Ex-Arizona basketball player Maya Nnaji talks about calling team environment 'toxic'

When former Arizona Wildcat Maya Nnaji left the UA women’s basketball program earlier this season, she cited a desire to step away from the game to focus on academics.

Yet a handful of social media replies by Nnaji not long after suggest there could be more to it.

“The school I played for was a toxic environment. I was losing love for the game (and) needed to leave. I’ll play pro after I graduate medical school. My basketball career isn’t over,” Nnaji said in replies under a Dec. 28 Instagram post originating from the account “@naijanation.”

Nnaji’s comments surfaced Thursday amid social media back-and-forth on X (Twitter) over the UA program’s announcement that morning that it would hold walk-on tryouts to try and fill out its roster for the remainder of the 2023-24 season.

Facing ASU at home Sunday — a game the Wildcats won 63-52 to sweep the two-game season series over the rival Sun Devils — Arizona had just seven available players.

With leading scorer Kailyn Gilbert out again for undisclosed reasons — UA head coach Adia Barnes said after the game she wasn’t out for medical reasons, she’s just “not available” — it was the third consecutive game Barnes’ had just two on her bench to accompany her starting five. The 2023-24 UA roster, which started at 11 but added one more midway through, has seen three players go out with season-ending injuries in addition to Nnaji’s departure and Gilbert’s unknown status moving forward.

Reached by the Star this weekend, Barnes would not comment on Nnaji’s social media remarks. She did respond to a question postgame Sunday about how social media remarks online impact her team and its players. Part of her response explained why she tries not to publicly respond to criticism about her UA program.

“One of the hardest things I can tell you, as a coach — so there’s stuff that goes on, right?” Barnes said. “I can’t say the truth about everything because ... I could change everybody’s opinion about so many things, like, if people knew the truth.

“Every coach in the country goes through this. Like, there’s so many things you can’t say or decisions you make that leads to say someone leaving or something or there’s a reason, but you can never say and so the coaches always have to sit there and smile we just take punches. And that’s hard. I mean, that’s hard sometimes,” Barnes added. “But it comes with the territory and you just have to smile.”

Barnes cited a phrase made popular by former first lady Michelle Obama as part of her thought process.

“’When they go low, we go high.’ Sometimes you’re like, ‘I want to go low, too.’ But you can’t,” Barnes said. “You have to be a role model for your players. It’s stuff that is just a distraction. And what I want to worry about is the seven (players) I have, or the eight when we have eight, and then I want us to be our best and I want us to be professional. And the reality is the seven know the reality and the truth and you can see it on the floor because if we weren’t cohesive and we ... didn’t have great culture, they wouldn’t fight like they do. And that’s very obvious.”

At the time she stepped away from the Wildcats on Dec. 15, Nnaji, who is part of the UA’s Accelerated Pathway to Medical Education (APME) program, said in her own social media posts, “it has become clear to me that I need to reprioritize my main goal and true life’s purpose: becoming a physician.”

According to the UA, the APME program is a “combination undergraduate-graduate program that will take a student seven years to complete and will result in an MD degree upon graduation.”

The original post by @naijanation — an account self-described as “a community for Nigerians to discover their culture (and) access to the finest in Nigerian fashion, music and education” — was celebrating Nnaji’s own social posts stating her reasons for leaving the Wildcats.

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When asked by the Star recently about her replies on @naijanation’s Instagram post, Njaji said they were in response to others who commented on the post, questioning why she really left the Wildcats.

“I was trying to explain to people, who don’t really watch sports, what was going on,” she told the Star. “Not like school, as in like the environment I was in (in) the program.

“I was trying to explain to people because they were insinuating that my father is the reason why I quit. And that is just completely false. In Nigerian culture, parents would love for their kids to be lawyers or doctors and sports are not really important to them,” said Nnaji, whose brother is former UA men’s basketball star Zeke Nnaji, currently a reserve forward with the NBA’s Denver Nuggets. “They were insinuating, ‘Oh, she’s Nigerian. He probably made her quit and I was like, ‘No, that’s not at all what happened.’”

Nnaji said she also wanted to make it clear that “I take my school very seriously and that’s why I left.”

When asked by commenters on that original @naijanation thread why she couldn’t have succeeded in basketball and school at the same time, Nnaji replied that “the academic load (and) all the practices (and) games were too much.”

In another reply, she said, “I had originally intended to do both but the (environment) on my college team was too toxic and distracting from my school, so I quit the team. I will play pro after I graduate medical school.”

Nnaji, who did not know that screenshots of her comments were reposted Thursday until the Star told her about it, did not address her use of the word “toxic.” She said that she wouldn’t go into any further details, telling the Star: “If I wanted to stir up drama and become a distraction for my teammates, I could have done that and I do not want to do that at all.

“I will never discourage someone to go to Arizona I’ll never try to write an exposé, whatever you want to say,” Nnaji said to the Star. “That’s just not how I roll. That’s not me. I’m not going to be selfish.”

Nnaji said the time away from the program and the court has allowed her to prioritize her academics and “get in tune with myself outside of Maya the athlete.” She added that she hasn’t thought much about what’s beyond this semester, but said she enjoys school and being in Tucson. If she decides to transfer to another school, she said, that would mean applying for another medical school; that’s not something she’s discussed with her family as of yet.

“People can say whatever they want to say,” said Nnaji, whose previous “@maya_nnaji” Instagram and X (Twitter) accounts were no longer active as of Sunday afternoon. “Good or bad, people are always going to be talking anyways. I just ask that people give me respect and my privacy, and that they continue to support the program that they love. And continue to support the players that are still on the team. Focus on what really matters.”