SEATTLE — Joyful. That is the simplest way to describe how University of Washington point guard Sayvia Sellers plays basketball and makes people feel. The junior is currently leading the Huskies to their best season since the Kelsey Plum era ended in 2017. And she does it all with an infectious happiness — contributing to her team in multiple key ways.
Washington is currently ranked No. 22 in the AP Poll with a 9-1 record, its first time ranked in the top 25 in nearly two years and its first time ranked for multiple weeks since 2017. Sellers is averaging a team-high 20.3 points with remarkable efficiency in addition to 3.5 assists, three rebounds and 1.6 steals per game. Saturday marked another massive performance from Sellers as she notched her second 30-point outing of the season in a tight, five-point contest against Green Bay in Seattle.
“She’s just an incredible talent,” Washington head coach Tina Langley told The IX Basketball on Thursday. “She can score it at three levels. She does a great job of making everyone around her better, really facilitates well, understands the defensive end. She just plays with a great IQ and skill set. And my favorite thing she plays with is joy, and so she’s just incredibly fun to watch.”
Sellers says she is generally a pretty happy person who doesn’t get upset easily, but basketball is especially fun, and the joyful mindset helps her play her best.
“I get to play in front of fans every game and just being able to play with my teammates, they’re a really fun group, and I think it takes the pressure off,” Sellers told The IX Basketball. “Just having fun, you’re not so tense. It’s like, just play freely and how you feel, and I think I take a lot of pride in that. I think this team does too.”
Growing up in Anchorage, Alaska, as the youngest of eight kids with her mom and grandpa, Sellers has always been around family and is very family-oriented. She is very close to them, and they modeled that joy for her.
“My siblings and my mom, my grandpa too, he’s always been a joyful person, and I just grew up around that,” Sellers said. “Like being in the house with eight kids, there’s a lot of fun in that. They’re the reasons I’m playing basketball. With my brothers, when I go out and play basketball with them, it was always fun, so I think I just carry that over when I’m playing.”
The ability to balance seriousness with levity is senior shooting guard Elle Ladine’s favorite thing about playing with Sellers, now in their third season together. While Ladine also plays the game with joy, she is a self-described hot head at times. Sellers’ joy, joke making and matching humor acts as a simultaneously fun and calming counter presence that helps her see the bigger picture.
“At the end of the day, it is just a sport, even though we commit our lives to it, we love it, it’s just putting a ball in the hoop. And we just kind of make light of it together, we crack jokes. Sometimes it helps me realize it’s not that serious. But there’s a good balance with Sayvia, so she’ll get me back to that place in my mind where I’m calm, I’m having fun celebrating,” Ladine told The IX Basketball. “The joy that she plays with is what makes it so fun to play with her.”
It isn’t just the ability to bring levity when needed; her joy shows through in how she plays.
“I mean, you see the beautiful smile, you see her have fun, you see her phone it in after a three,” Langley said, referring to Sellers’ three-point celebration that she said doesn’t have a specific meaning, but she started doing last season with Ladine. “She just plays the game the way you hope all young women play it. We all started playing this game because we love it, and we had fun playing it, and somewhere along the way, we lose it. And I love that she still plays the game with such joy, with her whole heart out there competing. She has great work ethic, but she has fun doing it.”
Growing into her role
Looking solely at the technical basketball, Sellers has developed into one of the nation’s most talented and fun-to-watch point guards. A three-level scorer, the 5’7 guard can hit the deep three, pull up in the midrange, or break down the defense with her dribbling and shiftily attack the rim.
“Having a point guard that is super downhill, super aggressive, just puts a lot of pressure, and that knows how to make the right reads at the same time, it makes everyone’s life easier because we kind of play off each other,” Ladine said. “It’s very helpful having somebody that’s confident with the ball in their hands that much. … Just keep watching. Keep your eyes on Sayvia because she’s super underrated, and she’s literally one of the top five best point guards in the country.”
Sellers’ most obvious growth through her collegiate career is her consistent statistical improvement from season to season. From her freshman year to now, Sellers has improved her field-goal percentage from 40% to 47% and now 49.7%. Her three-point field-goal percentage went from 30.2% to 38.7% to 41.5%, while her free-throw accuracy has gone from 74.2% to 78.7% and now 82.4%. This improved efficiency, in addition to some increased usage, has also boosted her average points per game from 8.5 to 15.3 and now 20.3.
“She’s just very locked in, and because she’s a person that’s incredibly competitive, you see her grow every year,” Langley said. “She has an incredible growth mindset. She’s so eager to be better that she doesn’t have a ceiling in my opinion. She’s just incredibly talented, hard working and humble, and that’s going to have no limits.”
Sellers’ improvement has been key for Washington this season. They started the season with last season’s leading scorer for the Huskies, Ladine, unavailable due to injury. Sellers has led the team in scoring every game so far this season, except one, while also dishing out assists and playing smart defense. Though she contributes every game, she also comes up with some of her biggest scoring performances when they are needed most, in Washington’s tightest games.
In the team’s first bout against power four opposition, facing Utah in Salt Lake City, Sellers tied her career high in scoring with 30 points in the 72-61 victory. Washington’s next biggest test came against the University of Southern California at the Galen Center to open Big Ten play. Though it was a 50-59 loss for the Huskies, Sellers scored 20 of her team’s 50 points. On Saturday, Sellers once again went off for 30 points in a 79-74 home win over Green Bay. Fighting back from an 11-point deficit in the fourth quarter, Sellers made a career-high seven three-pointers in her fourth 30-point performance in the last two seasons.
