A girl adrift, 12 years old and alone in the wilderness of San Diego’s concrete jungle. She keeps moving, keeps chopping wood, keeps her wits about her. Because there’s a play drawn up for her to succeed, she can feel it. Destiny, child.
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“What’s the word? Serendipity?” USC women’s basketball coach Lindsay Gottlieb asks in regard to Destiny Littleton’s presence in her program this season.
She asks because back in 2017, when Littleton was a top recruit out of The Bishop’s School in La Jolla, a McDonald’s All-American whose 4,300 career points made her the state’s all-time leading scorer among girls, she thought she’d play all her college ball as a Trojan. Instead, she wound up at Texas, and then at South Carolina, where last year she became a national champion.
That she’s playing at USC only now, just as the Trojans have begun to crest upward again, breaking into the Associated Press’ Top 25 poll for the first time since 2016? That does seem like a stroke of serendipity.
A little like a touch of fate, that it’s happened just as Littleton – a 23-year-old graduate student and point guard, playing heavy, necessary minutes and making the most of the NCAA’s bonus COVID year – has dropped her disguise, emerging from an emotional thicket not unscathed, but untarnished. Good, stronger and the right woman to lead these tough-willed Trojans, whose wins don’t often come easy, but have come anyway.
A fighter, with the fortitude to take the big shots and live with the results. “A great overall person,” said Aaliyah Gayles, a teammate and friend. “A pick-me-up person, a loving person. I would take a thousand Destinys, if I could.”
HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT
To get a sense of that, you need only to sit and listen a while to Littleton, a 5-foot-9 floor general whose braces show when she smiles and who has a tattoo on the inside of her left forearm that reads, in neat, cursive script, “With pain comes strength ♡.”
As a kid, the…
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