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LAS VEGAS — Shaylee Gonzales was nervous, perhaps moreso than she's ever been.
No, this wasn't before winning a West Coast Conference Tournament title a few years ago or playing top-billed Stanford in an NCAA Tournament game. It wasn't before the BYU star led the Cougars to a 15-1 record in WCC play and the program's first regular-season conference title since 2015.
It wasn't even before BYU's regular-season home finale this year, a 63-39 win over Gonzaga in front of a record-setting home crowd that all-but clinched the league title.
No, Gonzales wasn't even wearing her BYU uniform when she felt so nervous on a Monday evening, sitting in a gym in Arizona, watching her alma mater Mesquite High go for its first-ever boys basketball state title with her younger brother Cohen leading the charge.
And all she could do was watch as little brother Cohen had 14 points and five rebounds to lead Mesquite to a 64-58 win over Salpointe Catholic in the Arizona 4A boys basketball championship two days after Gonzales and the Cougars wrapped up a conference title with an 82-52 win at Pacific.
"I actually wanted to get in; it was making me want to get in, just sitting with the fans," Gonzales told KSL.com. "Just the fans and intense people there. We had tons of family and friends there just supporting the boys.
"We were the six seed, the other team was a No. 1 seed, and it was a huge upset — a great game."
Gonzales is a star point guard on the BYU women's basketball team, a fourth-year sophomore who overcame a season-ending ACL injury two seasons ago to earn WCC Co-Player of the Year and Player of the Year honors while leading the Cougars to arguably the best regular season in program history with a 25-2 record that includes a 15-1 mark in conference play and undefeated regular seasons at home in each of the past two years.
But she's also a loyal big sister, a college student who takes seriously her sports media (journalism) program, a businesswoman with a line of merchandise that she devotes to her loyal fan base — they call themselves "Shaybaes" — and a rising name, image and likeness star who pitches products and businesses, including BYU sponsors Mountain America Credit Union and supplement company Nutricost.
"Once NIL passed, I felt like a businesswoman. I was basically running my own business," Gonzales said. "I have my own company, my own merch. It was cool to learn both sides.
"It feels like I've been growing up more, learning about taxes and credit. Being able to work with brands like Mountain America has brought a whole new side to it, too."
And before she was any of that — even before she was the 2017 Gatorade Arizona player of the year with 40 career double-doubles and seven career triple-doubles who averaged more than 21 points, seven rebounds, five steals and five assists per game at Mesquite — Gonzales was an older sister, the head of her own "starting five" raised by a pair of former college basketball players at nearby Grand Canyon University.
Josh and Candice Gonzales never pushed their children into basketball, but basketball was also omnipresent in their lives. The game brought them all together, and the Gonzales clan, which now consists of Cohen and two younger sisters, with oldest brother Zaiah serving a two-year mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, never misses a chance to hoop.
About two years ago, the Gonzales parents even installed an indoor court in the family's home so that they could play, shoot, practice and workout whenever they wanted.
Basketball wasn't the only thing, Shaylee Gonzales has been playing the violin since elementary school, the piano since junior high, and she taught herself to play the guitar and ukulele, which she'll still strum out when she's back home in Arizona. But it is a major thing.
"Basketball was a huge part of our lives," said Gonzales, who grew up with her mother as her high school coach and a father called her 'Slim Shaylee' while coaching her Team Arizona club.
"We eat and sleep basketball; it wasn't so excessive where my parents pushed us to do it," she said. "But each and every one of us all decided that we wanted to work hard and play basketball.
"It's a huge part of our lives, and we love it. We've worked so hard to get to where we are."
But few work harder than Shaylee Gonzales, who raked in her third All-WCC first-team selection last week along with her Player of the Year honor. The sophomore started all 27 games in the 2021-22 season, averaged a team-high 18.7 points, scored in double figures 26 times, and added 5.7 rebounds, 4.4 assists and 2.4 steals per contest.
