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Syracuse freshman Priscilla Williams takes 500 shots a day from beyond the arc. Williams arrives at practice early or stays late regularly to shoot 3s on the basketball gun.

“What you need to do is make sure you get up in the morning and take your 500 shots a day,” Eric, Priscilla’s father, said he always told his daughter.

Back when she attended Branson (Mo.) High School, Williams trained with her dad at 5:30 a.m. four or five times a week, and shooting was 85% of the workout. In addition to those workouts, she would reach 500 total shots, about 250 of which were 3s, he said. That routine is how Williams developed into the lethal, deep-shooter that she is now. Eric always said, “shooting is just repetition, repetition.” 

Now a freshman at Syracuse, Williams has increased her pace, firing 500 daily 3-pointers in addition to other shots. The gun counts them automatically, and she tries to emulate game-situations, “sliding shots from slot to slot” because center Kamilla Cardoso will often get swarmed in the paint and forced to locate a kick-out pass. Williams knows she has to move to get open for that, so she practices it during her 500 shots. She knows she needs to be able to sink wide-open looks, too. 

“If you take 500 shots a day, if you’re off, you ain’t gonna be off (for) that long,” Eric said. “Finally something’s gonna go down, but just take your time and shoot the basketball.”

Williams joined Syracuse as the No. 9-ranked Class of 2020 recruit, alongside the No. 5-ranked Cardoso. Through 15 games with the Orange, 14 of which Williams started, she’s become an integral part of the offense. The 6-foot-2 freshman leads SU in made 3-pointers (30), and led the Atlantic Coast Conference in 3-point percentage at one point earlier this season. Her current .411 percentage is a team-high (minimum 15 attempts). 

She starred in a career-high 26-point performance against Miami that included six 3s and a 100% shooting performance from the field. Head coach Quentin Hillsman added that every time she touches the ball, the other team yells that she’s going to shoot. If her shots aren’t falling, she just keeps shooting — like Eric always told her, eventually they will. 

“She’s a threat,” Hillsman said. She’s doing her job and she has the respect of our opponents and she’s creating space for us.” 

For Williams, she was always naturally athletically gifted, but she had to put in the work to strengthen her shooting, she said. The ideal situation is when she’s firing shots without thinking — like she did against Miami. That’s the key to “heat(ing) up very fast,” because it’s “a momentum thing,” Williams said. 

That day, she converted multiple contested deep shots over Hurricanes’ defenders, including three consecutive 3-pointers on three touches in the fourth quarter. Shooting the deep ball is Williams’ role for Syracuse, teammate Tiana Mangakahia emphasized.

“I didn’t think about any of the shots. I just took it and shot it,” Williams said more than a week after the game. “Cause I know I’m a shooter.”

At Branson, head coach Kip Bough said Williams was a dangerous shooter because she was so tall for her age. No one could stop her from shooting 3-pointers.

“We’re not talking toes on the line 3-point, we’re talking deep, deep 3-point (tries) where the other coach is raising his hands like ‘What are you gonna do? What can you do?’” Bough said.

As a freshman, Priscilla Williams has already become the team’s go-to when it comes to shots behind the arc. Courtesy of Rich Barnes | USA TODAY Sports

As a point guard then, she did 90% of the ball-handling for a Branson team that graduated 11 players in the two years prior to Williams’ arrival. The second- and third-best players had season-ending injuries during Williams’ senior year as well, Bough said, but the Pirates were able to compete against state-championship caliber teams.

“People would’ve just expected this is gonna be rough,” Bough said of Williams’ final season. “But all of a sudden we’re in every game, … (We) got a shot, and it was in large part due to Priscilla.”

Bough said Williams is the best Division-I athlete to come out of Branson, Missouri, which is a particularly strong area for girls’ basketball. Her athleticism paired with her ability to shoot the 3 made that possible, he said. Her teammates weren’t as skilled as her which was frustrating, Bough said, and at times they watched Williams’ play like spectators instead of her teammates, Eric said.

Williams was often double- and triple-teamed. No one was able to play her straight up, man-to-man, Bough said, adding that for three consecutive years, “all we’re seeing (are) junk defenses toward her.”

“It got to the point where we knew, if you’re on Priscilla’s team, it was going to be a good day. If you weren’t on Priscilla’s team, it was going to be a long, hard … practice,” Bough said. 

“She was that good.”

In one championship game, she had a defender who played full court defense against her, another who picked her up at half-court and a third who joined if she tried to drive in the lane. Still, Williams had 43 points and they won the championship, Bough said. 

As a junior, she set a school record with 51 points, and regularly put up point totals in the 40s. The day she broke the record, Williams was honored with a special ball pregame for reaching the 1,000-career points milestone. A friend of Bough’s assistant coach came to watch, and joked that ‘I hope you bought a second ball because she might be at 1,000 by the end of the game,’” Bough recalled.

Coming to Syracuse has been an adjustment for Williams, though. Alongside Mangakahia, Cardoso, Kiara Lewis and Digna Strautmane, she doesn’t have the ball 90% of the time anymore, and has had to adjust by working on increasing her off-ball movement. Just like in high school, though, she continues to draw a lot of attention from defenders at Syracuse, Hillsman said.

Back in Branson during Williams’ early-morning shooting sessions at the gym with her dad, she’d do a drill called around-the-world, featuring a sequence of shots from the inside and outside of the arc. Miss two in a row, and she’d start over. 

While Williams shot, Eric said he frequently asked her the same question, one that emphasized the idea that shooting is about repetition. 

“How much do you weigh? And how much does a basketball weigh?” 

Williams would answer that a basketball weighed seven or eight pounds, less than the “X amount of pounds” that she weighed. And Eric responded to his daughter with the same thing every time: with enough practice, enough repetition, that difference in weight “means if you shoot it right, you can shoot it from anywhere.” 

Published on February 9, 2021 at 10:40 pm

Contact Roshan: rferna04@syr.edu | @Roshan_f16