Photo credit: Trevor Cockburn | The Breeze
When an athlete graduates college, his or her collegiate career is typically over. JMU women’s basketball forwards Anne Diouf and Morgan Smith had the chance to play one more season while they earned master’s degrees.
Neither Diouf nor Smith played for the Dukes prior to the 2020-21 season, both coming to JMU as transfers. Diouf played three seasons at Georgia Tech and Smith played three seasons at Georgetown.
“After the four years I did at Tech, I decided that I wanted to leave and go somewhere else where I can do my basketball career and potentially start my master’s,” Diouf said. “I talked to [head coach Sean O’Regan] and I really had a great conversation with him. Everything he told me were things that I was actually looking for in a coach.”
Despite only getting to play for JMU for one season, Diouf made it count, and worked hard in practices and grew tremendously as a player, scoring a season-high nine points and career-high 13 rebounds and three assists against George Washington on Dec. 13.
“One of the best things she’s done for us is have positive energy,” O’Regan said. “She’s taken that role in stride, and that’s been really important.”
Diouf and Smith are in the same graduate program: sport and recreation leadership. Pursuing a master’s degree while being an athlete may sound overwhelming to some, but Diouf said it hasn’t been bad because she’s interested in what she’s learning.
“I was a little bit stressed coming here as a graduate transfer,” Diouf said. “But when Coach O told me that [I] won’t be the only one because Morgan would be coming as well, I was very relieved because I was like, at least I’ll have somebody that I can relate to.”
The two said being in the same grad program has been helpful for them as classmates and teammates because their schedules line up almost exactly. They’ve formed a close friendship through sharing the same experience at JMU.
“It definitely makes everything a lot easier,” Smith said. “We live together, so literally every second of the day, we’re together.”
An injury early into the season sidelined Smith after she played in only three games. Although she didn’t have the season she wanted, Smith said she always a source of motivation and positivity on the sideline, just like Diouf.
“I think what they did was raise the intensity of being at a high-pitch program for four years prior to this,” O’Regan said. “They understand how hard you have to go, how physical you have to be, I think that’s what really elevated our whole team.”
“My undergrad was actually harder than this master’s program,” Diouf said. “I used to take four to five classes and this [program], I’m only taking three classes.”
One of the biggest differences in a team with graduate students is the age difference; players can be anywhere from 17 to 23 years old. Recruiting a graduate student is also completely different from recruiting an incoming freshman or an undergrad transfer.
“I think everybody has their inner kid, and it’s good to be around people younger than you,” Smith said. “It allows the opportunity for me to help mentor or help them point out things that I may see that they don’t see yet, as they’re still growing as players.”
Diouf said the most surprising part of her time at JMU was how welcoming and accepting the team was of her.
“Just being in the locker room with them makes me happy,” Diouf said. “Especially as a foreign player, you don’t have your family around you so you tend to miss them and sometimes, you feel like you don’t have nobody with you … they are just always making sure that I am okay.”
Story originally published by The Breeze.
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