“Angel, we thought when she was playing here, had the potential to play at the next level,” recalls Jerome Shelton. The head girls varsity basketball coach for St. Frances Academy knew that the player with jersey No. 10 was going places, and despite some controversy around her grades in college, she has done it! Angel Reese, a star member of the 2024 WNBA Draft Class, is looking back at her high school years, even if somewhat reluctantly.

A fan recently dug deep into social media and came up with a video of a young Reese at St. Frances, dressed sharply in her school uniform with a sharp chin-length bob cut. The Sky rookie reposted the video to her X account with the caption, “omggg no yall didn’t like where did yall find this 😭😭😭 & that’s why i let yall run wit that lil gpa thing cause i been smart but whateversssss😭😫😘”

Eagle-eyed fans dived deep into social media and are now introducing the world to a studious-looking Angel Reese! Usually found in her athletic garb, the player in the X video dons a different kind of uniform to deliver a speech about her school’s qualities as she invites students to enroll there. But that’s not the contrast catching our eye.

Before graduating from LSU, Reese had a 2-year stint at the University of Maryland but shifted gears and transferred for better basketball opportunities, where she met Kim Mulkey. However, just before she was set to graduate, teammate Flau’jae Johnson’s mother had a comment to offer about her grades after Mulkey’s own words about Reese went viral.

Angel Webb Reese, the Sky player’s mom, had written in an Instagram story, “Folks, please do not send me long text messages with a bunch of grammatical errors it gives me a headache. How do I know you said what you said if I can’t understand what you’re saying.”

Kim Brooks, Johnson’s mom, then implied in a social media post that when Reese was missing games, it was because of bad grades. She indirectly addressed her message to Angel Reese’s mother, “You definitely know about grammar errors when your daughter got a 2.0 or less GPA. 🤦‍♀️ And in fact when writing your smart message you didn’t capitalize nor did you use any periods. 😂”

Well, those days are certainly behind her, as the Sky player put it in an X post of her own in May, “ahhh i graduate on saturday!!! ON TIME IN MY 4 YEARS😘😘” While this was a burden off her back, Mulkey’s comments, or rather emails, on her then-mentee stirred up fans.

Kim Mulkey was in hot water with Angel Reese fans

Back in March, the LSU women’s basketball coach came under the spotlight when emails from her revealed the real reason behind Angel Reese being left off the Wooden Award list last season. While she had played on one of the best teams as a top player, the ‘Bayou-Barbie’ apparently didn’t fulfill some unspecified criteria.

Mulkey publicly said that grades were not the issue, “It’s just there’s a criteria on some of these awards like, a lot of them will have community service stuff. Some of them will have GPAs, yeah. She’s academically fine.” But then Reese missed four straight games from Nov. 17-25 after being benched, which was reasoned as a “coach’s decision” by Mulkey.

While she is out of that system now, Angel Reese has done better than anyone expected in her rookie year in Chicago. Once close with Flau’jae Johnson, the relationship between the two former teammates has also cooled down. Although they had opted to mostly stay out of this controversy with their moms, once Reese graduated, the distance naturally pulled them apart.

But the fact remains that the Sky rookie passed with flying colors even though some critics seemed to dislike the idea of it!