Taylen Collins ready to make an impact on Auburn women's hoops

The dunk was real, on a real 10-foot goal, she said.

Perhaps you’ve seen the season ticket ads on social media channels for Auburn women’s basketball. “Girls can dunk too,” says senior forward Taylen Collins at the end, right after effortlessly flushing a two-hand jam.

And apparently she’s not the only member of the 2023-24 Tigers who can throw it down.

 “We have a couple girls who can get up there,” Collins said. “It’s not just me.”

While the slam dunk hasn’t happened in a game for her just yet, she’s had plenty of other highlights over her first three seasons of college basketball.

A three-year starter at Oklahoma State, Collins announced her transfer to Auburn in the late spring and joined coach Johnnie Harris and the Tigers for summer workouts, along with the team’s trip to Europe in August.

Collins brings to the Plains size, speed, and the ability to take over on both ends of the floor. She was the fourth-leading rebounder in the Big 12 last season, averaging nine points and nine rebounds per game. She recorded nine double-doubles and tied the Oklahoma State record for single-game rebounds with 23.

It seemed predestined that she would be a Cowgirl – her father, Terry Collins, was a member of the 1995 Oklahoma State men’s team that went to the Final Four. But it wasn’t just his ties to the OSU program that led her there initially.

“It wasn’t just based off him,” Collins said. “I had built a good relationship with the coaching staff there. It was really about the connections for me. That’s important.”

OSU, however, made a coaching change after her sophomore year, and she entered the transfer portal a year later.

Her interest in Auburn and its staff was sparked years earlier, even before she began her collegiate career. Associate head coach Damitria Buchanan was an assistant at Kansas and recruited Collins before she ultimately signed with the Cowgirls.

“It was really the relationships that I built,” Collins said of her decision to leave her home state for Auburn. “I’ve known Coach D for awhile, she recruited me coming out of high school. So it was kind of like a jumpstart on everything. And then I got to meet the girls, and just seeing how they interacted with each other, it was just laughs and good energy. It was something I wanted to be a part of.”

Interestingly enough, she has played in Neville Arena before. Her OSU team visited Auburn two years ago when the Cowgirls took on the Tigers in the 2021 SEC/Big 12 Challenge. Collins had 11 points and eight rebounds in the game, but Auburn came away with a 77-66 victory.

 Now several months into her Auburn career, she has seen the chemistry on the team continue to grow – through summer workouts, the Europe trip, and now three weeks of regular-season practice.

“The competition level is so high in here, because you’re just around a bunch of girls who love to compete and it shows,” Collins said. “I feel like our connection with each other is growing more and more now that we’ve got to play against the scout team and all of us have been able to be on the same team. 

“As that continues to grow, it’s going to make everything more fun, and everything’s going to fall into place.”

She said the team’s trip to France and Switzerland in August – where the Tigers got to play three games against European professionals – was a unique and helpful bonding experience.

“It helped a lot, because that was like us getting thrown into the water,” Collins said. “Getting to play with each other for once. I think it was great because it was a new experience we all got to have together, and so I felt like it grew our bond even more.”

Auburn has started to feel like home for the Muldrow, Oklahoma, native, somewhat similar – if a bit bigger – than her previous stop in Stillwater.

“I really love the community here,” she said. “I like how everyone’s really supportive of everybody. I like how you’ll have the women’s basketball or men’s basketball teams out supporting volleyball and soccer – just everybody supporting everybody. I think that’s really special here.”

And that support will be reciprocated once the Tigers hit the hardwood, where Collins can’t wait to throw down that first dunk – it would be the first in Auburn history, by the way – and watch her teammates and fellow student-athletes go wild. 

“On a fast break,” she said, “where I’m feeling good, the legs are feeling good, it’s going to happen.”