It was a hot June morning in East Texas. A tiny 7-year-old girl newly arrived from Liberia stood by the window of her extended family’s crowded three-bedroom apartment, wondering how to make friends while her mother worked from dawn to dusk to support her daughters.
The answer? A nearby park where kids were bouncing and tossing a bright orange ball with black stripes—something she’d never seen before. That’s where Molly Kaiser, the NMSU Women’s Basketball All-CUSA first-team power guard, got her first lessons in resilience, teamwork, and loyalty.
“I just soaked it up and kept watching. That’s how I found basketball and fell in love with it,” says Molly. A few weeks later she gathered enough courage to ask if she could join the game. During one of her first plays, she took a hard hit to the head. Fighting tears, she was determined to stay tough. “I couldn’t go home and tell my grandma I got hurt playing,” she recalled. “They’d say I couldn’t play anymore, and I wasn’t about to let that happen.”
Over time, Molly honed her basketball skills, joining her junior high and high school basketball teams and eventually catching the attention of prominent college coaches. “I got letters from universities like Princeton,” she recalls, “but NMSU made me feel at home, like I was part of something bigger.” She felt an overwhelming sense of peace once she set foot on the NMSU campus. “I had never seen mountains before and knew I had found the right place.”
Nevertheless, she didn’t get much playing time during her freshman year. But a series of injuries opened an opportunity for her, and as soon as her name was called, she says, “I was ready.” When Coach Jodi Adams joined NMSU to lead the women’s basketball team in 2022, Molly was nervous at first. She thought about leaving NMSU but decided her loyalty was stronger than her fears. “They’ve been nothing but true to me, loving me and giving me a good education.”
Coach Adams immediately put her at ease, coaching Molly to become First Team All-CUSA following a season in which she averaged a team-high 14.9 points per game while starting all 31 games. Now she’s their standout guard, leading the team in several offensive statistics and surpassing 1,000 career points. She also earned scholarships like the Presley Askew Endowed Scholarship named after one of NMSU’s beloved basketball coaches.
“Having that support and being able to focus on basketball and school, that’s the best thing in the world.” The connection to Coach Askew means a lot — almost as much as wearing jersey #7 to honor her father, who passed away on November 7th when Molly was in 7th grade.
Once she completes her master’s, Molly hopes to play in the WNBA. “That would be a dream come true.” Later, she aims to open field houses across the U.S., creating safe spaces for at-risk youth to play, learn, and build friendships. “I want to love them on and off the court.” If she’s as skilled in business as she is in basketball, she’ll slam dunk any goal she sets her mind to.