Family Ties: How a Couple of Cousins Stole the Basketball Show in March

LSU’s Angel Reese and UConn’s Jordan Hawkins won national titles on back-to-back nights, giving their relatives plenty to celebrate.

After leading UConn to its fifth men’s national championship April 3 with 16 points, Huskies sophomore marksman Jordan Hawkins delivered the most memorable quote of March Madness: “The cookout gonna be lit.”

He was referring to a family barbecue to celebrate not only his title but also the one captured by his cousin, LSU forward Angel Reese, the night earlier. Cookouts are a big thing in their extended family. When the cousins were growing up in Maryland, they and a couple hundred of their relatives would meet at a park in Gaithersburg. (Asked how many people were usually there, Hawkins says, “A lot.” When pressed for a more exact number, he says, “A lot.”) 

“There’d be burgers and dogs on the grill and plenty of pickup basketball. “Everybody plays basketball in the family,” says Reese. “It’s fun when you go to a cookout and everybody’s on the court playing and it’s competitive.”

For a time, Reese could take her cousin. “She was bigger,” says Hawkins. “I was a pretty scrawny kid. She used to beat me, but not anymore.” In a theoretical game of one-on-one, both concede the 6'5" Hawkins would now beat the 6'2" Reese simply by shooting over her.

It’s something Hawkins has gotten pretty good at.

“My pops taught me to shoot,” Hawkins says of his father, Craig. “We’d go to the park every day and just shoot all the time. The biggest thing my dad taught me was having the right form and doing the same thing every time.” Dad’s lessons stuck: Hawkins has an uncanny ability to replicate his stroke—straight up and down, with a high, soft release—no matter where, or how, he catches the ball.

That stroke brings to mind another pair of Huskies. After Hawkins lit up Oklahoma State for 26 points while hitting five of nine three-point attempts in December, Cowboys coach Mike Boynton invoked UConn royalty: “Guys like Ray Allen and Rip Hamilton come to mind when I watch him play, the way he moves. I can see him growing into one of the best scorers to come through [UConn] because of his ability to use screens and get shots off with good size on the perimeter.” The comparison to Allen was fitting: Hawkins announced his commitment to UConn with a video in which his highlights were interwoven with clips of Allen.

Hawkins met Allen for the first time in January, when he stopped by a UConn practice. Hawkins picked the Hall of Famer’s brain on everything he could think of, from how to get open to using his jumper to unlock other parts of his game. The next day he dropped 31 points on St. John’s.

Hawkins’s season, capped by an NCAA tournament in which he made half of his three-point attempts, solidified his status as the best pure shooter in this month’s draft, where he’s expected to go somewhere in the middle of the first round. (He officially declared a few days after the title game.)

While Hawkins’s postseason performance was epic, it was completely overshadowed by his cousin’s. Reese showed what makes her one of the most dangerous players in the women’s game, averaging 21.3 points and 15.2 rebounds in LSU’s six tournament wins.

Like Hawkins, Reese was taught the game by a parent: her mom, also named Angel. A rebounding force at UMBC, the elder Angel didn’t push her daughter into basketball. She dabbled in volleyball, track and even ballet. Before she hit a growth spurt in junior high, Reese was a point guard. “I had no choice,” she says. “When I was in third grade, I played on a fifth-grade team and I was like the smallest one.”

She’s taller now, but she still has those ballhandling skills, which make her almost impossible to guard. It wasn’t just Reese’s skill set that got her noticed during the postseason. Her well-documented use of wrestler John Cena’s “You Can’t See Me” hand gesture in the direction of Iowa’s Caitlin Clark was easily the most discussed aspect of both the women’s and men’s tournaments. Clark, of course, did the same thing earlier in tournament with no blowback. When Reese did it, she was called a “piece of s---” (by Barstool Sports’s Dave Portnoy) and a “f---ing idiot” (by Keith Olbermann, who ultimately walked back his comments).

LSU topped Iowa, 102–85, to secure the national title :: Zach Boyden-Holmes/The Register / USA TODAY NETWORK

Reese never backed down, insisting that the ensuing conversation on double standards involving gender (guys talk trash all the time) and race (Clark is white) were necessary. “These are issues that needed to be raised,” says Reese. “A lady came up to me at a store and thanked me for doing what I did, because she said her daughter never had a voice. It’s bigger than me. I mean, I didn’t do it for the publicity and to go viral. It really came from my heart, and that’s what I felt. And I know a lot of people feel the same way.”

Of course, it did go viral. Reese entered the tournament with around 70,000 Instagram followers and now has well north of a million, and her NIL prospects are through the roof. She was so mobbed when she returned to campus that she had to start taking her classes virtually. (She isn’t eligible for the WNBA draft until 2024.) All the buzz landed her on Good Morning America, where she was surprised by Hawkins.

After GMA, the two did a photo shoot together in L.A., where Hawkins was working out with former UCLA star Don MacLean ahead of the draft. He’s been trying to add a few pounds to his 188-pound frame while also looking to improve his game off the dribble. They got to hang a little at the shoot but have yet to solidify plans for a Maryland reunion with the family. But when they do, rest assured: It will be lit.