GAINESVILLE, Fla. — The team was pummeling the opponent at halftime, but Florida forward Me’Arah O’Neal was in the locker room beating herself up over a couple open misses during the first two periods. Just when Florida coach Kelly Rae Finley was about to weigh in, her sophomore point guard beat her to it. 

They were good looks, Liv McGill told O’Neal. Take ’em every time, she extolled. The lid eventually would come off the basket.

Finley couldn’t help but beam with pride when recounting the exchange. 

“That’s what leadership at the point guard position looks like,” said Finley after witnessing yet another moment of growth from the most decorated prep prospect in the 50-year history of UF women’s basketball. “The pace of the game has slowed down for her — her reads, decision-making, the flow of the game — but her ability to connect with her teammates, to motivate and inspire each of them in their own individual way, that’s what a true point guard does and that’s where she’s really made a jump this season. You can see it with her on the court and everywhere on our team.”

More of this, please. The Gators (12-3) are going to need more of whatever McGill is capable of dishing out as they wade into their 2026 Southeastern Conference slate this week, starting with Thursday’s road date at No. 23 Tennessee (7-3), followed by Sunday’s home league opener against No. 3 South Carolina (12-1) at Exactech Arena/O’Connell Center. Finley likes to say the strength of her team is the team, but each step of maturation for her mile-a-minute playmaker is going to make the team-first narrative thread that runs through the UF locker room even stronger. 

Sign McGill up for all of it. 

“I want to give my team whatever the game needs, which could be something different — scoring, defense, whatever — on any given day,” McGill said. “I don’t know what it will be, but I do know the SEC is going to be a dogfight and I cannot wait to get after it.”

Her enthusiasm for the daunting tasks ahead comes on the heels of some pretty impressive getting-after-it to date. McGill, after a SEC All-Freshman season when she averaged 16.5 points (12th in the league), 5.2 assists (4th) and 2.1 steals (10th), has now invaded the national statistical charts. The 5-foot-9 sophomore from Minneapolis, is averaging 24.4 points per game — third only to Iowa State’s plus-size phenom center Audi Crooks (28.9), and Notre Dame guard Hannah Hidalgo (25.5) — to go with 5.5 rebounds, 6.2 assists (16th) and 3.7 steals (12th). 

Last season, McGill became the fourth player in UF history (and first in 24 years) to post a triple-double, and this season three times has hit the 30-point mark in a game. She scored 38 points and had 10 assists in a win over Chattanooga. For context, the last six players to have at least 38 points and 10 assists in a game — get this — were all named Caitlin Clark. And, finally, McGill has three games this season of at least 25 points, five rebounds, five assists and five steals; the rest of the nation’s 4,500-plus Division-I players have five such games combined. 

“She’s got it all,” O’Neal said. 

And Finley saw it coming before anyone else. 

Early Gators connection 

Alivia McGill has always been big on relationships. As a youth, she wanted badly to play on the same club team with one of her best friends, Sunaja “Nunu” Agara, now the leading scorer and ACC Player of the Year candidate at Stanford. Agara played for the Minnesota Metro Stars, but the club had no openings for the talented seventh-grade point guard who already — at 13 years old — had a Division I offer. 

That offer was from Florida, via Finley, then the Gators’ associate head coach, and a Minnesota native who had done her scouting homework in her home state.

“I started building chemistry with her before I ever knew where I wanted to go to school,” McGill recalled. “Our relationship never changed.”

But her situation did. When McGill was in eighth grade, the Metro Stars had an injury on their U-16 team. McGill got the invite to join the club program, but she had to play two years up. That wasn’t a problem for McGill. Nor was her transition to bigger, better competition. 

“I was short, but I was feisty,” McGill said. “I didn’t back down from anything.” 

That’s exactly how her coach remembers her. Tara Starks had an outstanding club team and eventually got the job at Minnetonka Hopkins High, which was sending Paige Bueckers off to UConn around the time McGill was showing up to take the ball. 

“She was all over the place, but you could see there was something to her,” Starks said of McGill. “She was tough, played both ends of the floor, and even talked a little trash.” 