This while the Cougars rolled to a 25-2 record, scoring at a blistering pace and winning games by 21.2 points per game — the second-best scoring margin in the nation. The No. 9 team in the NCAA's official NET rankings was a top-16 team until the selection committee began revealing its top-four seeds for the NCAA Tournament — something the Cougars have never garnered for a variety of reasons, including some that have little to do with basketball — before being projected firmly as a No. 5 seed in the tourney by most national media outlets.
Even when she didn't need to play that much, Gonzales still averaged 30 minutes per game, though she often sat for long stretches of the fourth quarter while younger teammates continued to pad a big lead.
"Shaylee deserves this award. She has been the best player in the league all season from start to finish and has been so consistent," said BYU coach Jeff Judkins, who won his second consecutive WCC Coach of the Year honor this year, as well. "I am happy for the players who received these honors and recognize everyone on our team has contributed to our success this year in a lot of different ways."
But again, she's also more than a basketball player.
Gonzales hopes to play in the WNBA and celebrate a long career of professional basketball. But she also knows that the ball will stop bouncing for her just as it does for everyone else, which is a big reason why she's studying sports photography and social media management as part of her track — and gaining real-life experience in both during her time on campus.
The 5-foot-10 bucket-getter has over 210,000 followers on TikTok (including 8.5 million "likes" on the platform), more than 82,000 followers on Instagram, and just over 3,000 followers on Twitter.
That's in addition to 130,000 followers on a YouTube channel that Gonzales can now freely monetize after the NCAA removed rules and regulations that previously forebode athletes from making money off their name, image and likeness during their college careers.
The ruling opened the doorway to a geyser of NIL-specific relationships between athlete and companies over the past year, including a school-wide deal between Provo-based location verification company Smarty and every BYU female athlete on campus — including Gonzales.
Athletes are compensated for their time and pitching products and services both in person and on social media with funding, including up to $6,000 per player under Smarty's multi-million dollar deal. And while that adds an extra layer to the players' already valuable time that includes practice, games, school, media responsibilities and the rest of college life, it's also helped Gonzales and others learn how to manage their time — and taxes — of running a small business.
"It's really important to manage your time and to know when it's good to post and create," Gonzales said. "I still have basketball and school to worry about, even a bunch of other things. And sometimes it can be hard to separate the two. That's part of why I've been taking more of a break from (social media) to focus more on basketball. I needed to focus more on basketball and school, which are the top-two priorities."
Much of that screen time happens naturally, too. With the abundance of social media — almost every Gen Z student at BYU, athlete or not, seems to have a TikTok account or an Instagram page — the key to a healthy relationship with those platforms now rarely seems to be forbidding one but simply managing it.
Gonzales' relationship with social media grew naturally, as well. And it's been a blessing for BYU fans since she signed to play with the Cougars prior to the 2018-19 season.
"It just happened organically; I didn't think much of it," she said. "I posted one video, and it blew up — and I was just doing some stuff for fun.
"I'm not doing as much social media as I did in past years. But since I gained that following, now people just kind of love to know the athlete. Social media makes them feel connected, so that when they see you at games, they know a little more about me. Some of my biggest videos are just behind-the-scenes, day-in-the-life content."
But there's always a time to take a step back from those roles, and now is one of those times. The Cougars open the WCC Tournament in Monday's semifinals against a Portland team that was the only conference mate to claim a win over BYU in the regular season.
Think Gonzales and her teammates are motivated to make up for the 75-64 road loss to the Pilots, only the sixth in the 32-game all-time series between the league foes?
"We really want to play Portland again, because we lost to them. We want to play Gonzaga again, too," Gonzales told KSL.com before the fourth-seeded Pilots' 69-44 quarterfinal win over Santa Clara in Las Vegas. "But we're really excited for the tournament — a long time to prepare and practice.
"Then we'll go as far as we can in the NCAA Tournament. The Final Four is our goal."
