Malia Samuels’ coaches and teammates often refer to her as “Pitt,” short for pitbull. She got the name at 14, when she was going head-to-head with 17-year-olds, fearless and feisty. It stuck.
Now, she’s bringing that effort and intensity to a short-handed USC team, as a leader who has been on the court at the Galen Center longer than any of her other teammates.
Before the season started, USC head coach Lindsay Gottlieb told reporters she was impressed with the growth Samuels had made in the offseason, both on the court and off, “getting the team together.”
Samuels’ name won’t be found at the top of any scoring leaderboards. She’s averaging 3.6 points per game this season and shooting 33% from the field and 28.1% from three. Yet, she’s gone from a combined two career starts in her first two years to starting 17 of 23 games as a junior.
Samuels told The IX Basketball that as her minutes have increased, she’s also been thinking about “how to get the most out of [my teammates], while also navigating my own play.”
Samuels is the Trojans’ defensive engine: a 5’6 ball of energy who wreaks havoc the moment she checks in. She’s racked up 36 total steals in 23 games this season after posting 33 in 35 games all of last year and just 13 in 23 games as a freshman.
In her first year at USC, Samuels averaged 8.7 minutes per game. As a sophomore, that crept up to 12.5 minutes. This year, she’s nearly doubled it at 23.7 minutes a night. Her assist numbers have followed the same arc: 0.8 per game, to 1.3, to 2.7 this season. She’s become a legitimate facilitator on top of being USC’s most relentless pest.
“We hold Malia to a really high standard,” Gottlieb told reporters after the Trojans’ hard-fought win over Indiana on Feb. 12. “We know what she’s capable of. We know who she is as a person. We know who she is as a player. She was on point tonight with distributing the ball, three assists, no turnovers. She changes the game defensively. She got to the free-throw line. I thought, all around, she just came in and did what we know she’s entirely capable of doing, and did it at a really high level.”
With three minutes left in the game, Samuels had a steal, followed by a deflection, followed by a tie-up, disrupting any attempts Indiana made at building momentum. She made two free throws with 1:46 left to bring USC’s lead to 3 points.
“It feels good to have your coach trust you in these late-game situations,” Samuels said. She noted that prior to the Indiana game, Gottlieb tasked her with helping rally her teammates, while also giving solid minutes.
Samuels said that as a child, her dad would buy her an ice cream cone depending on how many times she “touched the ball,” a habit that’s evident in how she plays defense. It’s not always the flashy steals (though sometimes it is). It’s deflections, tie-ups, poking the ball from the opposing player’s hand at half court, interrupting momentum wherever she possibly can. Her active hands are those of someone who understands that impact doesn’t always show up in the stat sheet.
“You can always have a bad offensive game,” Samuels said. “But you can never have a bad defensive game. That’s all effort.”
Three assists and zero turnovers won’t make a highlight reel, but for a team navigating a challenging Big Ten schedule, that kind of frenetic, controlled chaos is the difference between a good possession and a wasted one. Samuels doesn’t calm a game down; she speeds it up, gets under her opponents’ skin, and forces them into mistakes before they realize what happened.
“Defensive is something I’ve always prided myself on,” Samuels said.
The Trojans sit at 16-9 overall and 8-6 in the Big Ten. They are in the NCAA Tournament conversation, but are fighting for seeding. They have to rely on a defensive identity, and the play of players like Samuels to inject life into a lineup the second they touch the court — whether it’s challenging some of the best point guards in the country for 94 feet up the floor or pestering post players 10 inches taller than she is under the basket.
“The main thing for me is doing whatever it takes to win, whether it shows up on the stat sheet or not,” Samuels said. “I’ll put my body on the line, whatever, to help the team win.”
In the second half of a year that hasn’t seen as many notches in the win column as the Trojans would like, Samuels is hopeful her squad can “win out,” make a run in both the conference and NCAA tournaments, and downright compete. “Our record doesn’t show how scary we are.”