More than a little, actually. 

As McGill gained traction with the Stars, her confidence on the floor only grew. So did her boldness, as far as making plays and telling opponents about it.

“I wasn’t very mature at that time, but I’ve gotten better at controlling myself since then,” said McGill, offering no apologies for her on-court demeanor. “That’s just the game of basketball. But if you go back and watched my [high school] highlights, I’m way more chill than I used to be.” 

One of her favorite dish-outs, Sparks remembered, was just one word. McGill would hit a bucket and just tell her defender, “Mouth!” 

Mouth? 

“Yeah, as in ‘I shot it your mouth!’ ” said Sparks, who saw her point guard get a technical or two back in the day. “There came a point where I would just watch her — eyeball her, as if to say, ‘I dare you!’ — because I knew she’d want to say something to somebody so bad.”

In time, McGill got to the point where she (mostly) let her game do the talking. Obviously, it spoke volumes.

Like during her 2021-22 sophomore season, when McGill led the team to a 26-1 record, with a near-flawless performance in the Class 4A state championship game: 26 points, 11 of 13 from the floor, 3-for-3 from the arc, four assists and four steals. 

That and her ensuing seasons shot McGill up the recruiting charts, making her a top-10 national prospect, eventual 2024 McDonald’s All American and FIBA world champion for Team USA’s U18 team. By then, offers were coming from around the country, but it was that first one — from Finley years before — that trumped all the others. 

“She full-court pressed me and made it clear how much she wanted me and how much she valued me long before I was a McDonald’s All American or had a gold medal,” McGill said. “She always knew I was going to be one of the best. So when she got the head-coaching job [in 2021], it was a no-brainer. Our relationship was already strong and never changed.”

SEC season is here 

McGill arrived on UF’s campus in the summer of ’24 and was handed the ball. She’s had it ever since. 

This season, Finley has challenged McGill to be more aggressive and decisive in taking on the level-3 defenders she’s about to see in the SEC that require quick reads. Finley compared them to check downs for a quarterback. 

“You have maybe a 10th of a second to read three passes or take a shot,” Finley said. “That’s where her maturity has really come along, as well as the connection with her teammates.” 

Added UF assistant coach/recruiting Cynthia Jordan: “I remember watching her on the adidas circuit and going back to the [UF coaches] group chat and telling them, ‘Man, this is an old-school point guard.’ Now, I think Liv has progressed to a different kind of player here at Florida. She’s more offensive minded. We see her passing ability; that’s who she was in high school — a pass-first point guard, with a real feel and IQ for the game — but now she’s looking to score more.”

To that point, McGill has more than a hundred shot attempts (at 43.3%) than any of her UF teammates and nearly 50 more 3-point tries (27.4%) and free throws (77.9%). 

She also leads the team in talking, but for every shouted play call or warning of a screen or encouraging conversation with a teammate, McGill probably has three times as many conversations with herself. 

“It gets me going. Whenever I make a mistake or I’m doing good, I try to be the first one to either criticize or cheer myself on — and I can be pretty hard on myself, if I need to,” said McGill, who gave examples of those internal chats. “Oh, they can go a lot of ways. ‘Make a better pass, Liv. Hold your follow-thru. C’mon, Liv! play better defense.’ Or,  ‘Good pass! Good defense!’ Most of the time, it’s to keep me in the moment; to keep me having reminders of what I can do and help remind me to remind my teammates and keep them engaged.”

Now comes the conference gauntlet — eight SEC teams are ranked, nine of the 16 are either unbeaten or with just one loss — and the most demanding part of the season. 

In other words, the best part of the season, per McGill.

 

“I live for the excitement,” she said. “When I have a lot of energy, my team feeds off of it. So most of the time I know when we’re feeling down or need a little oomph or a little push. Even if I don’t score something or somebody else scores I’m going to get hyped, I’m going to bring the energy because Gators women’s basketball feeds off of that.”

It’s SEC time. Liv McGill wants to eat. 

Email senior writer Chris Harry at chrish@gators.ufl.edu. Find his story archives here.