Growing up, Mia Broom always heard her dad say, “If you’re not sweating in warmups, you’re not warming up correctly.” Now a sophomore guard at Columbia, Broom still takes that to heart.
Before her first-ever college game at Duke in December 2024, Columbia’s strength coaches noticed that Broom’s workload was already very high in warmups, based on the trackers they use to monitor players’ health. “You need to chill,” they told her.
About six weeks later, Broom was about to make the lone start of her freshman season at Yale. When she entered the locker room partway through warmups, head coach Megan Griffith noticed she’d sweated through her uniform.
“She played the game before the game,” Griffith told reporters in March 2026. “… I was like, ‘Holy bananas.’”
Fast forward to the end of Broom’s sophomore season, though, and that intensity from the moment Columbia entered the gym turned out to be exactly what the Lions needed. With the team down two starters, Broom stepped up in the Lions’ run to a WBIT title. She averaged 17.4 points, 6.2 rebounds and 5.0 assists in five WBIT games, up from 6.6 points, 2.6 rebounds and 2.5 assists all season to that point.
Broom came to Columbia in fall 2024 from Seattle, where she was used to doing a lot of everything for Lakeside High School. She told The IX Basketball that adjusting to the college level was difficult for her, between everything she had to learn and the faster pace at which she was expected to do it.
After missing the first eight games of her freshman season with an injury, she averaged 4.9 points, 2.5 rebounds and 1.7 assists in 17.2 minutes per game. But she played a lot in some games — reaching 20 minutes nine times — and very little in others, including just four minutes in the Lions’ NCAA Tournament win over Washington.
“Mia is such a lightning rod, and this is what I love about her,” Griffith said in February 2025. “And also, as a coach, you’re trying to corral and harness the energy she provides, literally: physically and emotionally and everything. … So to me, it’s just, can she do it on both ends and in long enough stretches where we can keep her out there?”
Broom returned for her sophomore season in incredible shape — impressing Griffith, who said she usually sees that jump in fitness from upperclassmen. Now Broom, who is often self-deprecating on other topics, proudly says she’s the fittest player on the team.
“I didn’t want anything to hold me back from playing — especially not fitness, something I can control,” Broom told The IX Basketball after the WBIT run.
Griffith also saw Broom embrace some smaller details of the game, including taking charges. Early in the season, Griffith compared her to graduated captain Kitty Henderson, one of Columbia’s all-time greats and Griffith’s favorite player she’s ever coached.
As a sophomore, Broom started three of the first six games, then settled into a reserve role again. But her minutes still fluctuated at times. The coaches saw a player who wanted so badly to contribute on the court that it sometimes worked against her. So they simplified Broom’s role and had her focus on scoring, even though she considers herself a point guard at heart.
“Great scorers need to be great scorers before they’re passers, and Mia gets caught up in, ‘Well, am I the point guard? Am I the wing?’” Griffith said in November. “And … we just really want her to lean into being another scoring guard for us and take that responsibility completely from her.
“But I love what I’m seeing from her. I mean, she’s worked so hard to put herself in this position. … She’s a really difficult guard because she’s so shifty and quick, so we just have to continue to harness her skills and build up her confidence.”
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As the season went on, Broom found a rhythm playing without the ball in her hands and started to settle into the role Columbia needed her to play. In mid-January, she scored in double figures in three straight games for the first time in her career, and her minutes started to tick up.
For Broom, earning more trust from the coaches came down to her consistency — not just in games, but daily.
“If you’re showing up and you have elite habits on and off the court, they know they can trust you,” she said. “And … it’s easy to overcook things and overcomplicate things, but if you’re showing up every day the same way, if you’re just literally making the changes they want you to make, it’s so simple.”
“I’m just proud of her that she’s allowing the coaching points and the feedback to really sink in,” Griffith said in February. “Because I think for any young player, that’s always really hard and it bruises your ego a little bit. But … she’s just trusting the process.”
The coaching staff also made a small but important change about halfway through conference play. Griffith, a former Lions point guard herself, is Broom’s position coach, which meant Broom was working out with her and watching film with her regularly. And Broom wanted to do everything right in front of Griffith, which was an impossible standard.
“Meg, I think you need to stop coaching Mia,” assistant coach Allie Bassetti said one day.
Griffith agreed that some distance might help Broom, so Bassetti took over watching film with her. They replayed games on a large TV in Bassetti’s office possession by possession, with Broom standing up and pointing to where she needed to be on the court.
“I think at that point, I kind of stopped just saying, ‘Yeah, I understand what you’re saying,’ and I really started asking questions of, ‘What am I actually doing?’” Broom said. “Because at that point in the season, I should have known where the correct gap was, but I had to accept the fact that I still wasn’t in the correct gap. And I think asking those questions and just acknowledging the fact that I still wasn’t grasping the concepts is what let me make the changes on the court.”
