Mikayla Blakes Breaks Program Record With Fifth SEC Player of the Week Award
Mikayla Blakes Sets Vanderbilt SEC Player of the Week Record
Mikayla Blakes continues to prove that she is in fact one of the best women’s basketball players in the SEC and nation. Today, Blakes earned her fifth SEC Player of the Week selection for the 2025-26 season, and that is a Vanderbilt program record. Wendy Scholtens won SEC Player of the Week four times during the 1989-90 season. Blakes shared this week’s award with South Carolina’s Madina Okot.
Coming off the mid-week bye, Blakes continued to set new standards with a 35-point performance in No. 5 Vanderbilt’s 81-79 win over the No. 16 Kentucky Wildcats. That was Blakes’ 10th 30-point game of the season, making her the first player in the 21st century to accomplish that. She is also just the second SEC player in the last 15 seasons to score at least 20 points in nine consecutive SEC games.
Blakes is averaging a nation’s best 26.6 points per game and always finds a way to put Vanderbilt in a position to win. However, she will always thank her teammates first and rarely acknowledges her own accomplishments. That shows the type of leader she is for the Vanderbilt Commodores women’s basketball team.
“Honestly I’d say my teammates. Like when they’re going it’s hard to stop just one person individually. And I think the way we started the game, exactly how we started the game last game, it’s just so hard because you can’t help off Aubrey, you can’t help off Justine, you can’t help off Jak, you can’t help off Sacha ’cause that’d mean there’s free buckets there. So, I think my teammates definitely opened it up for me today,” Blakes told me after Vanderbilt’s 86-70 win over No. 4 Texas on February 12.
For the month of February alone, she is averaging 32.8 points per game and will have two great opportunities to finish the regular season strong as the Commodores host the Alabama Crimson Tide on Thursday night at 7:30 PM ET/6:30 PM CT, and then they will wrap it up on the road in Knoxville on Sunday, March 1 at 2:00 PM ET/1 PM CT, before postseason play begins.
With SEC and National Player of the Year conversations swirling, you have to talk about Mikayla Blakes and strongly consider her for both honors. What she is doing on a nightly basis is definitely special, and you can’t deny that.
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