Braylon Mullins’s Shot Was a Lifetime in the Making

GREENFIELD, Ind. — There is a black Dodge police cruiser parked in front of Greenfield-Central High School, and it’s not difficult to deduce who drives it. The Connecticut Huskies license plate on the front is the giveaway.

Inside the building, school resource officer Josh Mullins is trying to get back to work, but the interruptions keep coming. A stunning college basketball scramble play in Washington, D.C., Sunday tilted life here in Greenfield, a town of about 25,000 located in the flat farmland terrain that stretches out east of Indianapolis. Mullins’s oldest son became a March legend in that instant, and the smile remains plastered on his face.

“Enjoy the moment, man,” officer Mullins says. “These things don’t happen to everybody.”

This thing happened to a basketball family with deep roots in this community—a family that rejected the nomadic lifestyle of modern prospects and stayed home. This thing was the fulfillment of a recruiting pitch by UConn coach Dan Hurley, and a mother’s wishful Instagram prophecy nearly two years earlier. This thing was the realization of a gym rat’s dream, a live-action monument to a lifetime of practice shots, a distillation of all that work into one fundamentally flawless wrist flick.

“If you’re from Indiana,” Josh Mullins says, “you better be able to shoot.”

Freshman Braylon Mullins’s 35-foot swish beat the buzzer and Duke in the NCAA men’s tournament East Regional final. It propelled UConn to yet another Final Four, and it poetically brings the freshman who launched it back home, where his thunderclap of a shot echoes loudly. The electronic sign in front of the school on North Broadway celebrates the event: “Congrats UConn. GC is proud of you Braylon.”

The shot came at the confluence of opportunity and preparedness. And the preparation stretches back through time in Greenfield: to Christmas mornings in the high school gym; to a floodlit backyard court on Fifth Street; to a childhood friendship turned teenage courtship turned lifetime partnership. This all-time March moment was generations in the making.

Josh and Katie Mullins met in second grade at Harris Elementary, classmates well before soulmates. After matriculating half a mile down the street to Greenfield-Central, which houses both the middle school and high school, they eventually became best friends. On Valentine’s Day 1998, when Josh was a standout basketball player for the Cougars and Katie was a cheerleader, they went on their first date.

Katie’s family had been in Greenfield forever, establishing a farm outside the city limits that is nearly 150 years old. Josh’s grandparents moved there from Kentucky and never left. This place, about 25 miles outside Indianapolis but not to be confused with affluent suburbs like Carmel or Fishers, is all they knew. Katie’s uncle, Guy Titus, is the mayor. Josh’s cousin, Gary Achor, is running for sheriff.

“We’re just little townies that have always been here,” Katie says.

They actually lived elsewhere during college. Josh went to Lincoln Trail Junior College in Robinson, Ill., to play basketball, and Katie followed. But she was driving 2 ½ hours home nearly every weekend to work at a tanning salon, and after graduating from Lincoln Trail opted to attend nearby IUPUI (now known as IU Indianapolis) to get her four-year degree. This time, it was Josh’s turn to follow Katie—he signed with the Jaguars, becoming a starter and double-digit scorer on their only NCAA tournament qualifier in 2003.

They got married after college and, naturally, settled in Greenfield, a town bisected by U.S. 40 and dotted with American flags and driveway basketball goals. (Knightstown, site of the gym used in the movie Hoosiers as the home of the Hickory Huskers, is 12 miles away.) Josh became a police officer and the couple had three boys—Braylon and twins Cole and Clay, who will play at Division III Franklin University next year. Basketball was an inevitable family bonding element.

Katie remembers Braylon pushing around basketballs before he could walk. By the time the boys were old enough to play, the family lived in a modest house where Katie grew up on West Fifth Street, with a backyard court that became the launching pad for all that followed. Other kids flocked there to play with her boys.

“It was the go-to place in the neighborhood,” Katie says.

But the standing game was Josh and one of the twins against Braylon and the other twin. The rules to keep it relatively fair: Josh had to wear flip-flops and could shoot only three-pointers.

“We would go out all the time,” Josh says. “We played under the lights. It was one of those things where you want your kids to do the same thing as you until they tell you they hate it. [Braylon] never told me that. We put a ball in his hands and it just never left.

