“I wouldn’t expect anything else”: Taylor Johnson-Matthews embracing the standards of Big East basketball
Walking back to the team vans in Birmingham, Alabama after playing five preseason games over a two-day span in July 2023, Pearl River Community College women’s basketball head coach Scotty Fletcher was surprised by a season-altering message from one of his newest players.
“I want you to coach me as hard as you want me to coach me,” she said after running him down. “I want to make sure we win a championship this year and I get you a ring, big dawg.”
Fletcher had barely been coaching then-sophomore Taylor Johnson-Matthews for two weeks, and she would be flying back to her native city of Cleveland for three weeks immediately after the five-game event. But at that moment, he knew he had attracted a special player to Poplarville, Mississippi to join his Wildcats for 2023-24.
Sure enough, Pearl River would go on to have one of its best seasons in program history behind an outstanding campaign from 5-foot-9 Johnson-Matthews. The Wildcats finished the year with a 27-5 record and a 13-1 mark in the Mississippi Association of Community Colleges Conference (MACCC), along with their first at-large bid to the NJCAA National Tournament since 2003.
In her sole season at Pearl River, Johnson-Matthews was recognized as a Second-Team All-American by the NJCAA and led the MACCC in scoring with 18.2 points per game. She also left an indelible mark on the defensive end of the floor, notching 6.6 rebounds and 2.5 steals per contest to go with her prolific scoring abilities.
Fast forward to today, where Johnson-Matthews now plays in Chicago for the DePaul Blue Demons. Under the tutelage of both head coach Doug Bruno and interim head coach Jill Pizzotti, the junior is averaging 14.0 points and 3.2 rebounds per game while shooting 36.1 percent from three-point range.
And through the first five games of Big East play in 2024-25, Johnson-Matthews led the entire conference in scoring with 21.2 points per game.
Johnson-Matthews’ rise has undoubtedly been one of the most underrated stories in women’s college basketball for 2024-25, and for many on the periphery, as unlikely as any so far this season. But for Fletcher, who recruited Johnson-Matthews out of Wright State where she averaged just 3.8 points per game in 11.0 minutes per contest as a freshman, her early success at DePaul is just the latest confirmation of his belief in his star player, who had the ultimate green light at all times.
“‘Baby, I don’t care if you kick it up there. You shoot the ball dang near every time, and you shoot as many threes as you want to when you come to Pearl River’,” Fletcher remembers telling Johnson-Matthews and her mother on their first visit to campus. “And I think Taylor thought I was being crazy and funny, but I was being serious because Taylor’s got one of the prettiest natural-form shots that you’re ever going to see.”
After not even attempting a single three-pointer in her freshman season at Wright State, where Fletcher noted she was being played at center, the Pearl River staff molded Johnson-Matthews into a 30.8 percent volume shooter from beyond the arc. Her 40 made threes over a 32-game season were second-most on Pearl River for 2023-24.
And while most offseason programs that completely transform a player’s shot diet are rigorous by default, Fletcher saw a different level of dedication in the work that Johnson-Matthews put in prior to her sole season in Poplarville.
“Taylor moved down here from Cleveland to Mississippi without a car, and on the weekend she would get two to three workouts in a day. She came down here with the right mindset,” Fletcher said. “She was our hardest worker on the team, she was a captain, and someone that the girls looked up to. They weren’t jealous or envious of her, and she did the work. And when you do the work and you’re committed, and you have the personal accountability and self-discipline, success is going to follow.”
The latest display of Johnson-Matthews’ work ethic and scoring aptitude will come tonight at Wintrust Arena in Chicago’s South Loop, where her Blue Demons are gearing up for a home matchup with the AP No. 6 Connecticut Huskies, led by Women’s Basketball Hall-of-Fame head coach Geno Auriemma.
Auriemma will undoubtedly have Johnson-Matthews towards the top of his scouting report tonight, and while it will be his first time coaching against the standout junior, it won’t be the first time the two have encountered each other.
In fact, the pair have a picture together, coincidentally at the 2024 Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame ceremony held in Knoxville, Tennessee.
“The NJCAA put on a three-on-three event that correlated with the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame, and we had two players that played in that event; Taylor was one of them,” Fletcher said. “Geno was there as well because Maya Moore went in [the Hall of Fame], so the girls that participated with the NJCAA got to take a picture with all of the inductees. So Taylor got a picture with Maya Moore, and she also got a picture with Geno.”
