Jazzy Davidson’s closest friends know she can be elite at USC

Before she came in USCnever occurred to me Jazzy Davidson how adorable her basketball upbringing was. She grew up outside of Portland, and spent most of her years playing the game with the same close-knit group of girls—girls who had been best friends since before fifth grade and who, after all this time, could see her every move before she made it.

“They're basically my sisters,” Davidson says.

They had been like this almost always for as long as she could remember. Ellie, she met in kindergarten. She and Sarah joined the same team in second grade. By age 10, Dylan, Race and Avery were also on the club team. Over the next eight years or so, until the Oregon 6A girls state championship in March, they were inseparable, the six of them spending nearly every waking minute together.

But now, days before the start of USC's freshman season, Davidson is in Los Angeles while her former teammates are scattered across the Pacific Northwest playing for various other Division I schools. She admits it's a strange feeling, but also an exciting one, to be here with a new team, continuing her basketball journey without the girls who have been there all along.

“Being here, I realized how comfortable I was with them,” Davidson said. “It’s definitely different now, it’s definitely a learning experience.”

As part of this frayed dynamic, Davidson emerged as one of the top female prospects in the country as she and her friends led Clackamas High on an unprecedented four-year path to success. Now, as she begins her freshman season at USC, Davidson finds herself in circumstances no one expected when she signed with the school.

At the time, she was expected to be a talented No. 2 while the Trojans Generation star JuJu Watkins commanded all external noise and nightly double commands. But then Watkins injured my knee in Marchforcing her skip the 2025/26 season. Suddenly the Trojans' greatest prospect became their salvation.

For the record, no one says this out loud at USC. No one in the building expects Davidson to step into Watkins' shoes easily, either.

“These are very unique shoes.” USC coach Lindsay Gottlieb speaks. “But the fact that Jazzy can come into our program and already leave a really unique and incredible impression on everyone is pretty wild.”

By her own admission, Davidson has never been good at meeting new people quickly. Most people outside her circle would probably describe her as “quiet” or “low-key.” Only by getting to know her better will you truly understand who she is and what she is capable of.

On Sunday, USC caught a glimpse: The Trojans were one point behind No. 9 NC State and 10 seconds on the clock. Coming out of a timeout, Davidson, 6-1, quickly broke through two defenders to the basket, caught a pass and, without taking a step, added to the basket to win.

The arena gets even bigger Saturday when No. 8 USC faces No. 2 South Carolina at Crypto Arena in the first of several grueling tests awaiting a slate that includes four games against the top three teams in the Associated Press preseason poll. Any hope of the Trojans reaching the same heights as last season depends in part on their star freshman quickly discovering her potential.

No one saw Davidson deliver on that promise like the girls who were there from the beginning. In their opinion, the world will soon see what they have.

“If you know Jazzy,” said Ellie Rhoden, now a freshman guard at Colorado State, “you know she can do whatever she wants.”

When Davidson's mother saw that her five-year-old daughter was unusually tall, she enrolled Jasmine, who would later become known as Jazzy, in basketball. Rhoden was on that first team. She saw a video of the two of them, both still in kindergarten, shooting basketballs over their heads into a backboard.

“We were terrible,” laughs Rodin, “but we thought we were really great.”

Davidson moved down the street from Roden in fourth grade, and by then she had an idea. Enough, at least, to catch the attention of Clackamas High coach Corey Landolt, whose daughter played for the same club program.

“I saw [Davidson] was working with a coach and just thought, 'Yeah, this kid is different,'” Landolt said.

When the others joined forces a year later to form the Northwest Select club team, there was little anyone could do to stop them. The six girls seemed to fit together perfectly on the court. Despite this, Roden says, “we became inseparable almost as soon as we met.” She doesn't remember their team losing a game to their age group in two full years.

Around the same time, Davidson stood out from the crowd as a promising young woman. She grew to 5 feet 10 inches by seventh grade, only for the pandemic to shut down virtually the entire state, including all school sports.

So Davidson threw herself into basketball. She and Sara Barhoum, now a freshman at Oregon State, began working out together in their free time between online classes, doing everything they could to strengthen their frail bodies. They then filmed together at night, pushing each other to improve.

“It was a big time for me,” Davidson says. “That’s when I honed everything.”

The team traveled out of state two or three times a month to test themselves. On one particularly memorable trip, only six of them competed in a tournament in Dana Point. They ended up winning it all, beating some of the best teams in the country, despite staying up late playing heads-up and getting sunburned from visiting the beach the day before.

Those high school trips only strengthened their bond, as well as Davidson's place as a top prospect. By the beginning of the first season, when they were all attending Clackamas High together, the secret was out. The college coaches showed up. Gottlieb, who had just accepted a job at the University of Southern California, was one of them.

Even then, Davidson handled the game with a certain grace—as if it came naturally to her. “She’s so lively,” Gottlieb explains. “She's sliding.” But there was also a fearlessness in stepping into the ring against much older and stronger players.

“She had to stand up for herself,” Landolt says. “But people couldn't stop her on the inside. They couldn't stop her on the outside. She was so versatile. She could do everything.”

As a lanky freshman, Davidson posted 22 points, eight rebounds, four steals, three assists and one blocked shot in a game en route to being named Oregon State's Gatorade Player of the Year. She won the award again her sophomore year…and the next two years after that.

After those four years, Davidson became the leading scorer in Oregon Class 6A women's basketball history with 2,726 points. However, some of her teammates claim she was even better on defense.

“Jazzy is good at everything she does,” Barhoum said. “But she’s probably the best defender I’ve ever seen.”

The girls played on the same team for six years until Clackamas made a run to the 6A state championship game. They spent so much time with each other that it could be a “blessing and a curse,” their coach said. Sometimes they also quarreled like sisters.

Landolt urged them to hang out with other friends, half-jokingly. But all this time together made their connection on set telepathic in many ways.

“I threw so many passes to Jazzy that no one else would have caught them, but she was just there.” said Race Mogel, who now plays for Southern Oregon. “We were always on the same page. And not just me and Jazzy. Everyone.”

Davidson was benched due to foul play for an extended period of time in the state championship game against South Medford. But she made two key blocks in the final minute as Clackamas won its first state title.

Two years later, when they returned to the state senior championships, Davidson was again forced to sit for long periods after spraining her ankle. This time, her absence “knocked the wind out of everyone's sails,” Landolt says. Clackamas blew a 19-point lead in the third quarter, although a stumbling Davidson tried in the final minutes.

Six girls found each other after the last call, heartbroken. They knew it would be the last time.

Their last joint record in Clackamas was 102-14.

“We all hugged each other,” Barhoum says, “and just told each other, 'We're all trying to do better. We've all made history. And now everyone's going to make history somewhere else.'

They may be living separately now, but the six girls, who now play for different college basketball programs, still talk all the time.

“I FaceTime with one of them at least every day,” Davidson says.

Her Trojan teammates are still getting to know her, still learning her tendencies. It will come with time. But the reason she ultimately chose USC over all the other top programs was because of how homely it felt.

Through two games, Davidson seems to have eased into his starring role at USC, leading to inevitable comparisons to Watkins that Gottlieb would prefer to avoid.

“You don't have to be anything other than your best self,” Gottlieb insists.

Her friends have seen firsthand how far Davidson can take a team at her best. But no one, not even six of them, understands Davidson's circumstances quite like Watkins.

Her advice was simple. But it still resonated with Davidson heading into the season.

“She just told me not to worry about it,” Davidson says. “You're doing great. Just go play the way you play and everything will be fine.”