Dylon Harrison
Staff Writer
With the start of every new sports season, there will be players who begin the final stretch of their careers in an ISU uniform. One of these players is ISU women’s basketball star, Saylair Grandon.
Grandon, a computer science major, will be graduating in the upcoming spring semester after four years at ISU.
She came to ISU after graduating from Westview High School in Phoenix in 2015. In high school, Grandon played basketball all four years, as well as one year of softball.
During her high school basketball career, Grandon averaged 14 points per game, and was named team MVP three separate times. In college, she averages 8.1 points per game.
Grandon chose to come to ISU out of high school after being impressed by her visit to the school.
“The girls here, it just had a good vibe,” Grandon said. “Especially when I went on other visits, you could kind of tell the difference.”
She said her decision was helped by the fact that she liked the coaching staff, especially head coach, Seton Sobolewski.
During her first season at ISU, Grandon played in 26 games totaling 6.9 minutes per game. Her season-high was 23 minutes in a game against Sacramento State.
Last season, she started in all 32 games and had a season average of 10.8 points per game. She was also named to the Big Sky all-tournament team, due to her average of 22.3 points per tournament game.
In the 2016-2017 season, Grandon missed a few games in February and March due to a broken finger. This was the only time she sat out due to an injury.
“It’s bittersweet,” Grandon said about this being her final year at ISU. “I feel like that’s very typical, but I think that’s the perfect way to describe it.”
After graduating, Grandon hopes to go overseas and continue playing basketball. Her country of choice would be Germany, but she is willing to go anywhere she can.
If she is unable to make a career in basketball, she’s hoping to go into a career related to her expected degree in computer science. She hopes this job would be related to either information insurance or programming.
“It’s just kind of interesting to know that you can build stuff out of a computer that people use every day,” Grandon said. “I think it’s a very useful degree, and it can be applied anywhere.”
Grandon has been playing various sports for most of her life but did not always plan to be a college athlete.
“I guess college basketball is something that I didn’t really realize I wanted to do until I was a junior,” Grandon said. “After that, it kind of just landed me here.”
Grandon said she hasn’t accomplished all her basketball-centered goals but hopes to complete them by the end of this season.
“My biggest goal that I want to accomplish is winning a conference tournament,” Grandon said. “And then just a bunch of sub-goals to try to meet that big one.”
Grandon said throughout her time here her biggest inspirations have been the coaching staff and teammates, Freya Newton and Grace Kenyon.
To the ISU community, Grandon said she would like to say, “Thank you, pretty simple, but I think I got what I wanted out of this. Hopefully I can get a little more, and I think I got what I needed to hopefully be successful in life.”
