© Grace Hollars/IndyStar / USA TODAY NETWORK
Next Generation: Maya Makalusky is Making the Most of Her Second Chance
"Do you want to play basketball?"
That's what Mike Makalusky remembers the cardiologist asking his 11-year-old daughter, Maya, who was diagnosed with a heart condition called Long QT syndrome.
"That's the happiest I ever am in my life," Maya responded. "When I'm playing basketball."
A younger Maya Makalusky shooting a jumper back during her first AAU travel basketball game in Colorado.
Long QT Syndrome (LQTS) can cause fast, chaotic heartbeats, and people with LQTS are at risk for sudden fainting, seizures and in some cases even sudden death, according to the Mayo Clinic.
The first cardiologist the Makalusky family saw told Maya that she could never run cross country or play basketball ever again. That moment was very hard for Mike. He wanted to protect his daughter more than anything else. He had gotten in several arguments with Maya, refusing to let her play basketball no matter how much she begged.
"I didn't care about anything besides protecting my daughter," Mike said. "But I had underestimated her love for the sport."
Seeking another opinion, the second cardiologist they saw in Indiana told Maya he was going to let her play basketball.
"Look, at the end of the day, you have to live your life," Mike recalls the cardiologist saying to him. "This means a lot to her, and I believe she's safe to do it, so you got to let her live her life."
Maya remembers almost having the game she loves ripped away from her unfairly, by a genetic condition that she couldn't control. She was given a second chance that day when the cardiologist told her she could play basketball again, and she ran with it.
More than five years removed from first being diagnosed with LQTS, Maya is a 6-foot-3 forward in the class of 2025 at Hamilton Southeastern in Fishers, Ind. She committed to Indiana in June as a high-profile prospect, a goal that wouldn't have seemed possible all those years ago. But Maya loves basketball that much, and has put everything she has into it since getting her second chance.
"That's why I love basketball so much— it's an outlet for me," Maya said. "When I realized [basketball] could be taken away from me, and now I'm allowed to play that sport that I love, I'm going to put 100% in every day and I'm gonna get anything I want out of this game."
Maya Makalusky starred as a sophomore for the Hamilton Southeastern this past year, and she's hit over 40% of her three-point attempts through two years of high school basketball.
Mike remembers the first time he realized that Maya might be a truly special basketball player.
She was playing in a recreational basketball league game in Colorado, where the Makalusky family lived prior to Indiana, and the score was tied in the final minutes. Maya — only in elementary school at the time — calmly dribbled up the court and hit a step back three before the buzzer sounded to win the game.
Instead of a massive celebration, the young Maya just walked off the court as if she had done it 1,000 times before.
Maya plays with that same confidence now, entering her junior year at Hamilton Southeastern, and the confidence comes from a work ethic that's unlike any other.
"Confidence starts from getting in the gym, getting up 300-400 shots every day, because you shoot so many shots in a day and in a week, and you start hitting all of them, then the confidence will come," Maya told HoosiersNow. "I shot 400 of these shots, and now I just have to make this one in the game. You've repped all these moves out so many times, and confidence comes from all of that practice."
Some people struggle to fall in love with the process of becoming a great basketball player. The constant repetition it requires to become one of the best. The grind of getting up hundreds of shots every day in order to become a great shooter.
Maya relishes it.
She hounded her parents to buy her a Dr. Dish Basketball Shooting machine, which rebounds and passes the ball back out to you after each shot. Maya would practice on it after every game, regardless of how well she shot or how many points she had scored.
Another time, she was specifically instructed to take a break from basketball on a family vacation, but instead snuck a basketball into her packed bag against her parents' permission so that she could practice on the trip.
Countless times, she called coaches for keys to the school gym so she could get in, and before she reached driving age, she would bike herself to the school in order to get shots up, even through pouring rain.
No one works harder to be a great basketball player than Maya.
A younger Maya Makalusky returns home from the Hamilton Southeastern gym after riding her bike over in the pouring rain to get shots up after she had been told she needed to take a break from basketball.
Maya's love for basketball is genuine, but so is her love for other people.
Despite being a superstar basketball player in her hometown, Maya always find time to support people in need. She wants to help people facing hardships that most of us can't fully comprehend.
Maya works in the Best Buddies program at Hamilton Southeastern, which operates as a student-run friendship club, pairing up disabled and non-disabled students with each other as buddies.
"Maya does such a good job of putting herself in other people's shoes," her older sister Riley, who will be a freshman on the Butler basketball team this year, said. "Since she did go through that with her heart condition, it makes her more prone to loving people who have things that they're struggling with or have had things in life taken away from them."
Maya first joined Best Buddies in seventh grade, and this past year she took an American Sign Language (ASL) class so that she could better communicate with nonverbal students she was working with.
"Getting to work with such amazing kids is a blessing. Best Buddies has changed my life in the best way," Maya said. "I love those kids and they truly are my family."
Maya and Riley Makalusky at the Hamilton Southeastern Best Buddies prom.
Maya has been through a lot of adversity in her life. From her battle with LQTS and the fear that her life's passion might get ripped away, to being born five weeks premature and battling through eating aversions as an infant. Maya remembers what it's like to be in positions that feel unfair in life, so she's always trying to help those in need in whatever way she can.
"When someone is ostracized or picked on, [Maya] will stand up for them. She loves the underdog," Maya's mother, Jenn Sliwa Makalusky, said. "She has a compassion for people who are hurting or broken or different, and it's because of her own struggles that she's battled in her life."
Seeing what their daughter does in the Best Buddies program and the way she treats people around her fills Jenn and Mike with even more pride than seeing her excel on the basketball court.
