With SEC title on line, Aliyah Boston and her ‘inseparable’ friend prepare to face off
More than six years ago, four-star recruit and point guard Jordan Nixon was bugging her AAU basketball coach, Walter Welsh, saying that the team needed another post player.
That’s when a 6-foot-2 eighth-grader named Aliyah Boston entered the gym for the first time. She had been driven by her aunt 45 minutes or so from Worcester, Massachusetts to Hartford, Connecticut, then traveled with another player’s family down to the New Jersey gym.
That first practice, Boston remembers feeling intimidated. Welsh seemed a little crazy, yelling at most players on the floor. But she was tough, capable of taking contact and already a monster shot-blocker, Welsh recalled.
Later that night, Nixon called Welsh.
“That’s the player,” he remembers Nixon saying.
Bonding over basketball
On Sunday, Boston and the South Carolina women’s basketball team will take the floor to play Nixon and her Texas A&M Aggies. At stake is an SEC regular-season championship, the No. 1 seed in the conference tournament and major implications in the race for a No. 1 seed in the NCAA tourney.
It will mark the first time Boston and Nixon have shared a court since their high school days, when they both played for Welsh’s iExcel AAU squad. In many ways, they make an unlikely pair — Nixon is a 5-foot-9 point guard raised in New York City in Harlem and the Bronx, while Boston is a 6-foot-5 post from the U.S. Virgin Islands.
But very quickly after that first practice, they bonded on and off the court.
“She was just great, like great on the court and then off the court,” Boston said. “I don’t know how it happened. I think our personalities just clicked like automatically and we were inseparable from there.”
As players, they shared some similarities, Welsh said. Nixon was always the vocal leader on her team, and Boston, playing up a year, was always outgoing, energetic and enthusiastic. They communicated well and pushed everyone around them. And as a point guard and forward, they were lethal in the two-man game, Welsh said.
“Posts in the AAU, unless the coach makes it a priority, the posts don’t touch the ball. But Jordan always made it a priority of making sure Aliyah touched the ball in the high post, low post, ran some of the sets that we had so she could try to get a touch,” Welsh said. “Sometime it was tough because everybody would double Aliyah because she scored so easily. So it would be a little tough for that to happen, but there was always a connection on the court with them as a point guard and forward.”
But parts of their friendship, Boston said, has little to do with basketball.
“We’re always laughing. No matter what, we’ll always find some way to laugh about something together. And like on the court, we have a great relationship, and I think I’m glad that it started, like we became friends through iExcel.”
The two became so close, Nixon’s mother jokingly refers to them as “Jo-liyah.”
USA Basketball trials
In 2016, Boston, Nixon and a teammate traveled with Welsh to Colorado to participate in the trials for the 2016 USA Basketball Women’s U17 World Championship team. Boston hadn’t been invited, so her parents had to pay their own way to get her to the trials.
More than 100 players participate in the trials, with periodical cuts over the course of several days. After one morning session, before a round of cuts, they were eating lunch when the girls said how nervous they were about the prospect of being cut.
“I had a thing with them I always say to them: Never let anybody determine your worth. Only you decide that. Give that away, you’re giving away a big part of yourself,” Welsh said. “So I gave them that speech again. So we go back, and I happen to be on the phone, I walk over and Aliyah’s bawling. I’m like, ‘OK, she must have got cut, so I won’t say too much.’ Jordan was on the phone, I think she was talking to her dad. And then I went upstairs and Jordan came up and sat next to me. And I’m like, ‘What are you doing? Get your shirt, get on the court.’ And she said, ‘No, I got cut.’ So I said, ‘Why the hell is Aliyah crying?’ She goes, ‘Oh, she felt bad for me.’”
Welsh went back to Boston, who was still crying and upset, even though she had made it to the next round. Eventually, he and Wilson were able to get her ready to go back on the court.
Boston just missed making the final roster, getting named a finalist before being cut, but the incident stuck with Welsh, a longtime coach on the AAU circuit. It was unlike anything he had ever seen in his career.
Winding paths
With Nixon being a year older than Boston, the future Gamecock got to see how her friend handled the crush of recruiting that would soon descend upon her. Nixon was ranked in the top 60 nationally and held offers from Notre Dame, Tennessee, Florida State and others.
“I was able to kind of watch her go through it, and see the things that she was looking at in terms of coaches,” Boston said, “and I was listening to her talking about how good her visits were and how much fun she had and just kind of going through that process.”
Nixon committed to Notre Dame, and there was talk between the two girls’ families about reuniting at the college level. The Irish were one of four finalists for Boston, and she took an official visit there.
In the end, though, Boston revealed in November 2018 that she would be going to South Carolina, headlining the No. 1 recruiting class in the country. Less than a year later, Nixon announced she would transfer from Notre Dame and join Texas A&M.
When the two teams met last year for the regular season finale, a 60-52 win for USC that secured a perfect 16-0 SEC season, Nixon wasn’t able to play — she was sitting out her redshirt season.
This year, however, Nixon has blossomed for the Aggies, starting every game for a 21-1 squad aiming to make a run to the Final Four. She averages 9.1 points, 3.2 assists and 1.2 steals per game. Her 3.2 win shares ranks in the 91st percentile nationally.
Boston, meanwhile, is an SEC Player of the Year and All-American candidate, leading the conference in blocks while being second in rebounding and fourth in double-doubles.
And through it all, they continue to text, FaceTime and talk frequently. The topic of this Sunday’s game, though, the biggest game of the SEC season and one of the most important nationally, hasn’t really come up.
“That’s just not really what we ever really talk about,” Boston laughed. “And then we just start talking about different things.”
So as key leaders for their respective teams, will they be all business, studiously avoiding each other on the court?
“In warmups, I’ll probably give her a smile or something,” Boston said. “In the game, we probably won’t talk. And then after the game, we’ll probably talk.”
Legacy
Watching Sunday’s game from New York, Welsh doesn’t plan on rooting for the Gamecocks or the Aggies. He knows neither of his former players would ever let him live it down if he favored one team over the other. Besides, he likes to watch with a critical eye.
“I just kind of watch to see what they’re doing so I can say, ‘Hey, make sure you fix that, make sure you work on that kind of stuff,’” Welsh said.
And while Boston and Nixon might not talk too much during the game, Boston appreciates the importance of the moment — and how far she and Nixon have both come.
“It’s just exciting, because we are so close, and we started out in the same area, same team and everything,” Boston said. “So it’s good to see that, where we are. ... I feel like we’ve grown a lot. I think we’ve matured a lot and just our skill level as well has just gotten so much better.”
Sunday’s not the end, either. As the calendar flips to March, Welsh will continue to watch both Nixon and Boston closely, feeling pride in the successful careers he helped shape.
“I’m smart enough to know I’m not the only person to have my hands on them, to work them. But I know where they were, where Jordan was from sixth grade to 11th grade and Aliyah was eighth grade to 11th grade,” Welsh said. “So it’s a big-time job. We still talk once or twice a week just to see what they’re doing. But it’s a great thing and I hope one of them wins the national championship. I’m not sure who’s going to do that, but that would be the topping on the cake, so to speak.”
This story was originally published February 27, 2021 at 2:37 PM.
