City of Basketball Love

By Joseph Santoliquito (@JSantoliquito)
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(Ed. Note: This article is part of our 2023-24 season coverage, which will run for the six weeks preceding the first official games of the year on Nov. 6. To access all of our high school and college preview content for this season click here.)

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Early last week, a sweaty, tired Nicole Melious, La Salle’s 5-foot-8 freshman, was walking off the court after practice and asked what she thought was an innocuous question to Explorers’ associate head coach Chris Day: “How am I doing?” The court was empty and Day was not about to sugarcoat anything. He took the filter off old-school style. It was raw, emphatic—and true.

In the build-up to the Explorers’ 2023-24 season, Day and Explorers’ head coach Mountain MacGillivray saw things in the gifted guard that she was not seeing in herself. A 3,000-point scorer in high school, and New York city’s all-time leading scorer, Melious was thinking too much on the court, hesitant to shoot for the first time since she was a high school freshman, being passive, worrying about fitting in, deferring too often, and basically, being everything that she is not on a basketball court — a coldhearted scorer.

If the Explorers are expected to step out from the middle of the Atlantic 10 Conference pack, where they were last year, Melious is going to be counted on to play an important role.

She just needed to have that reaffirmed.

“Coach Day put it out there, and it was really good to hear, and I had to hear it,” Melious admitted. “He told me the good things I was doing, and the things I was doing wrong. He stressed that I should be the player I am, and not worry about anything or anyone else around me. That really helped me. It was not very pretty. It was tough to hear, but he was right. I had to hear it. Ever since then, I’ve had a lot more confidence, and I have been a lot more aggressive. I was probably mentally holding myself back, not being who I am. This is a process. We still talk about it all of the time. and I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback. I just needed that wakeup call.”

Melious has always been the scoring hammer. A four-year starter at Susan E. Wagner, in Staten Island, N.Y., she finished with an amazing 3,140 points in her high school career. She finished holding the New York City all-time single season scoring record (1,137 points and career scoring record for boys and girls, and ranked fourth all-time in the state in career points.

She chose La Salle over Georgia Tech, George Washington and Seton Hall. La Salle is the smallest school of all of them. She was attracted to the coaching staff and the La Salle culture. MacGillivray and Day will be giving her great latitude to do what she wants.

“Nicole came in with the expectation of being good, so I can’t say that’s a surprise there, she’s performing well,” MacGillivray said. “(Her biggest adjustment) is not going to be shot selection, I need her to take more shots. She’s probably been conscious of trying not to over-assert herself. And we’re actually going to talk (to her) about it, but I need her to take even more. She’s a high-percentage shot-maker, so anytime we can get the ball in her hands and get a shot off, we’re good with it. I don’t care where it’s from, take the shot. She’s been well over 40% so far in the preseason.

“But we need, it’s her, and this is all the freshmen and all the transfers, it’s all nine, understanding the why and the how in our defense. Not our presses, presses are new for everybody and I’m making it up as we go along. But in our half-court man-to-man, we were one of the best teams in the Atlantic 10, second-best behind UMass, according to CBB Analytics, and it’s all because of everybody playing their roles.”

Last season, the Explorers finished 17-14 overall and 8-7 in the A-10, getting knocked out by George Mason, a team La Salle beat during the regular season, in the first round of the A-10 tournament. La Salle lost its top five scorers, amounting to 47.4 points of offense a game. The Explorers will need to find scoring somewhere, and who better than someone like Melious, who could fit well into what MacGillivray plans to run this season.

“We are playing at a really, really fast pace,” he said. “Our five-minute scrimmages were like 25-26 to 18, if you extrapolate it for a whole quarter. That’s a fast-paced quarter. But our quarters have been when they were making shots, 40s to 30s, 46-38. Like really-high-paced, and that’s what we want to do. That’s what I’ve always enjoyed coaching the most, I didn’t have a team that was built to do that. We’ve always run our break in that structure that we’re doing now, but we’ve got the players who can run the floor, who are finishing in transition. It’s a different group, and we’re getting to play the way I really like to play.

“So, you’ll see that. It’s new.”

Melious is adjusting to college life and independence. She’s washing her own clothes, as all college freshmen have to, for the first time in her life. She is appreciating sleep, too, more than she ever has. MacGillivray is from the old John Chaney school. He likes to practice at 6:30 a.m. and works by Vince Lombardi time. In other words, his players better be ready at 6:30 a.m., not just show up at 6:30, so Melious has grudgingly grown accustomed to getting up at 5:30 each morning six days a week.

It did not take her long to feel she belongs. If she had any questions about that, she found out in the Explorers’ scrimmage against Princeton. She had the option to sink or swim, and she has been doing swimmingly well.

“I respect my teammates and I trust them, I have no problem sharing the ball, and I’m not facing any double- or triple-teams like I did in high school, because that was annoying,” she said. “I think we can be really good this year. This is a new team that has a good dynamic and plays well together. I get told by coach Mount and coach Day to shoot all the time. They give me that freedom. One of the reasons why I chose La Salle was the freedom by the coaching staff on offense and to shoot more. I have listened more recently. There were some nerves going on in the beginning. I wanted to respect the other players and share the ball. After coach Day had that talk with me, he told me what I had to do to help this team win, and I’m ready to do that. Coach Day told me I had to be the player the team expects me to be. The confidence I got from that conversation I can take now into the season. It’s up to me to do it.

“The last time I was afraid to shoot in a game was my freshman year in high school. This is like that. I have to be true to myself. We are definitely getting there.”

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Joseph Santoliquito is a hall of fame, award-winning sportswriter based in the Philadelphia area who began writing for CoBL in 2021 and is the president of the Boxing Writers Association of America. He can be followed on Twitter here.