The overall improvement wouldn’t have happened without Sellers’ hard work throughout the offseason, something Langley highlighted. But Sellers and Langley also pointed to a difference more on the mental side — comfort level understanding what is expected of her and the team systems.
“Probably knowing sets. I didn’t really know much my freshman year, to be honest,” Sellers said of her biggest growth since her freshman season. “I am just more confident in the offense. Like, I know when things get out of order how to get back in the offense. Knowing what coach [Langley] wants out of us has been really important. I think my and [Langley’s] relationship has grown a lot, and what she wants to see on the court from me and what she expects. So I just try to go out there and play hard, make shots.”
Ladine has noticed this in the growth of Sellers’ confidence over the years.
“We always knew she was so talented, but being able to just fit in our system and learn it and just be herself within it has helped her gain a lot of confidence,” Ladine said. “And you can see it out there on the floor, she plays with such a good pace and poise and just a confidence, she brings it to everyone else on the team.”
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Quiet leadership
One major area of evolution that can’t be measured statistically is how Sellers has grown into a leader for the Huskies. Sellers is not the loudest voice in a room, but Langley thinks she has beautifully stepped into the leadership role.
“She’s a young lady who is quiet, but she enters a room and has a presence,” Langley said. “She has such a joy. She has a deep care and love of people. So whether it’s inviting someone to the gym or to study plays or talking through something with them on the floor, she’s just a very personal leader, like people have great relationships with her.”
Senior point guard Hannah Stines has had a front row seat to Sellers’ three-year evolution. A love- and joke-filled friendship, Stines says Sellers reminds her of “one of those pesky younger siblings that is always up to something and mischievous, but I love her,” and they know each other very well, though she noted she’s never had a younger sibling. At the same time, Stines has immense reverence for Sellers’ basketball IQ, which she has seen since her freshman year and thinks is one of her biggest strengths.
Some of Sellers’ leadership relies on her basketball knowledge and ability to share it. Ever the calm presence, she is unlikely to be the hype woman in the huddle, but she will tell her team they need to stop being middle-driven on or that someone needs to be in a different defensive position. On the court, she is the floor general, leading sets on offense and directing her teammates on defense. If someone asks her where they should go in a given play or for help generally, she’s got it.
“She has a very high IQ on the basketball floor, and she understands things that other people don’t, and I think she’s just kind of owned that more,” Stines said. “She’s someone that I feel like our whole team knows that if we go up to her, she knows what she’s talking about. And I feel like she’s just become more open to sharing that knowledge and helping us see what she sees, instead of keeping it to herself. … The things she does say are like really important, really helpful and well thought out.”
In addition to her basketball insights, Sellers has found ways to connect with and support her teammates.
“She lifts us up so much,” Stines said. “She has always been really humble and really helped us with her confidence. But I feel like, especially this year and last year, she’s done a really good job at seeing other people’s strengths, like each of our strengths on the team, and pointing them out and lifting us up. She lifts me up so much, and I feel like she believes in everyone so much, and she’s been able to say it and let us know more and vocalize it. I think she lifts our whole team up a lot like that.”
That belief that Sellers instills in her and her teammates is Stines’ favorite part of playing with the junior guard.
“She’s so good, and she believes in us so much, and it’s just a really good feeling to know and to have a point guard, especially, that wants you to shoot the ball, wants you to be aggressive,” Stines said.
Sellers says she takes pride in how she communicates with people and knowing the different kinds of communication that individuals thrive with. Caring about the person first, Sellers is there to have tough conversations with her teammates or just see how they are doing. She also wants to be the person that people ask questions of and is able to help because she has the answer.
Even though Langley has been telling Sellers she is a leader since day one, it was not something that immediately translated.
“I think coach giving me that confidence to be able to have a voice has been important, but I definitely had to work on it,” Sellers said. “It sounds easy to just tell people what to do, but it’s not. There’s a lot that goes into it.”
Motivation
When Sellers decided to come to Washington, her goal was to become the best player and person she could and win games. As the team as a whole has improved and accomplished more, like playing in the NCAA Tournament last season for the first time since 2017, the vision has expanded. One day, she also hopes to play in the WNBA. But the motivation behind those goals is not as much about personal accomplishments as it is about giving back to the people who have supported her — her family, the coaching staff and her teammates.
“My family, they’ve had to sacrifice a lot for me to be here ever since I started playing basketball … so my family does motivate me a lot,” Sellers said. “And then our coaches, they spend so much time trying to do everything for us. So just being able to show up for them is really special and does mean a lot to me. And then, especially for my teammates, everyone has their own individual goals, but I think being able to show up every day and try to be good for them is really special. And I think our team does a really good job of that.”
Sellers’ genuine selflessness is why Langley considers herself blessed to coach the junior.
“It’s a blessing when you feel like you have the opportunity to come alongside young people who are driven to help everyone around them be great,” Langley said. “You know, she’s talented, talented, but it’s the heart that really makes her special. It’s the way she loves people, and the way she loves this program, and the way she loves helping people achieve their dreams.
“Our mission statement is about helping each other achieve our individual goals as well as our collective goals of becoming, and she couldn’t be a better example of that. That’s what she does every day. So it’s an honor to be a part of her life daily.”
Even though Sellers is not concerned with her personal notoriety, this has the potential to be a breakout season for the guard as her individual talent grows alongside Washington women’s basketball’s national awareness. And the Huskies will continue to advocate for that recognition without prioritizing it.
“I think Sayvia has done a beautiful job of showing up daily and just putting the work in and letting those things come and not really giving a lot of thought to them herself,” Langley said. “But it’s been wonderful to see people get to know her and to be able to celebrate her, because she definitely deserves that.”
