How Gabby Elliott chose basketball when the game tried slipping away from her

That’s the amount of time that was left on the clock a week ago when Arizona State guard Gabby Elliott had the ball poked away from her by Cincinnati guard Joya Crawford, who subsequently dashed down the court for a layup that broke a 64-64 tie, giving ASU its fourth loss in six games after starting the season 15-0.

The sequence became the devastating climax in a game that saw the Sun Devils squander an 18-point lead. As sports so often does, it left one player carrying the weight of a loss that belonged to everyone.

“That was an upset kid in the locker room,” ASU coach Molly Miller said of Elliott. “And it didn’t have to come down to that one play, that’s what we kept telling her.”

In need of a bounce-back at home in a rivalry matchup versus Arizona, Elliott and the Sun Devils found themselves in another collapsing moment. After building a comfortable halftime lead, they once again saw it unravel in the third quarter. Elliott even had to briefly exit after landing awkwardly on her leg, the kind of moment that can change a game, or reopen old scars. 

Elliott checked back in anyway without flinching. She’d already been through worse.

With 44 seconds left and ASU clinging to a three-point lead, the game-defining turnover ran through Elliott again — except this time she was the one who took the ball away. She proceeded to calmly bury two free throws to seal an ASU victory, finishing with a game-high 22 points.

Elliott walked off the floor the same way she stepped onto it: steady, composed and unchanged by the swing of the moment. Never too high, never too low. It’s a poise that didn’t come from one season, or one program, or even one comeback, but from years of learning how quickly a moment can slip away. And how to be ready when it returns.

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A journey like no other

A quick look through ASU’s roster, or any college sports roster, suggests that Elliott has had a pretty unique journey. Six college seasons. Four different programs. Without context, she could be mistaken for another example of the evolving, sometimes absurd, landscape of college athletics: transfer whenever a “better opportunity” arises, and do anything you can to find another year of eligibility.

Elliott’s path, however, was never about chasing something better; it was about salvaging what she still loved. Her moves were shaped by torn ligaments and circumstances outside her control, not too much ambition or a lack of loyalty. Each stop was more of a restart than a shortcut, another attempt to reclaim a game that kept slipping away.

“There is no clear-cut path to how it’s supposed to go,” Elliott told The IX Sports. “Especially nowadays, I feel like the quickest thing is just, ‘transfer, transfer, transfer,’ when that shouldn’t be the mindset necessarily. Even [when people bring up that] I went to multiple schools, it wasn’t necessarily because of choice. I tore my ACL, plans changed. I feel like you got to take things like that into account because it gives me a different purpose for doing all of this.”

The cost of that different purpose came in silence. Months spent in rehab instead of on the court, seasons reduced to training rooms and sideline roles, and the uncertainty of whether basketball would still be there when her body finally caught up to her will.

“One day I’m feeling great, and next thing you know, I can’t even walk,” Elliott said. “It’s constant highs and lows. You have to give yourself grace.”

Multiple season-ending injuries forced Elliott to confront a question most players never have to answer: not whether she could play again, but whether she still wanted to.

“A lot of people ask me, especially after back-to-back ACLs, ‘why do you still play basketball?’” Elliott said. “Honestly, because I want to. Because without it, I wouldn’t be who I am.”

A five-star recruit out of Detroit Edison Public Academy in Michigan, where she won the state’s Gatorade Player of the Year award during her senior season, Elliott enrolled at Clemson in 2020.

There, she got off to a tremendous start to her collegiate career, averaging 13.6 points per game in 25 games to earn ACC All-Freshman team honors. But after that, Elliott played in just 27 games combined across her next three seasons.

Before her junior year, she transferred to her home state of Michigan to play for Michigan State. In her 11th game with the Spartans, she tore her left ACL. The next season, she tore her right ACL after just four games.

That unplanned fate is more than just an obstacle in the road for an athlete. It forces a player to rethink everything and decide if their sport is still a passion, or merely an obligation they feel compelled to fulfill.

“I did have thoughts where I was like, ‘You know what? I’m going to rehab and I’m just going to start my life,’” Elliott said. “And there was nothing wrong with that either. You’ve got to stop and figure out what you want to do. I feel like that’s where my patience came from, especially with my recovery specifically … it’s not something like, ‘Oh, you’ll be back in four weeks.’ No, no, no. This is a whole sit-down, nine-month process where you have a lot of time to think.”

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Another chance

The choice was made: Elliott was going to keep pushing. She stayed in the Big Ten and transferred to Penn State ahead of the 2024-25 season, where she played in every one of her team’s 29 games for the first time in her collegiate career, while averaging a career high in minutes per game, as well.

A stage was set for Elliott to take advantage of two extra years of eligibility, one granted through a medical redshirt and another given to all athletes who competed during the COVID-19 impacted 2020-21 season. Although Elliott had no bad blood towards Penn State, she chose to again put her name in the transfer portal after the Nittany Lions went just 1-17 in conference play.

Elliott chose to spend her sixth and final college season in Tempe, where ASU’s outlook heading into the 2025-26 season had a similar mystique to her own: a new coach, a roster stitched together through the transfer portal and few external expectations. Like the rest of the Sun Devils, Elliott arrived overlooked, but quietly confident in what was still possible.

“Just how I know people didn’t expect me to come back and be doing what I’m doing, people did not expect us to go on the portal, get pieces together and have the season that we’re having,” Elliott said. “Just like with my recovery and changing schools, I always knew what I wanted to do, and I’m not surprising myself, but everybody else. And that’s exactly the same with the Sun Devils right now.”

Scoring has become Elliott’s loudest proof point, not because it was ever the goal, but because it is what this version of ASU has needed most. Her career-high of 16.6 points per game leads the Sun Devils, while playing 32.8 minutes per game — also a team and career high.

But Miller is perhaps most impressed with what Elliott has done as a leader and on the defensive side of the ball. Her calm steadiness has guided an ASU team that has little experience playing together compared to other Big 12 programs, and on defense, Elliott’s 46 steals are most on the team and seventh in the conference.

“She is understood amongst her teammates as someone that can get the job done under pressure if we need a bucket,” Miller said. “She’s also really buying into the defensive end. She had some assignments the past couple of games, shut down some shooters and did a really good job for us. She’s been reliable.”

Of course, the biggest steal came in the final seconds against Arizona, which also showed just how much Elliott and her journey has impacted her teammates as a tone-setter. After the whistle blew with Elliott clutching the ball on the floor, all of her teammates — led by freshman guard Amaya Williams — rushed to the six-year veteran to help her up and shower her with celebration.

“When we’re together, the more we have a chance to pull off the win,” Williams said postgame with Elliott smiling beside her. “That (play) just hyped me up to the max. We needed that stop, and she got it for us.”

“I got the steal and my freshman was the first one over to me,” Elliott later added. “Relationships like that are what I want to last forever because I also had people that I looked up to [when I was] coming in. At least leaving here, I want them to know I’m big sis forever.”

Seven seconds in Cincinnati and 44 in Tempe hardly register in the span of a six-year-long college career, but for Elliott, they came to represent nearly everything she has endured. One moment slipped away, the other was seized. Neither told the full story.

It’s not a story of redemption or revenge, but one of the calm certainty of someone who understands that moments come and go, but what lasts is how you meet them. After six seasons defined by restarts and rehabs, Elliott no longer measures herself by a single play. She measures herself by the steadiness she brings to the next one.

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