She’s a Coast hoops star who battled boys on the court. Now she’s got D1 interest.
As Hayleigh Breland worked her way through her first couple of practices with the Stone High girls basketball team, it quickly became obvious to head coach Sam Smith that he had to find a way to put his freshman guard on the court.
“I think she just wanted it,” Smith said of Breland’s freshman season. “There wasn’t a doubt after the first or second practice that she’s our starting point guard. We needed that and she filled in right away. She had the opportunity to shine, and she did.”
As a freshman in 2018-19, the 5-6 Breland averaged 16.1 points, 3.0 assists, 5.4 rebounds and 3.5 steals a game as she helped pave the way to a 25-2 season.
Breland hasn’t let up as a sophomore, putting up 17.2 points a game for a 17-4 squad and drawing significant interest from Division I programs.
An easy transition from junior high to the high school squad is likely rooted in Breland’s early experiences in competitive basketball, suiting up for an AAU boys team coached by her uncle, Brian Breland. She first started going to practices for her uncle’s team at about the age of 6 and began playing in games at 10.
“My uncle asked me if I wanted to play, and I just started playing. It started from there,” Hayleigh said. “My first time playing with girls was my eighth grade summer. I’ve been playing with boys for a long time.”
Her uncle mainly used her as a sharp shooter during games against boys, finding ways to set her up for jumpers. But there were occasionally times when she’d take a tumble.
“Sometimes, they’ll knock me down,” Hayleigh said. “My uncle always told me to get back up. This is going to make me tough.
“Boys are more physical than a lot of girls. Going against that contact and their speed helped me advance to playing with girls.”
Brian Breland recalls one of the high points of her AAU career as a 10-year-old being a 25-point performance against Anfernee Hardaway’s squad in Atlanta.
“They beat us by 30, but she had 25 in the game. She was our leading scorer,” he said. “When she got out there, I knew they were not going to play defense on her. So I told her to shoot the ball. The first shot, she made. The second shot, she made it. On the third shot, they tried to go out and block it. She did a pump fake and made the basket. The crowd went crazy.”
As a sophomore in high school, Hayleigh is quickly hitting all the marks needed to become a major Division I prospect.
“She’s probably as good a passer as she is a shooter or scorer,” Smith said. “She can do them all.
“She can create her own shot, go to the basket. We can do other things that can help her, set up picks to free her open.”
Like father, like daughter
While her early experience as part of an AAU boys team likely sped up her development, Hayleigh also had plenty of help from her father.
Willie Breland was a junior forward on the 1997-98 Stone High squad that won the Class 4A state championship. Standing at 6-6, he earned a spot on the Sun Herald’s All-South Mississippi team as a senior before moving on to play at Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College.
“I remember Willie quite well,” Smith said. “He was an inside player, tall, very good post player.”
Along with her uncle, Hayleigh’s father been an important figure in her development.
“There’s a community park we stay at,” she said. “He puts cones out and we do drills, things like that.”
As for the 1998 state championship, that’s a topic that comes up often during the back-and-forth between father and daughter.
“All the time. All he does is brag,” Hayleigh said with a smile and an eye roll. “’You got to win a state championship, you got to win a state championship. I won a state championship. This is going to make you win a state championship.’ That’s all he talks about.”
Her father’s playful boasting serves as extra motivation.
“I’ve got to live up to what he did,” she said. “People tell me he was really good. I’ve got to live up to it and just try. He always tells me to be better than him.”
Southern Miss offer
Hayleigh is already building an impressive legacy of her own at Stone High with just six losses through her first 48 contests.
Even before she played a single high school game, she grabbed the attention of at least one college coach.
“The first time I heard about her she was in the eighth grade playing summer ball,” Smith said. “An assistant coach at USM contacted me and said, ‘We like her, she’s really good.’”
The summer after Hayleigh’s freshman season at Stone High, USM head coach Joye Lee-McNelis offered her a scholarship.
“That was a big day for me,” she said. “When she told me, I just felt like I had to give that back to my people here because a lot of people haven’t done that here. To come up from working hard and staying focused, I felt like I just had to give that back to community. Getting my first offer from a D1 school as a freshman, I felt like that was big. I knew more were going to come because I’m going to keep working.”
Hayleigh has been playing with the Alabama Starz AAU girls squad during the summer, and that experience has helped her realize there’s still room for improvement.
“When I went and played with them, I’d never seen girls play like that,” she said. “I was used to boys playing real fast and quick, but these girls were really good. I’ve always been the top person on a team, the leader. There were a lot of leaders on this team. I need to step up. I realized this summer that I need to step up my game a lot because these girls want to do what I want to do, and that’s to improve and go to the next level.”
Smith is confident she has the work ethic necessary to to meet her goals.
“When we open the gym, she’s the first one here and the last one to leave,” he said. “She’s consistently working on her game.”
