A

lexis Peterson still feels like an underdog. There was no sense of anger or vengeance in her voice, though. Peterson sounded calm when talking about how she’s grown as a player and as a leader this year, ready to accept the challenge of guiding a relatively young team after the departure of many role players.

“I think that’s to our benefit,” she said about being viewed as the underdog.

“It’s to be expected,” she replied when asked about SU being picked to finish fourth in the Atlantic Coast Conference.

Syracuse is coming off the best run in its history, making it all the way to the national championship game, ranked No.14 in the preseason and head coach Quentin Hillsman had just finished calling Peterson, along with Brittney Sykes, part of the best backcourt in the country.

Still, she felt like an underdog.

Peterson’s basketball career has been about proving people wrong. It started with the boys she played with growing up in youth leagues. Then it was college coaches, like Jim Foster, then the head coach of Ohio State, who deemed the 5-foot-7 Peterson too small to play in the Big 10 and didn’t offer her a scholarship.

“I proved him wrong,” Peterson said flatly.

That aspect is still a huge part of Peterson’s character. But, as she gets ready to go into her final season, another layer is developing. A heightened maturity level and a newfound ability to put away the past and focus ahead is allowing Peterson to develop into the total leader she’ll need to be for Syracuse this season.

When she came home for the summer, Peterson talked frequently with her mother, Georgia Peterson, and aunt, Carla Norris, about Syracuse’s postseason run. She would rave to both of them about how excited the run made her. Although SU hadn’t accomplished the ultimate goal it also shocked most of the basketball world.

She didn’t talk much about the loss to Connecticut. They both knew she was disappointed with the loss, but she focused more on the wins and then more on the upcoming season.

“When they beat (No. 1 seed and 33-1) South Carolina, that was truly like ‘Oh my god, we can’t believe this,’” Georgia Peterson said. “So I don’t think anything after that would have destroyed their mood.”

Moving past setbacks is something Peterson wasn’t always good at, said Tom Jenkins, her Sports City U AAU coach.

“That was one of the things that I felt like she had to learn to compartmentalize a little bit more,” Jenkins said. “Because in high school, and in AAU, if there was a loss … she didn’t want nothing to do with nobody, and she took it very hard.”

Peterson went back to work out with her personal trainer, Ronnie McClendon. She’d been working out with McClendon since she was in high school. This summer, she took the training up a notch.

The intensity of the drills stayed the same. The difference was that in high school, the sessions usually lasted between 60 to 90 minutes, never exceeding the hour-and-45-minute mark, McClendon said. This summer, the sessions lasted three to four hours. Peterson was in the gym at least four days a week, McClendon said, and would sometimes come in twice in the same day.

The two would work on offensive and defensive drills on the basketball court. Next, they’d move on to strength training before hitting the treadmill. No two sessions were ever exactly the same, according to McClendon, in an effort to break up the monotony.

On top of that, Peterson was running more outside of her work with McClendon. Norris said she told Peterson to run more on her own in high school but she didn’t like doing it so she wouldn’t. In an effort to get into the best shape of her life, though, Peterson needed to change.

McClendon remembers that when Peterson approached him, telling him she wanted to ratchet up the workout level, he smiled at her, expecting that day to eventually come.

“Anytime that happens, it pretty much solidifies that the kid’s arrived,” McClendon said. “That the maturity level is there, the intestinal fortitude is there, the leadership is there. And those are all things we reinforce throughout every workout, throughout every conversation.”

Still, the fiery “prove-it” side of Peterson came through during these sessions. She was taking part in a ball handling and shooting drill, making the first five shots in a row before missing one. Peterson then hit the next four to finish the rep. McClendon remembers seeing Peterson annoyed with herself afterward. She didn’t care that she’d made all the shots but one. She was still upset with the miss.

Norris has seen that attitude from Peterson from the days they were playing against each other on a curbside hoop, and even she sees a change in her. Norris knows that Peterson has more weight on her shoulders, yet she isn’t too worried about Peterson overstressing herself to the point where the game isn’t fun anymore.

“She’s hungry. She plans on leaving it all out there,” Norris said. “She plans on being a 40-minute girl, 40-minute player. She’s just ready to get right back after it.”

A few weeks away from the start of the regular season, Peterson still hasn’t rewatched the tape of the national championship loss to UConn. Her mother says that she doesn’t remember if that’s ever happened before, for her daughter to skip out on rewatching a game.

But for Peterson, not watching isn’t related to do with bitterness from the loss. In fact, she says, it’s quite the opposite. She feels she’s grown from the game and doesn’t need to see it again to feel the difference.

Peterson talks about how the Syracuse players got to live out a dream by playing on college basketball’s biggest stage, about how they surprised teams by making it that far and how the experience from that moment is something the whole team can carry forward.

Peterson says that Syracuse as a whole won, despite the loss in the game. The same player who, according to Jenkins, once went into a shell after losses, was finding positives in a heartbreaking defeat.

“I’ve already taken away from that game what I need to take away from it, and I’m ready to move forward,” Peterson said.

“You move forward by just understanding that you had a once —”

She stopped herself short of saying “once in a lifetime.” Syracuse’s point guard has grown as a person and as a leader this offseason. Still, she has one thing left to prove.

Banner photo by Jessica Sheldon | Photo Editor