Fletcher paused for a moment, then laughed.
“It’s really neat to me that Geno had no idea that night that the leading scorer for the Big East [through five games] took a picture with him, and would later be playing in that league,” Fletcher said.
While in Knoxville for Johnson-Matthews’ three-on-three matches, Fletcher also spoke with DePaul head coach Doug Bruno about his sophomore standout. Bruno’s staff would end up landing a commitment from Johnson-Matthews barely two months after the April 2024 Hall of Fame event.
“DePaul appreciates Taylor’s game for what it’s worth, and that’s allowed her to score the basketball. Taylor is a mismatch and poses a lot of different things that she can do offensively and defensively,” Fletcher said. “And I think it was really about getting her in a system that was very similar to ours in terms of putting her in space where she can create for herself and create for her teammates. And obviously now she’s stretching the defense and shooting the three really well, so I just think DePaul provided an opportunity for her to play the game that she was able to play at Pearl River, cause that’s Taylor’s natural game of basketball.”
Indeed, Johnson-Matthews’ “natural game of basketball” has turned the heads of several standout figures in the women’s game over the last two years. From established Big East legends like Auriemma and Bruno to legendary Texas head man Vic Shaefer (who texted Fletcher about her spin move that is “down to perfection”), Johnson-Matthews has already built up some notoriety among the sport’s coaching greats.
But perhaps most notably, Johnson-Matthews earned a compliment from 2021 WNBA Champion and three-time WNBA All-Star Allie Quigley during her own DePaul Hall-of-Fame press conference, held January 12 at Wintrust Arena following a women’s home game against Providence.
Quigley joked that she was only able to watch that game for the opening minutes before she “got passed around a little bit”. But the opening minutes were all she needed to watch; in the first quarter, Johnson-Matthews attempted five three-pointers.
Four of them went in.
“When I saw Taylor shoot, I was like ‘that’s a nice-looking shot’. She needs to shoot it every time she touches it,” Quigley said in the January 12 presser.
For Fletcher, this only reaffirmed what he saw from the moment he started recruiting Johnson-Matthews out of Wright State: a hunger and desire to prove herself and play with confidence.
“You hear sometimes in basketball ‘game recognizes game’. And I think Allie recognizes how talented Taylor is, which is something that we saw from day one. I think Taylor has grown into that level of confidence, which was something that she was missing at Pearl River when we got her,” Fletcher said. “We just gave Taylor the freedom to play her game and be who she is. That instilled a lot of confidence, but she did that from her work ethic. So I think that’s strictly Allie recognizing Taylor’s work ethic, and the hours that she has spent playing basketball [to get to DePaul].”
Among Johnson-Matthews’ teammates, her work ethic has certainly not gone unnoticed. Graduate senior Jorie Allen has continuously praised Johnson-Matthews for not only her scoring and effort, but her overall impact on DePaul’s team as it navigates being down as many as six players at a time from game to game.
And after Johnson-Matthews notched her first-ever Division I double-double (19 points/10 rebounds) against Marquette on December 29, Allen emphasized the urgency of Johnson-Matthews’ development with the Blue Demons and added that she’s just scratching the surface.
“I’m really enjoying seeing Taylor come into herself in terms of offensively finding her shots, and coach Jill keeps challenging her on the defensive end to really be a presence down there as well. But I expect that from Taylor, and I daresay I even expect more,” Allen said in her Marquette postgame. “I’m going to be excited to see her continue to grow on and off the court and be a leader on this team in so many ways. That’s what we need from her and that’s what she’s capable of.”
Especially on a roster with such little margin for error, it can often be tough for new players to come in and learn a system, let alone with a “coaching change” in the closing weeks of the offseason. But to her credit, Johnson-Matthews has embraced her newest role as a three-level scorer for the Blue Demons, and continues to show that the sky's the limit as she continues to acclimate to Big East play.
And with the ultimate goal of reaching the WNBA herself just like Quigley, the standards being set around Johnson-Matthews will only continue to increase. So will she able to handle the pressure for the remainder of DePaul’s 2024-25 season?
She kept it short and sweet.
“Of course. I wouldn’t expect anything else.”