Charlotte, N.C. – Laila Phelia could not see.
It was as if a curtain had been pulled over her left eye.
It happened to the Syracuse basketball guard in late June 2024.
Initially, Phelia believed she had a contact lens issue but soon knew something more serious was affecting her vision. She’d recently transferred from Michigan, where she put together an All-Big Ten season, to Texas, which would go on to reach the 2025 Final Four.
Phelia called a Texas athletic trainer during the July 4, 2024 weekend, described her troubling symptoms and got an appointment with an eye doctor. She saw a specialist that Monday and was told she needed emergency surgery to repair a detached retina.
What followed were weeks and then months of vision insecurity, of wondering and worrying how the sudden loss of sight in one eye might affect her basketball career and her overall life.
There were laser treatments that required her to keep her eye open for three minutes at a time. There were conversations about draining and silicone buckles and eye implants. There was pain and discomfort and the mental anguish that accompanied all of it.
“It was pretty hard,” said Phelia, who transferred to SU last spring. “I wanted to play senior year, so I tried the first few games. But it was pretty tough.”
Phelia is completely healthy now, her eye issues re-addressed with an additional April 2025 surgery. She gained a medical hardship season and will play a final college basketball year at SU.
“Just gotta play with goggles, which is totally fine,” she said Monday here at ACC women’s basketball media day.
Felisha Legette-Jack can hardly believe Phelia is in her program.
The SU coach served as one of the evaluators who elected Phelia to USA Basketball’s AmeriCup team in 2023.
In the college season that followed, Phelia was named an All-Big Ten first teamer in coaches’ and media polls. She earned a spot on the Big Ten All-Tournament Team. She became the 31st player in Michigan history to reach 1,000 career points. She averaged nearly 17 points per game that season and was a coveted commodity in the subsequent transfer portal.
And while Legette-Jack appreciated Phelia’s ability to score, she also valued her toughness as a defender.
Both Legette-Jack and SU guard Sophie Burrows described Phelia as a tenacious defender. Phelia said she first understood the importance of defense on that 2023 USA team.
Good teams always have scorers, she reasoned. By ramping up her defense, she could earn more playing time.
“She is a defensive juggernaut,” Legette-Jack said. “She plays on both sides of you and she is a relentless defender.”
Guard Caitlin Clark (22) of the Iowa Hawkeyes goes to the basket during the second half against guard Laila Phelia (5) of the Michigan Wolverines at Carver-Hawkeye Arena on Feb. 15, 2024 in Iowa City, Iowa. (Photo by Matthew Holst/Getty Images)Getty Images
Phelia is grateful to be playing at all this season.
She recounted on Monday the sheer terror of her eye ordeal. She learned the retina had been slowly detaching, the result of a genetic abnormality.
She wore a patch after her first surgery to protect her healing eye, which was bloodshot and swollen shut for months. It took a few months before any vision returned to that eye.
Her monthly laser treatments caused lingering discomfort. She needed reading glasses to protect against eye strain while studying or reading. She couldn’t drive.
She would be having what she considered a “perfectly normal day,” when suddenly, she’d get nauseous or experience piercing headaches.
The doctors explained how the nausea and the headaches stemmed from fluid draining out of her eye. She lost some hand-eye coordination and resorted to juggling to get it back.
She shelved plans to play professionally in the WNBA or abroad. Instead, she would redshirt and play another season of college basketball.
“I feel like a lot of people don’t talk about how hard it is to sit out for a season,” she said. “It really makes you do a lot of reflecting.”
Laila Phelia of the Texas Longhorns warms up against the South Carolina Gamecocks before the start of the NCAA Women’s Basketball Tournament Final Four semifinal game at Amalie Arena on April 4, 2025 in Tampa, Florida. (Photo by Thien-An Truong/ISI Photos/Getty Images)Getty Images
After Phelia reflected on 2024-25, she decided to transfer. She needed a change, she believed, to re-inspire confidence in her game. She appeared in just 10 Texas games in 2024-25 before sitting out the rest of the season.
She didn’t speak with many coaches after she entered the portal but was struck immediately by her conversation with Legette-Jack.
“She was so invested in wanting to help me. Even now, she constantly reminds me of the player I was at Michigan, always trying to build that confidence in me,” Phelia said. “It’s been amazing. I’ve been excited and I’m so blessed to be able to be coached by a woman like her.”
Phelia is a woman of faith. She believes, she said, that her ordeal happened for a reason.
“It was a big change of events,” she said, “and I just had to have faith in God’s plan and just try to make the best of it, to see it from a different perspective.”
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