LOS ANGELES — A few minutes before USC and Nebraska tipped off on New Year’s Day, Harvard-Westlake girls basketball assistant coach Millie Junio settled into a seat at the Galen Center next to Kiki Iriafen’s mother, Yemi. They watched Iriafen warm up, the star forward who normally lights up hardwood floors with sheer joy. They watched her catch the basketball. They watched her take a few shots.
Mm, Junio thought. Something’s wrong.
“Kiki’s sick?” she asked Yemi.
Maybe she was a little under the weather, Yemi told her. But she wasn’t sick. Iriafen’s face, normally etched in focus before games, was distant. Her energy, normally buzzing pregame, was a fraction sluggish. The alarm bells rung in Junio’s head, a woman former Harvard-Westlake standout Iriafen has come to call “Aunt Millie.” And after a USC win and 14 points for Iriafen on 7-of-16 shooting, Junio approached Iriafen.
They exchanged pleasantries, Iriafen seemingly chipper. Junio cut right through it. The smile didn’t fool her, she told Iriafen.
“What’s going on?” Junio asked. “You don’t have to talk about it today. But I’m here.”
“It’s a lot, Coach,” Iriafen responded, as Junio remembered.
Iriafen had asked for this, in many ways. On a visit to Los Angeles in April, the star Stanford transfer sat on a hotel couch with Lindsay Gottlieb for a conversation that single-handedly accelerated USC’s trajectory; Iriafen committed to Gottlieb, there, for a shot at a national championship. She committed, too, to push herself to be uncomfortable, a top WNBA prospect wanting to develop in a pro-style system.
She was comfortable, indeed, at Stanford, where a breakout junior season earned her the 2024 Katrina McClain Award as the best power forward in the nation. And through 19 games in 2024-25, there has been little sign of discomfort at USC: Iriafen is averaging 17.8 points and 8.3 rebounds per game on 51% shooting. But this is a different world from the one she knew at Stanford, her 6-foot-3 limbs being stretched in a variety of new directions.
She is being tasked, defensively, with more responsibility guarding on the perimeter. She is adjusting to the improvisational flow of Gottlieb’s offense, her points coming more off of in-the-moment actions than the set high-post touches she saw under former Stanford coach Tara VanDerveer. She is figuring out her place next to JuJu Watkins, the transcendent USC guard with an evergreen light.
“I think it was just – trying to still be the same Kiki, but obviously, in a new system,” Iriafen said in mid-January, reflecting on her adjustment at USC. “So, kinda finding where I fit in that system.”
Any actual problems are few and far between for fourth-ranked USC (18-1 overall, 8-0 Big Ten), heading into Thursday night’s matchup with Minnesota (18-3, 6-3) and a final month of Big Ten play. And conversations with Iriafen around her fit do not involve any selfishness, as Gottlieb said: this is about fluidity, as all parties try and hone a USC offensive attack that is near-unstoppable at its best.
But this is an unfinished journey, and one that has weighed on Iriafen at times, her former coaches have seen. A few days after that New Years’ game, Iriafen called Junio and expressed that same sentiment: Where do I fit in?
“I think for her, it’s more – ‘I need to know my role, and I need to know where I fit in in this offense,’ because at the end of the day, the Big Dance is coming up,” Junio told the Southern California News Group.
“‘I need to figure that out now,’” Junio continued, describing her conversations with Iriafen. “Not when we’re in March. Not when we’re in April. Like, ‘I need to figure this out now.’”
Iriafen’s life, from a young age, has revolved around her home in the San Fernando Valley and those in it, her family holding strong Nigerian values of respecting one’s elders. Longtime former Harvard-Westlake coach Melissa Hearlihy, in fact, doesn’t know of a family that has come through her program that has been closer. Iriafen plays for her last name, as Junio said.
She plays, too, for her teammates and coaches, a pressure that can quickly build upon her broad shoulders. Iriafen is a perfectionist, Gottlieb has learned. Hearlihy, her former coach, called her a “pleaser.” And Iriafen has simply wanted to understand the expectations for her in USC’s offense, while being individually frustrated her game wasn’t “at the level she felt comfortable,” as Hearlihy described.
“At no point,” Hearlihy said of Iriafen, “does she want to look like it’s about her.”
Gottlieb, throughout her coaching life, has certainly had a constantly-evolving mind for X’s and O’s. Even more so, though, she is tasked with “having a pulse” on all 15 players on her roster, as she put it. And she felt the same weight, on Iriafen, at the same time as Junio.
“There was just, at one point, where I could sense in her for the first time,” Gottlieb reflected, “her just wearing a little bit of stress.”
So during that early January road trip to Rutgers and Maryland, Gottlieb sat Iriafen down on a couch in their hotel – ironically the same situation, they would joke later, as when she first committed to USC. Talk to me, Gottlieb expressed.
It wasn’t a world-changing conversation, Gottlieb reflected. But it was important, to Iriafen. She told Hearlihy of the conversation at a dinner a couple of weeks later; it was new to Iriafen, Hearlihy reflected, for a coach to encourage her to voice her uncertainties.
“I think it inspired her to try some things differently,” Hearlihy said, “and to have a little bit more confidence in what she needs to do that might be a little bit out-of-the-box for her.”
The returns haven’t been world-changing, on the surface, just yet. Iriafen’s rebounding has dipped well below her pace in 2023-24, as opposing programs have keyed on blocking her out off the glass. She shot just 6 for 15 against Indiana on Jan. 19, and exited last Wednesday’s blowout win against Purdue after banging knees with an opposing player (she’s healthy and cleared to face Minnesota, Gottlieb clarified to reporters on Tuesday).
But glimpses of her continued evolution, in USC’s program, have shined through. Iriafen scored 28 points on 12-of-18 shooting against Penn State on Jan. 12 as Watkins added 35, the two growing more comfortable in their pick-and-roll tandem by the week and Gottlieb increasingly experimenting with actions to utilize both to exploit opposing defenses. On one play against Indiana, as the Hoosiers threw an all-out “box-and-one” defense at Watkins, Gottlieb had the guard set a curl-screen for Iriafen, generating an open layup as two defenders stayed with Watkins.
The next day, Gottlieb consulted with Iriafen and Watkins during individual workouts on how to continue generating live reads for the two to play in space off of one another, rather than simply slowing them down to call sets. They are united, the three of them, in a wholly unique offensive system that continues to hum deep into Big Ten play.
And it was a credit to Iriafen, Gottlieb said, that she had stretched herself.
“You’re trying to maximize JuJu’s unique talents and Kiki’s unique talents and the rest of the team, but also to make ourselves feel very unguardable overall, and try to create situations that are scary for opponents,” Gottlieb said.
“And I think, nobody in the country wants to see JuJu and Kiki clicking, as they have been, in the two-man game.”
MINNESOTA AT USC
When: Thursday, 7 p.m.
Where: Galen Center
TV/radio: Peacock/USCTrojans.com