“It’s the difference being great and good. You just got to do extra things. And I gave him the ball at five and it just took off from there.”

By the time the boys were in middle school, Josh was on the Greenfield-Central coaching staff. That led to a family tradition—Christmas morning shootarounds in the school gym, Cougar Fieldhouse. Built in 1969, it had an original capacity of 4,620—huge by most standards, but not compared to some of the cathedrals in the state. (New Castle, about 25 miles away, seats 10,000 and is the largest high school gym in the nation.) The current Cougar Fieldhouse capacity is 3,100.

That is where Braylon really honed his shooting stroke and all-around game.

“I met him here every single morning at 7:15, an hour before school, for four years,” says Luke Meredith, the coach of the Cougars during Braylon’s tenure. “He shot by himself. We listened to music, just talked. There would be other guys that he would drag along with him, including his twin brothers. But he was the one constant.”

Braylon started making a name for himself playing for Indiana Elite on the AAU circuit, but he was viewed as a mid-major prospect. Katie posted a graphic on Instagram on July 1, 2023—the summer between her son’s sophomore and junior years—with the logos of schools from the Mid-American Conference, Missouri Valley and Horizon League.

“Headed into July with some good ones!!!” she wrote.

Meredith knew that Mullins had all of the talent and work ethic, but believed he still lacked some necessary self-confidence to play at that level. Braylon was too humble for his own good.

“I had to give him the nickname BMF, ‘Bad MoFo,’ ” Meredith says. “I was trying to get that out of him. He was the opposite of too cocky. I needed for him to show everybody how good he really was.”

By the end of his junior year, everything had changed. His rising recruiting profile coincided with offers to do what hotshot teenage basketball players tend to do—changing AAU teams and attending private/prep schools. The Mullins family listened, but ultimately was not interested. A product of Greenfield was going to finish growing up in Greenfield.

“I was adamant,” Katie says. “It would just be silly to go somewhere else.”

Along the way, the scholarship offer list changed drastically. Braylon was growing taller and diversifying his game while maintaining his shooting ability. On July 22, 2024, she posted his final 10 list: Indiana, Alabama, Michigan, Tennessee, Purdue, North Carolina, Duke, UConn, Kentucky and Kansas. He’d blown up into a five-star prospect, one of the top 25 seniors in the nation.

The college list eventually was trimmed to a final three: Indiana, UConn and North Carolina. When those coaching staffs made home visits, it created a hubbub in Greenfield. The Mullins have dogs that could disrupt a living-room conversation, so the meetings were at The Depot, a popular local restaurant in a repurposed old grain mill.

“We kind of tried to keep our distance, let them focus on what they were doing, not try to bombard them with introducing ourselves and getting autographs and all that,” says bar manager Kayla Montgomery. “We kind of kept it really professional.”

(At least until the end of the visit. Then there were pictures to be taken with Hurley and Hubert Davis. Today, a framed UConn No. 24 jersey hangs in the restaurant, and they’re hosting a Final Four watch party Saturday night.)

In late October, before the start of Braylon’s senior season, he held a commitment announcement in Cougar Fieldhouse. UConn got its man. While on the home visit, Hurley told the Mullins family that he would bring their son back to Indiana for the Final Four in 2026.

“Dan Hurley is exactly what you see on TV and what you see on the sidelines,” Meredith says. “He is unapologetically him. And when he talks to you, the way he interacts with you, he’s just him all the way. It’s like, take it or leave it. And then there were other coaches that would come in and it was just an act. It was weird. It was different and you didn't have that same vibe.

“I went on the [campus] visit with Braylon and his family to Storrs. No disrespect because we’re kind of out in the middle of nowhere here in Greenfield, too, but it’s in the middle of nowhere. But that’s fine for Braylon. He didn’t really need any of the other hoopla and all the other things. And when Dan Hurley says, ‘I want you,’ It’s easy to say yes.”

Hurley’s molten intensity can be a lot to deal with. Braylon never shied away from it. Working hard is not an issue.

“We just put discipline and structure in his life and rolled it into basketball,” Josh Mullins says. “I think that’s why Hurley and him get along so well. He has the same system of discipline, and you’ll do things the right way.”

