WICKED SMAHT

South Carolina cut down the nets last season behind standout performances from ALIYAH BOSTON. This year? The best player in college basketball is Arizona using her photographic memory for the game to outwit defenses throwing everything at her

- MICHAEL ROSENBERG

It's winter on the mainland, and Aliyah Boston reigning National Player of the Year and pride of St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands is sitting in South Carolina's practice facility, explaining how to get a taste of the Caribbean. What matters here is not her chosen restaurant (Reggae Grill, a Jamaican place just outside Columbia) or her standing order (curry chicken with a side of mac and cheese), but the way she gives directions: "You're gonna see a stoplight. You're gonna drive over the bridge," she says. "There's going to be a gas station-it might be a Shell-to the right. There is gonna be a big Cayce sign to the left. Make that turn; you're gonna drive; it's a school zone.

And then once you see the little colorful mural, you're going down two streets and then make a right... there's gonna be one stop sign ... and then it's going to be to your left. The building is yellow." A quick drive later confirms she is correct about all this (and it is a Shell). But does she, um, know the name of the streets? "Nope," she says, laughing. "Not one street." Give Boston a map, and it might as well be in a foreign language. Ask Boston to memorize a page of text, and she has no chance. But send her on a winding drive with numerous turns just one time, and she can do it again and again. Once, she had to prepare to answer a big, complicated question for a class. Her classmates studied how to complete the problem. Boston just drew the diagram from memory and got an A.

Basketball is an anticipatory sport. Some players sense where the action is going—an intuition that they can’t quite explain. That’s not Boston. Her feel for the game, she says, is good but not exceptional. What separates her is her visual memory. If she has seen anything once, she has seen it a thousand times.