Olivia Miles Is Shredding Defenses as a Freshman. How Far Can She Go?

Olivia Miles doesn’t remember when she realized she was good at basketball. She does remember when other people discovered she was good at basketball. This happened almost as soon after she started fifth grade.

“People were just telling me that I had the ability,” she said.

It was as obvious to anyone who saw it that day as it is now in the N.C.A.A. tournament, where Miles, Notre Dame’s 5-foot-10 point guard, has already made history by becoming the first freshman in either the women’s or men’s tournaments to record a triple-double. Miles scored 12 points, 11 rebounds, and 11 assists in her first tournament game against Massachusetts, which was won 89-78.

“It’s always nice for me to see the triple-double, because it reassures me that I’m putting a lot on the court,” she said. “It’s fun to get these stats — to leave my mark and leave a legacy.”

Miles, 19, can talk to triple-doubles like a good friend. The one she got in the first round of the tournament was the second of her college career. She is often just a few rebounds or assists away from another one.

In Notre Dame’s second-round drubbing of Oklahoma, the No. Miles led the fifth-seeded Fighting Irish, a seed, to 108, the highest score the program has ever achieved in its tournament history. She had 9 points, 7 boards, and 12 assists in that game.

Those numbers are a testament to Miles’s skill, but also to the trust Niele Ivey has put in her first recruit as Notre Dame’s head coach. Miles was ranked No. ESPN HoopGurlz ranked Miles 8th in her class. She committed to Notre Dame two days after Ivey (a former Notre Dame star player, assistant coach) assumed the top job in 2020.

“I’ve basically given her the ball and said, ‘Give me the ball back in four years,’” Ivey said.

Miles is a ball-handler. She is Notre Dame’s leading scorer, but she averages 7.4 assists per game — second only to Iowa’s Caitlin Clark in that category nationally.

These assists are her most eye-popping highlights reels. Often, they occur in transition after only a few seconds have been cut off the shot clock.

“My first practice with her, she gave me like three open shots immediately,” said guard Dara Mabrey, a senior. “I was like, ‘Whoa, this is going to be fun.’”

Miles can read defenses with a near-professional speed, evaluating them quickly and usually finding a teammate eager to score. She sees the court with clarity through her signature sports goggles (no, she’s never wanted to try contact lenses).

“She’s got probably the best vision I’ve seen on anyone,” said Ivey.

Miles credits this ability to soccer, which she played in Phillipsburg, N.J. as a child, long before she ever stepped on the court. It was her first sport, and she continued playing every fall into high school — even after the point when she might have just focused on basketball.

“I feel like reading defenders, looking at open spaces and finding where to make the right pass at the right time — those parts of soccer really translate to basketball,” Miles said. She believes that her endurance has been improved by diversifying her athletic pursuits. “It’s helped me a lot to get used to different movements, different turns and cuts,” she said.

Miles also studies N.B.A. W.N.B.A. and Miles also study N.B.A. She can imagine many possible play options, thanks to her players. It’s hardly a revolutionary tactic, but watching Miles play, her passing and her strategy seem much closer to the professional level than those of most of her peers.

“Sometimes we’ll be darting up the court in transition as fast as we can, and she’ll see something and make a pass,” Mabrey said. “I’m like, ‘Dude, how did you even see her? How did you know that was going to happen?’”

As she explains it, Miles felt she had to take phrase “student of the game” literally because she hadn’t grown up watching much basketball. Her father is a runner and likes soccer, and her mother didn’t have an interest in sports. They didn’t realize the potential Miles had and the path she would need to take to reach them.

“I didn’t even know that you could go to college to play basketball,” Miles said. “Other people just had to tell us, like, ‘The next step for her is this.’”

The more serious she got about basketball, the more time she spent studying YouTube videos and Twitter clips of Trae Young and Stephen Curry, Arike Ogunbowale — another youth soccer player turned Notre Dame basketball star — and, she grudgingly admits, Sue Bird.

“Even though she went to UConn and it’s a whole big thing, I really love watching her play,” Miles said of Bird and their teams’ rivalry. “I mean, her vision is ridiculous.”

Cultivating her own vision has become Miles’s primary mission, one she is so singularly focused on that she elected to forgo her senior season at Blair Academy, a New Jersey boarding school. The season had already been postponed a number of times because of the coronavirus pandemic, so Miles proposed to Ivey that she become Notre Dame’s first early enrollee for women’s basketball, joining the team in late January 2021.

“I was like, OK, we’re not going to have a season and I’m just going to be stagnant,” Miles said. “At my high school, doing nothing — when I could be learning and growing in both academic ways and on the court.”

For athletes who play fall sports like football, early enrollment is common because they can get an easier transition to college. But for Miles, it meant starting both college and college athletics in the middle of conference play — and running the floor for her older and more experienced teammates.

The lessons of those early games have been bearing fruit at exactly the right time, with the Notre Dame offense clicking under Miles’s command. Miles has been the leader of one attention-grabbing win in the tournament. Next, she will try to help repeat one of Notre Dame’s biggest wins of the season, a regular-season triumph over North Carolina State, when the teams meet again in the round of 16 on Saturday — with the Wolfpack as a No. 1 seed.

“I want her to have fun, I want her to lead our team and push pace, and I want her to play with freedom,” Ivey said. “In other words, I want Olivia to play her brand of basketball.”