As Broom improved her positioning and understood the concepts better, she got more minutes in the biggest games. She was sometimes hard on herself afterward, but Griffith urged her to remember the good things she did and let the coaches help her fix the mistakes.
The work Broom had done showed in the Ivy League Tournament semifinals, even though the Lions were upset by Harvard in overtime. Broom played 39 minutes before fouling out and had 12 points, six assists, four rebounds and three steals.
“Leading up to it, I just realized that — I don’t know — it was time to just play basketball,” Broom said. “At that point, you can’t really afford to lose any games. So the only thing my mind was focused on was, what was the task at hand? So I think that’s probably why I had a better game against Harvard. … When I’m present, I’m at my best.”
“That was the loosest and most free that she had played all season, in the most important game of our season,” Griffith said.
After that, Broom’s mindset stayed the same even as her role expanded. Starting point guards Marija Avlijas and Fliss Henderson missed the entire WBIT with injuries, so Broom and junior forward Hilke Feldrappe moved into the starting lineup. Broom played 36.2 minutes per game in the WBIT, up from 22.6 previously.
Broom became a much-needed third scorer for the Lions behind Ivy League Player of the Year Riley Weiss and first-team All-Ivy forward Perri Page. She put up at least 9 points in every WBIT game, highlighted by her 26 points on 10-for-20 shooting, eight rebounds and six assists in a second-round blowout of North Dakota State. Only six other Ivy League players have put up that stat line since 2009-10 — and all six made an All-Ivy team at some point in their careers.
In part because of the film sessions with Bassetti, Broom also stepped up defensively. After a November loss to Saint Joseph’s, Griffith lamented that Broom had blown a few coverages and given up multiple 3-pointers to the Hawks. Contrast that with after the WBIT semifinals against Wisconsin on March 30, when Griffith credited Broom’s defense at the point of attack with setting the tone for the Lions.
“Mia’s been a huge assist, just in terms of being inserted in the starting lineup and doing what she does well,” Griffith said. “So I would just say that that breeds a lot of confidence in everybody else around the ball that, ‘Hey, OK, if I’m recovering, I can get there.’ … We’ve really bought into that team identity of, ‘Hey, we’re going to pressure you and we’re going to make everything difficult.’”
Broom said she knew she could handle her larger role on both sides of the ball from a conditioning standpoint, but the bigger challenge was making sure she stayed focused the entire game. While playing more on the ball again, Broom committed several turnovers, which she criticized herself for in Columbia’s press conferences after the semifinal and final. “I see that I almost had a triple-double today with these turnovers, so that’s cool,” she said after the semifinal.
But what Griffith saw was a player who moved on from her mistakes, at least while the clock was running.
“We talked a lot about … ‘The mistake happens, but can our response be elite?’” Griffith said after the semifinal. “And I thought Mia, Hilke, [forward Susie Rafiu], Perri and Riley did a great job of that.”
Weiss and Broom tag-teamed the point guard duties, with Broom often handling the ball and Weiss organizing her teammates and communicating a lot off the ball.
“Mia’s really great to play with,” Weiss told reporters on March 29. “… She pushes the pace, she moves the ball up the floor, and, yeah, she’s great energy. She stretches the floor because she’s a great shooter — a great scorer as well. So it’s been really great to play with her a lot more.”
In the championship game against BYU, Broom led the Lions with 23 points, six rebounds, four assists, two blocks and a steal. She shot 4-for-8 from 3-point range and 9-for-10 from the free-throw line, prompting BYU head coach Lee Cummard to say afterward that Broom “stepped to the line and just buried everything, just kind of buried us.” Broom was one of three Lions to make the All-Tournament team, joining Weiss and Rafiu.
“I think I just got a lot of confidence from my [teammates],” Broom said after the championship game about her performance in the tournament. “… I learned that I’m a tough player.”
The hope, for Broom and the entire team, is to carry over the confidence and connectedness from the WBIT run into next season. Broom and the Lions peaked at the right time this season, but perhaps that level of play can be closer to their baseline for 2026-27.
Over the summer, Broom wants to work on her finishing, among other things. But it’s also important for her to find balance — between her life on the court and off, and between getting better in workouts and not overdoing it.
“That’s one thing about me is that I can really go hard, but just focusing on quality over quantity is something that I struggle with,” Broom told The IX Basketball. “So just knowing that all the reps I’m taking are very intentional, game-like, and that they’re going to carry over for next year.”
That inner drive is what led Broom to break out when the Lions needed her most. But even before she starred in the WBIT, Columbia always knew that Broom wasn’t afraid to break a sweat — in games, in workouts or even in warmups.
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