By John Frierson
Staff Writer
Maya Caldwell aims to the best at whatever she’s doing. She works at it, she believes in it and the Georgia women’s basketball junior is going to give it everything she’s got to reach her goals. But Caldwell’s focus isn’t just on herself. She wants you to be at your best, too.
“Even within the team,” coach Joni Taylor said, “if Maya’s having a bad day you’re never going to know it. Her thing is: I make people laugh, I need to be happy to make other people happy, because if they’re having a bad day maybe I can be the one to turn it around.
“She is constantly putting her feelings to the side or making sure she shows up every day with energy.”
Each week in February, in honor of Black History Month, we will be taking a look at a past or present Georgia Bulldog or group of Bulldogs. This week it’s Caldwell, who enters Thursday night’s game against Missouri second on the team in scoring at 10.0 points per game, while also grabbing 3.4 rebounds a night.
But this story isn’t about Caldwell the player, though the things that make her a good person and citizen also make her a good teammate.
“She’s always had a sense of, whatever space I’m in, it’s not for me it’s for other people,” Taylor said.
How many of us, when we were young, thought much about the less fortunate? How many of us actively tried to help?
Growing up in Charlotte, Caldwell and her four siblings (two brothers, two sisters) started a non-profit, Children Empowering Children. Caldwell said she was seven or eight years old when they started it.
“We were doing bookbag drives, canned food drives, school supplies, clothing, and it just started off small, in our neighborhood and the neighborhoods surrounding us,” Caldwell said. “And the plan was to expand on that but eventually I started playing AAU basketball, my brother was playing, my sister was playing and it got to the point where there was nobody really home to host the drives because we were doing so much traveling over the summer for basketball.”
It’s been a while now since Children Empowering Children was active, but it certainly hasn’t left Caldwell’s mind or heart. And it may pick back up again one day, or something new may take its place.
“It’s been put on hold but it’s definitely something that I want to pick back up on when I graduate,” Caldwell said. “It’s a non-profit organization so I realize, I don’t want to say there’s no rush but I know what I want from it and I know that if it’s God’s plan it will happen, and it’s something that I do look forward to.
“I miss it, I miss it a lot, because I like giving back, especially to people who are less fortunate. A lot of people don’t realize that money doesn’t grow on trees and not everyone has everything that you have, and that’s something that my parents really made sure we knew about. So I can’t wait to get back to that.”
Caldwell said she always thought Children Empowering Children would be the first non-profit she helped create and operate, not the only one. And that doesn’t surprise Taylor at all.
“I would say Maya definitely knows that she wants to do something for the greater good but I don’t think she can pinpoint right now exactly how that’s going to manifest itself,” Taylor said. “But I definitely think she understands what she needs to do in life and what she wants to do is a higher calling than just for herself.”
Early in her freshman season, Caldwell was asked if there was anything about playing college basketball that had surprised her. This was her answer: “It goes without notice, but as a college basketball player you’re really spoiled, especially in the SEC. You have things that other players don’t get, whether that’s lower (Division I) or a D-II school. Sometimes it goes over my head and I have to come back to the realization that this is really a privilege and a blessing, so there’s a lot of privileges that we have that kind of go unnoticed.”
Because of the efforts of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Rosa Parks and so many others whose names are not as well known, Caldwell said, “every day is a blessing,” which is why Black History Month means so much to her.
“This month is, and I’m not just speaking for myself when I say this, but this month is important — it’s very important,” she said, though she wishes that the achievements of African-Americans were celebrated more throughout the year, not just in February. “Myself included and the black community, we know our history and we know where we come from.”
For Taylor, who grew up in Mississippi and is the daughter of a pair of educators, including a history teacher, Black History Month has always had a lot of meaning.
“We talked a lot about black history and civil rights, all of it, growing up in the ’70s and ’80s in Mississippi,” she said.
As Georgia’s coach, Taylor spends a lot of time talking with her players about things beyond the game. “For me it’s about diversity and inclusion in all ways and in all forms, and that’s what we’re about, that’s what our team is about and that’s the message we try to spread.”