Despite Jenn being a former basketball star herself at Villanova in the late 1990s, the Makalusky parents never wanted to force basketball on their children. They wanted Riley and Maya to develop their own passions. It just so happened both girls followed after their mother and fell in love with basketball. Jenn is happy knowing that she raised two excellent basketball players, but it's more important to her that she's raised two excellent people.
"Maya is a really great athlete, but she's an even better person," said Jenn. "She takes time to get to know everyone. She's kind, she's approachable, and she is more than just a really good basketball player. That's what I love about her — that she is a good human being."
With Jenn being a former DI athlete in the Big East, Maya's parents never wanted to overplay their daughter's basketball talents. They knew what it took to be a player at that level, and just how good you had to be. Even after witnessing that game-winning step back three, Mike would softly push back when other parents raved to him about how talented his youngest daughter was.
It wasn't until he met Nick Daniels — the managing partner of M14Hooops Indy and now Maya's personal trainer — that Mike began to truly realize how bright his daughter's future was.
"He looked at me and said, 'Maya could be if not the best, one of the best players in the country,'" Mike said, recalling his first meeting with Daniels, when Maya was a sixth grader at the time. "I told him that I appreciated it, but that I didn't know if that was true. He looked at me again and said, 'This is my job. I evaluate people and train them, and I'm telling you, she's that good.'"
Being a trainer and an expert of the game, Daniels knew he might have something in Maya when she was in sixth grade, already 5-foot-11 with elite shooting skills. But he really knew how great Maya was once he got to know the mindset with which she approached the game.
"The common denominator with every great player — boy and girl — that I've ever worked with is that they don't want to be told what they're good at. They want to know what they're not good at," Daniels said. "[Maya] doesn't want to hear how she's doing great. She wants to know what she needs to improve on, and how she can attack it, because she really desires to be great."
That mindset is also what her head coach at Hamilton Southeastern Brian Satterfield has seen in her. So many players love talking about what they can already do, while ignoring what they can't do. Not Maya.
"She accepts her deficiencies, and she gets out there and works on them," said Satterfield. "Some people don't accept that. Some people don't want to do that, but she's ready for that challenge."
In her interview with HoosiersNow, Maya made sure to mention those improvements she wants to make in her game, still two years away from playing in Bloomington. She wants to improve as a defender and as a rebounder, and she's been living in the weight room this offseason.
"She wants to get held to that standard because she wants to be great," Daniels said. "She understands to be in the same conversation with great players, she's got to do more than just score the basketball. So for her, defense and rebounding is huge."
Maya Makalusky, Teri Moren and the Indiana women's basketball coaching staff that Maya will be playing for in just a few years.
@MayaMakalusky on Instagram
Wanting to be held to a higher standard is why Maya committed to Indiana and coach Teri Moren. She wants to be surrounded by people who pursue excellence to the same degree that she does, while also maintaining the humility needed to coexist with all the great players.
"Coach Moren exhibits this humbleness, but also has this demand for excellence, and that's what attracted Maya," Mike said. "She wants to be pushed by the best. She wants to have people she can look at and say, 'Yes you were a McDonald's All-American or a Gatorade Player of the Year, and I want to still be better than that.' She wants to be in an environment where excellence is normal and you have to compete every single day to do something great."
Maya is happy that her college commitment is already taken care of, because now she can focus on all the goals she has for her two upcoming high school basketball seasons — making the McDonald's All-American team, winning Indiana Miss Basketball, and most importantly, winning a state championship with Hamilton Southeastern.
And when asking what Maya's main goal is in Bloomington, the answer is always the same, from herself to her parents, to her trainer and to her coach: to help Indiana women's basketball win its first-ever national title.
All of these can seem like extremely lofty goals to someone on the outside looking in, but Maya has long been a big dreamer, and she keeps accomplishing everything she's set out to do. She wanted to play at Oregon when she was growing up in Colorado, and then wanted to play at Indiana when the player she looked up as a role model, Hamilton Southeastern's own Sydney Parrish, transferred from Oregon to IU this past year.
She dreamed of playing basketball even after she was first told that she would never get to play the sport again. After wearing heart monitors to school and crying most days, thinking she might be denied the joy that basketball brought to her, Maya now chases after every goal she hopes to accomplish in the sport with fiery determination and passion.
"I had taken basketball for granted for a couple of years," Maya said, describing herself before her first diagnosis of LQTS. "Moving back to Indiana and getting the green light to play basketball again was a breakout moment for me, and once I started playing again, I never looked back."
There was a very clear answer to the cardiologist's question when he asked Maya if she wanted to play basketball. It's the same resounding 'yes' Maya will give when asked whether she loves basketball today, or whether she loves all the kids she works with in Best Buddies, or whether she loves her family, or the idea of joining the IU basketball team in just two years.
"I just want the world to know that Maya genuinely loves everyone and wants them to experience that fullness of life," Mike said. "You feel an immense sense of gratitude from her that she gets this opportunity to play basketball."
It's pretty clear that Maya wanted to play basketball. But she also wants to love other people in everything that she does. It's just who she is, and it's what she wants to bring to Indiana and to everyone in her life.
She was given a second chance, and she's not going to take it for granted.
Related Stories on Indiana Basketball
- GRACE BERGER VIDEO ANALYSIS: Grace Berger, Indiana's all-time winningest basketball player, recently recorded her WNBA career high, so our Daniel Olinger broke down how she excelled in that game for the Fever. CLICK HERE
- INDIANA A NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP FAVORITE: After finishing the 2022-23 season as Big Ten champions and a No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament, Teri Moren's team is primed for a run at the title in 2023-24. CLICK HERE
- BOOGIE FLAND FILM STUDY: Indiana is in the mix for the five-star guard in the class of 2024, so we broke down his game film and wrote a scouting report on the potential IU commit. CLICK HERE
