After suffering a major injury in the 2025 NCAA Tournament, former Iowa college basketball player Caitlin Clark made sure to send kind notes to the just injured JuJu Watkins.
With a legendary tournament run this year, No. 1 USC standout JuJu Watkins set the foundation for etching her name in March Madness folklore. Plans came screaming to a stop, though, when the 19-year-old tore her ACL on Monday during an ugly landing in the first quarter of her school’s 95-59 second-round victory over No. 9 Mississippi State.
Having previously scored positions on two consecutive First-team All-American teams in her two college basketball seasons, Watkins was on a Caitlin Clark-like path. She will now miss the whole tournament and probably the beginning of next year while she recovers.
As recently as last year, Clark, the face of women’s collegiate basketball, sent a friendly note of encouragement for injured Watkins;
“Sending all my thoughts and prayers to JuJu,” Clark tweeted to about 500,000X followers. She wrote with a love emoji, “Kid will come back stronger than ever.”
For the 30-3 Trojans, Watkins averaged 23.9 points, 6.8 rebounds, and 3.4 assists this year; he was also the expected choice to take AP Basketball Player of the Year.
Through her first two years at USC, she has scored 1,709 points. Independent of gender, Clark scored 1,662 and finally established the all-time collegiate basketball scoring record.
“If I told you that I wasn’t rattled seeing JuJu on the floor crying,” USC coach Lindsay Gottlieb remarked following game. “This is a human game, and so I obviously try my best to be what I need to be for the team, but internally it’s a lot.”
” Clearly, just heartbroken if there is a significant injury for JuJu, but at the same time, I hope she can at some point see just the significance she has here that goes so far beyond just her talent and ability,” Gottlieb said. “I mean, that’s rather what is generational about it, the way she’s galvanized everyone.”
2025 Third-team All-American Kiki Iriafen replaced her and scored 36 points on 16/22 shooting in 31 shots. For the rest of the competition, she will prove absolutely indispensable for the Trojans.
“We didn’t want to let her down,” Iriafen stated following game. “We simply want to keep dancing; so, whatever it takes is what I intended to do. It simply reflects our toughness, in my opinion.”
Gottlieb is sure her squad will be able to mobilize. “We know that we have a team that will be stepping up and that our locker room does not have any punks,” she remarked. “This team rallied, they rallied for [Watkins] they rallied for each other.”