Maupin Confidently Rises to the Occasion

By: D. Scott Fritchen

Here's the thing about Eliza Maupin: She doesn't know how good she can be. She's a 6-foot-3 ball of energy. She's arguably the most athletic player for No. 4 Kansas State. She has untapped potential. Oh, she had two double-doubles as a freshman last season. She scored 14 points at Oklahoma and scored at least 10 points in five others. This season, she's been limited in minutes while playing behind Ayoka Lee, sophomore Gisela Sanchez and redshirt freshman Imani Lester. But something happened on Monday night. Something magical.

It'll go down in our memory as "The Baylor Game."

That's the game when everything clicked and Maupin scored a career-high 16 points on 6-for-6 shooting, including the first made 3-pointer of her career, while she also grabbed nine rebounds and added one blocked shot in a career-high 29 minutes. She seemed to be everywhere at just the right time during the Wildcats' 58-55 win at Baylor. She was likely the most athletic player on the floor at Foster Pavilion in Waco, Texas.

"I'm not surprised because I practice how I play in the games, so it didn't surprise me a bit," she says. "But it's surprising everybody else because I hadn't been doing it in games. But it wasn't a big surprise for me personally."

It actually came as no surprise to K-State head coach Jeff Mittie, either.

"Eliza was fantastic," he says. "All the things that we're wanting her to do – which is to be more active cutting, rebounding, using her athleticism defensively – she did. It started with effort. Effort, effort, effort. At times, Eliza has gotten paralyzed in her effort by thinking too much.

"Hopefully, we've unlocked some of that."

After averaging 4.5 points and 3.1 rebounds in 12.9 minutes per game last season, she's averaging 3.3 points and 2.3 rebounds in 8.4 minutes while making 15 appearances this season behind Lee, Sanchez and Lester.

Prior to facing Baylor, Maupin had eight points on 3-for-3 shooting and three rebounds and two steals in a 69-58 win against Kansas. Prior to facing the Jayhawks, she had scored 10 points over a span of five games, never playing more than eight minutes in a contest.

"I really just think it was a time for me to prepare and refine my skills on defense, offense, hustling, rebounds and steals, so when I did play, I'd be up to that speed even if I wasn't getting the minutes," she says. "I just refined my skills."

It's been quite a journey for Maupin, who arrived at K-State on June 4, 2022, as the 21^st-rated player in the Class of 2022 by Prep Girls Hoops Missouri. As a senior, she earned Class 5 All-State honors and was named Class 5 District 2 Player of the Year. As a junior, she led Webster Groves (Mo.) High School to the state championship finals.

She had a rather large cheering section as well. She's one of 12 children to Micah and Heather Maupin. Six children are biological and six are adopted. There's Eliza, Isaiah, Malachi, Olyvia, Luke, Myah, Adele, Silas, Ezra, Saul, Titus and Nia. They range between 9 and 22 years old.

"My family is strong believers in God," Maupin says. "My parents said, 'We're going to adopt because that's what we've been called to do.' They adopted Nia when she was 10 days old and then it went from there.

"It just kept going and going."

The applause for Maupin from her siblings kept going and going as well after her performance at Baylor.

"They were all like, 'What's going on? Where did you come from?'" Maupin says. "It was great. They're all really supportive. I love that."

The family likely isn't that surprised by Maupin's athleticism. As a high school freshman, Maupin won the Missouri Class 5 state championship in the high jump in her first year of organized track and field competition. She won the state championship again in 2021. She was a natural.

For all of Maupin's talents, she was lightly recruited. She didn't play AAU basketball, which limited her exposure. She was a hidden treasure. K-State assistant coach Ebony Haliburton entered her life during her sophomore season. Maupin committed to K-State during her senior year.

"It was during the pandemic, and we had seen her, and we'd seen her on film as well," Mittie says. "We hadn't seen her a lot as a player. That was an interesting recruiting process because she didn't even visit campus until after she had committed. We loved the way she moved effortlessly, loved her instincts. Now she just had to think less and use those instincts more and her effort is just going to really continue to get better and better."

Boy, did she use her instincts at Baylor. She was so confident that she drained her first-career 3-pointer with 7 minutes, 19 seconds remaining in the fourth quarter, giving the Wildcats their first lead since the opening quarter at 50-49 after trailing by as many as 13 points late in the second quarter.

"It was one of those moments where I was like, 'OK, the offense is stagnant, and I'm wide open, and No. 33 isn't guarding me, so I'm going to take the 3,'" Maupin says, chuckling.

Adds Mittie: "I was shocked that she shot it. The team was shocked that she shot it. It was a surprising shot, to say the least."

The groundwork for Maupin's explosion against the Bears arrived weeks before.

"We started to see her practices improve probably two weeks ago," Mittie says. "To me, that's always the key for seeing success in a game. You want to see success in practice. At the time, there still weren't the minutes, necessarily. There still weren't a ton of minutes available, but now there's that opportunity (as Lee is expected to miss around four weeks while recovering from a fractured ankle) and that door is open, and she's run right through it."

When she ran into the locker room after "The Baylor Game," she was in for a surprise of her own. That's because her teammates doused her with water, celebrating her performance against a top-15 opponent on the road.

"That was awesome," she says. "It was a lot of fun. I'd played such a great game and that was a great way to celebrate. I loved that."

She hopes for even more celebrations down the road. This week, K-State is ranked No. 4 in the AP Top 25 and jumped to No. 2 in the USA TODAY Coaches Poll. The Wildcats, 19-1 overall and 8-0 in the Big 12 Conference, are off to their best start in school history heading into Saturday's 4 p.m. tipoff against BYU, 12-8 and 2-5, at Bramlage Coliseum.

"It's insane," Maupin says of K-State's status near the top of the women's basketball world. "I try to block out the noise, but it's a huge thing. We did that. Our team did that. Nobody else did. It's pretty exciting to know we're that good."

Still, Maupin doesn't know just how good she can be. There really are no limits to the havoc she'll be able to cause for years to come.

"The Baylor game definitely upped my confidence a little bit in that I can play at that level and keep going and keep playing where I can," she says. "I know my limit and I can keep working from there and grow."

Kansas State University Athletics

Players Mentioned

Ayoka Lee

Imani Lester

Eliza Maupin

Gisela Sanchez

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