Braylon averaged 33 points per game as a senior, but his career ended short of the common goal for any Hoosier high schooler: a sectional championship. Still, he won the coveted Mr. Basketball award, a sufficiently big deal in the state that there are signs on the way into Greenfield commemorating two athletes: 1996 Olympic gold medal gymnast Jaycie Phelps and 2025 Indiana Mr. Basketball Braylon Mullins.

Upon graduation, it was time to leave the heartland for the Northeast. But like his parents, Braylon brought his girlfriend to college with him. Kylee Beranek, from neighboring New Palestine High School, is also a UConn freshman. That helps the separation from home—yet it was a needed separation, Katie Mullins says.

“He needed this,” she says. “He needed to be pushed out. He was an introvert when he was younger, so this is good.”

All Braylon Mullins had to do was go to UConn and be a contributing part to something bigger than himself. He accomplished that fairly quickly, moving into the starting lineup on Dec. 12 against Texas and never leaving it.

With 10 days off between games from Dec. 21 to 31, Hurley gave his players time to go home for a holiday break. On Christmas morning, Josh looked at his three boys and told them it was time to maintain tradition and head to the gym.

“Braylon was like, ‘Really, we’re still doing this?’ ” Katie recalls. “Yeah, sorry. We’re going.”

The family that shoots together, swishes together. Six days after Christmas, with dozens of Greenfield residents making the short drive to Cincinnati, Braylon scored 17 points at Xavier. Some shooting struggles laid ahead, as Josh believed his son was putting too much pressure on himself. “You could see it in his body language,” he says.

But when the time came to take his longest and biggest shot of the season, Braylon channeled all that muscle memory and rose to meet a desperate moment.

The scene in Capital One Arena on Sunday, as the season was slipping away from UConn: The Huskies had rallied from 19 down but were trailing by two, applying full-court pressure; in the stands, Katie was sitting down with her hands covering her face. Josh was standing up to her right, and Braylon’s girlfriend, Kylee, was standing to her left. The stress of the moment was too much for Katie, who was “kind of peeking” behind her hands.

“I had my head in my lap,” Katie says. “I actually did not witness it. Then I kind of blacked out.”

All UConn fans, and a good portion of the nation, can recount what happened: UConn guard Silas Demary Jr. deflected a Cayden Boozer pass; Braylon ran down the loose ball and passed it to senior leader Alex Karaban, who was covered and passed it back to Braylon.

Kids practice very long shots quite often these days, but this was on another level. From very near the “March Madness” logo. Still, when Braylon let it go, with textbook form, those who knew him knew what was coming.

“As soon as it left his hands, I said ‘LFG,’ but not the full ‘LFG,’ with my family right there,” says Meredith. “I felt it was going to go in once it left his hands.”

“I’ve seen it before,” Josh says, still smiling.

When the ball ripped the net and Duke was defeated, pandemonium broke loose in the arena. But it broke loose in Greenfield, too. Meredith pulls out his phone and shows Ring doorcam video of his teenage sons and their friends immediately sprinting outside in celebration, with a basketball, ready to reenact the shot in the driveway. (Meredith replayed one other reaction to the shot: a call from an NBA franchise trying to gauge whether Braylon would be a one-and-done collegian and enter his name in the draft.)

Braylon Mullins’s star turn was foretold, hopefully, by his mother on instagram nearly two years earlier. On May 16, 2024, Katie Mullins posted a pair of basketball videos, one of Braylon in middle school and one in high school. In the top one, an eighth grade Braylon is crossing over a defender twice—left, then right—and launching a winning three-pointer. In the bottom one, high school junior Braylon is pulling up to hit a contestant, leaning three at the buzzer to beat neighboring rival Pendleton Heights.

Katie’s caption: “Maybe in college lol.”

Maybe became reality Sunday. A generations-deep product of Greenfield, who left for a faraway place, made a shot that will bring him home for the Final Four.

“He did all that shooting in the morning in front of no one, and then to hit that shot in front of millions, it was meant to be,” Meredith says. “All the things that went into that—if he misses the shot, their season’s over. He makes that shot and sends his team back to his home state. It’s a storybook.”

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