Mylik Wilson’s story is about completing the circle. He is from Rayville, a small town in sparsely populated Richland Parish in northeast Louisiana, the same town Elvin Hayes put on the map. Mylik thought he was coming to UH out of high school, but Marcus Sasser committed and took the spot. So he started his adventure at the Cajun Dome in Lafayette and could have starred there. But he wanted to win. He left for Texas Tech to play, but that didn’t pan out how he wanted. So he came to Houston and redshirted.
When he arrived, he didn’t know how to take Kelvin Sampson’s coaching. He took Kelvin’s tactics personally, and the coaches were frustrated because they did not know how to reach him. Finally, they decided to just work on building his confidence. To say it was a difficult journey would be insulting.
It was damn near impossible.
As we’ve written before, Mylik is the personification of a proverb that hangs in the player’s lounge on the second floor of the Guy V. Lewis Development Facility:
A stonecutter hammers away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow, it will split in two. It was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before.
On that cold night at Allen Fieldhouse, when Milos Uzan stole the ball and flipped it to Mylik for a three, he split the stone in two. Kansas was game #19, and the Coogs have played 19 since. Mylik has only hit three three-pointers since Lawrence, but the biggest was the one he buried in the Elite Eight.
Mylik isn’t loud. He isn’t talkative. Instead, he’d rather observe than be in the middle of the conversation. But when he makes a play, it’s usually the type that makes the arena roar.
He’s steely. He describes his role as “just giving guys a boost on defense,” but he has defiantly made himself into a pivotal piece of this magical team.
Mylik is one of the all-time great stories in Houston Basketball. He is always one of, if not the last, guys in the gym shooting day after day. He and Quannas White have worked thousands of hours on his game and are seeing it pay off in a big way. He continually makes winning plays and is the player fans always ask me about the most.
A week from now, Quannas will start his new adventure in Lafayette, while Mylik will also move on to a new life. Mylik pointed out the circle to me while we were in the locker room Saturday in Indianapolis. Two Louisiana boys, one who started his college career in Lafayette and one who is about to begin his head coaching career there.