Nine-year-old Aliyah Boston stood at the free throw line while her teammates prepared to box out in a game in the U.S. Virgin Islands’s sports, park and recreation league. She converted a pair of free throws, having now scored all 50 of her team’s points. But in the final minutes, Boston fouled out, forced to watch the rest from the bench.
Immediately after her departure, a player on the opposing team converted a shot, sending Boston’s team to a 52–50 loss. Boston, the only girl on her team, was extremely competitive and hated losing.
“She cried for I don’t know how long, but she was drenched,” her mother Cleone recalls.
For Boston, scoring 50 in a two-point loss may have been a great individual performance, but it was not good enough. She wanted to be , and that meant winning the game. Now a 6'4" junior forward at South Carolina who rocks iconic multicolored braids, she never thought back then she would be in the position she is now.
Boston’s zeal for progression has led her to become a two-time All-American, a National Defensive Player of the Year and the Gamecocks women’s basketball record-holder for the most consecutive double doubles. The genesis of her rise through the determination of her father, Algernon, and her sister, Alexis, on a makeshift court dubbed “Boston Arena” in her driveway.
Al bought one of the first basketballs for his daughters from a local K-Mart in St. Thomas. Boston and Alexis—the latter of whom is two and a half years older—had many battles on the semi-half court circle with a free throw line during the week and on early weekend mornings.
If Boston wasn’t attempting to beat her older sister in a game of one-on-one, she was giving her best shot in competing against her dad.
“I would not give them a free bucket, they had to work hard for every shot,” Al says. His presence at games in St. Thomas was so regular that Cleone recalls a time when a referee asked her husband about his ability to attend every game.
“The referee came up to him and asked him jokingly, ‘you don’t work?’” Cleone says. “I’m used to seeing moms at all of these games.”
Boston and Alexis’s passion for the game, meanwhile, continued to grow. One summer, both daughters attended a basketball camp in Massachusetts where Cleone’s sister, Jenaire Hodge, lived with her daughter Kira Punter. Following the camp, the Bostons were left with a tough decision about the future of their children.
They knew better opportunities for growth of their daughters’ skills were a long way from home. Despite it being more than 1,700 miles away from them, the Bostons allowed Alexis and Boston to remain in Massachusetts with Hodge after their camp in summer 2014.
However, there was one key caveat.
“If it could help them develop their basketball skills to the point they could each get a college scholarship, nothing else,” Cleone says. “Not play in the pros, not play for [Team] USA, not get gold medals, not be a top player in the country.”
The Boston sisters swapped the pristine beaches and 70-to-80-degree year-round weather for extremely cold winters in Worcester, Mass., to live with Hodge and Kira.
Hodge immediately made sacrifices for both Boston and Alexis to feel at home, all while taking care of her own daughter. Occasionally, while working a busy schedule in the fast-food industry, she cooked some of Boston’s favorite foods like curry chicken, oxtails, fried plantains and potato stuffing. But more than anything, Boston gained a much greater value in responsibility from the experience. “She definitely made us do our chores,” Boston says of Hodge. “It also made me grow up faster than if I would have still been staying with my parents because they could have helped me with certain stuff.”
On the hardwood, it did not take Boston a long time to adjust. At Worcester Academy, coached by Sherry Levin, Boston changed the program forever. She became the school’s all-time leading scorer, led it to two consecutive New England Prep School Athletic Council Class AA championships and became a three-time Massachusetts Gatorade Player of the Year. She also played on the 2018 U-17 USA team that won a gold medal and was named a McDonald’s High School All-American and Jordan Brand Classic participant.
When Boston was not playing for the Academy, she was playing for the iExcel travel team in New York, and her parents would come up to watch her and her sister play during holiday tournaments.
Before Zia Cooke—a junior guard on the South Carolina women’s basketball team—became Boston’s teammate, she witnessed Boston’s dominance during the time when the two played in the Junior Olympics together. Their relationship, which spans a decade, also developed from being high school All-Americans together.
“I knew she was a dog,” Cooke says of her first impressions of Boston. “She has always been unstoppable but to think that I would play with her on the same college team has been special.”