UCLA’s Kiki Rice carving out her own space as star in women’s hoops

Inside an old firehall in Middletown, Maryland, between when it operated as the local station and when the Poffenbarger family turned it into a whiskey distillery, Kiki Rice — along with Saylor Poffenbarger, an AAU teammate — discovered a basketball laboratory.

COVID-19 had closed gyms in 2020, so for about 10 months starting that fall, Rice used the converted building as a hub to cycle through shooting drills with Poffenbarger and Larry Gray, their trainer.

They maximized that window of Rice’s development, the early years of high school when recruiting visits and scholarship offers would give way to one final decision.

Rice — the cousin of Knicks executive Allan Houston and the niece of President Joe Biden’s former domestic policy adviser, Susan Rice — wouldn’t decide on UCLA for another year.

The Bruins’ eventual run to the Sweet 16, which continues Saturday against No. 3-seed LSU in Albany, would be a by-product of this.

For those months, Rice fine-tuned the jumper and other skills that made her a foundational piece of Sidwell Friends School’s nationally ranked teams, and since, she’s led a similar rise at UCLA, with the program inching closer to an elusive Final Four appearance.

Rice, though, has also carved out a place in the future of the sport.

She’s only a sophomore.

There are two more seasons before she could become a top pick in the WNBA draft.

In October 2022, Rice inked the first-ever NIL deal with Jordan Brand.

In May, she’ll be one of three women’s basketball players — alongside Iowa’s Caitlin Clark and South Carolina’s Kamilla Cardoso — featured in ESPN’s “Full Court Press” series.

“If I had been 10 years older and played college basketball a few years ago, I don’t know how different my experience would have been,” Rice told reporters in Los Angeles last week.

They’re the perks of being a rising star in the modern landscape of the sport, and they’ve coincided with a Bruins team in the midst of a special season.

“It’s definitely hard to imagine a more perfect storm,” Teo Rice, her brother and a Yale guard, told The Post. “Although there may be competitors on the court, players like Angel Reese, JuJu Watkins, Caitlin Clark, my sister as well, all bring their own buzz. And collectively, they just totally, exponentially increased the amount of attention on women’s basketball, women’s sports.”

As a freshman, Rice collected 11.6 points, 4.5 rebounds and 3.0 assists per game, and that built the foundation for a 2023-24 campaign when the Bruins peaked at No. 2 in the AP Top 25 poll and didn’t lose until Jan. 14.

The Bruins didn’t need Rice (13.2 points per game) to be their leading scorer.

They have Lauren Betts (14.9) and Charisma Osborne (14.1) for that, too.

But at times, like in the Round of 32 when Rice scored 17 second-half points, they needed the 5-foot-11 point guard to take over.

Those were the moments she’d been training for.

Her roots with Aggie McCormick and the Fairfax Stars had progressed to stints with USA basketball.

They were accompanied by training sessions with Gray and, eventually, Alex McLean, a former director of player development with the Wizards.

Her jumper needed work.

The drives into the paint were always there.

Rice’s court vision had been a strength, too.

McLean helped make mechanical tweaks and implemented performance-based drills that captured the pressure of a game.

If Rice didn’t make 3 of 5 shots, for example, and a perfect five in the final set of a drill, they started over.

When McLean worked with the Wizards, Rice trained in their facility after practice.

There’d be trips to Miami where she could train alongside professional players, such as Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, too.

And McLean still occasionally travels to Los Angeles during the season to train Rice at the UCLA facility.

At one point, McCormick recalled, Rice worried about whether other top players would follow her to UCLA. She didn’t stress about a responsibility to build the Bruins’ program herself, but rather to ensure she was a key part of what it could become.

There was work that needed to be done, Teo said, but there was an underlying belief that if Rice had sparked with the rise of Sidwell, the same could happen at UCLA.

The Bruins won 27 games last year and made it to the Sweet 16.

This year, their No. 2 seed in the region marked the highest in program history.

Rice had entered a program with upside that just needed a final boost, McLean said. And, in his eyes, Rice can “carry this women’s game,” as well as the Bruins, into the future.

“UCLA was always on the cusp,” McLean told The Post. “Kiki’s been a catalyst to elevate the level of talent they can get, and for her position, what she does, she can orchestrate a lot of things and she makes everybody around her better.”