our opponents, both in the half-court and with the 55 press. It is our hope that Joiya, by the end of her career at Rutgers, that she will have broken many of the 3-point shooting records.”
But with the time she has left at Hoover, the 6-foot guard is working on becoming a more well-rounded and dangerous player.
“Everybody knows Joiya’s a good shooter,” Hoover head coach Krystle Johnson said. “I’ve seen her expanding her game in other ways. She’s going to have to do some things this year that she hasn’t done before, specifically rebound.”
Johnson also noted that Maddox has been putting in time working on post-ups, ball-handling and on-ball defense. But don’t think Maddox’s days of working on her bread-and-butter are behind her.
“I’m a great set shooter, and the things I really need to work on are coming off the dribble and shooting and getting my shot off quicker,” she said.
Maddox will follow in the footsteps of her sister, Jailyn, in playing Division I college basketball. The two sisters shared time on the varsity team at Hoover for one season before the elder sister moved on to Virginia Commonwealth University.
Maddox admitted there were challenges playing with her older sister, such as feeling the pressure to live up to expectations. But overall, she counts it as an overwhelmingly positive experience.
“Playing with my sister my freshman year was great,” she said. “It gave me a chance to look up to her and see all that she could do and all that she provided for the team.”
Hoover won the state title during Maddox’s sophomore season, but the Lady Bucs were unable to back that up last winter despite posting a 30-2 record. Johnson said Maddox took the loss to Sparkman in the regional final the hardest.
“I think if anybody is willing to ensure that we do everything we need to do win, it would be Joiya,” Johnson said. “That memory of how she felt at that moment will drive her to know this is not going to happen again.”
Maddox doesn’t care what the Lady Bucs’ record is this season, as long as the final result isn’t the same.
“Going 30-2 and not winning state is kind of pointless,” she said.