Baylor’s Skylar Jones has landed on the Cheryl Miller Small Forward of the Year Award preseason watch list, according to an announcement Tuesday afternoon from the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame.
Jones arrives in Waco after a productive season at Louisville, where she averaged 8.4 points per game and filled the stat sheet in a handful of other ways. She pulled down 100 rebounds, recorded 51 steals to rank second on the team, and led the Cardinals in made free throws with 57 on 77 attempts, a 74% mark.
The Chicago native played in 34 games for Louisville in 2025-26 and reached double figures 15 times. Two of those performances topped 20 points. Her best scoring night came in a six-point win over Colorado in the third game of the season, when she put up 21 points on 8-of-15 shooting from the field, hit one 3-pointer and went 4-of-5 at the line.
Louisville finished second in the Atlantic Coast Conference regular-season standings with a 15-3 league record, and Jones averaged 7.4 points per game in conference play.
Her college career before Louisville came at Arizona, where she spent two seasons and appeared in 64 games with 40 starts across the Pac-12 and Big 12. As a sophomore, she averaged 10.7 points per game, finished third on the roster with 341 points and led the team with 52 steals. She also had a career-high 30 points against TCU, going 9-of-11 from the field.
Jones opened her college career with Pac-12 All-Freshman Honorable Mention honors and came to Tucson as a four-star recruit and top 100 prospect in the ESPN HoopGurlz class of 2023 out of Whitney Young High School.
Fan voting for the award will begin Friday, Oct. 30, with three rounds scheduled. The initial watch list of 20 players will be trimmed to 10 in February and then to five in March.
Those five finalists will be presented in late March to Miller and the Hall of Fame’s selection committee, which will choose the winner. That group includes media members, head coaches, sports information directors and Hall of Famers.
The 2027 Cheryl Miller Award winner will be announced on a date to be determined, along with the other four players named to the Women’s Starting Five. The remaining honors in that group are the Nancy Lieberman Award for point guard, the Ann Meyers Drysdale Award for shooting guard, the Katrina McClain Award for power forward and the Lisa Leslie Award for center.
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