Before she came to USC , it had never occurred to Jazzy Davidson how charmed her basketball upbringing had been. Growing up outside of Portland, nearly all of her years playing the game were spent with the same tight-knit group of girls — girls who'd been best friends since before the fifth grade and who, after all that time, could anticipate her every move before she made it.
"They're basically my sisters," Davidson says.
They'd been that way pretty much as far back as she could remember. Allie, she met in kindergarten. She and Sara joined the same squad in second grade. By 10, Dylan, Reyce and Avery were on the club team, too. For the next eight years or so, up through March's Oregon girls 6A state championship game, they were inseparable, the six of them spending almost every waking moment together.
But now, a few days before the start of her freshman season at USC, Davidson is in Los Angeles, while her former teammates are scattered across several states playing with various other Division I and NAIA schools. It's an odd feeling, she admits, but a thrilling one, too — to be here with a new team, continuing her basketball journey without the girls who'd been there the whole way.
"Being here made me realize how comfortable I was with them," Davidson said. "It's definitely different now, definitely a learning experience."
Within that well-worn dynamic, Davidson developed into one of the top women's hoops prospects in the nation, all while she and her friends led Clackamas High on an unprecedented, four-year run of success. Now, early in her freshman season at USC, Davidson steps into circumstances that no one would have anticipated when she signed with the school.
At the time, the expectation was that she could be brought along as a talented No. 2 while the Trojans' generational star JuJu Watkins commanded all the outside noise and nightly double teams. But then Watkins injured her knee in March , forcing her to sit out the 2025-26 season . Suddenly, the Trojans' top prospect also became their saving grace.
No one, for the record, is saying that out loud at USC. Nor does anyone in the building expect Davidson to step seamlessly into Watkins' shoes.
"Those are very unique shoes," USC coach Lindsay Gottlieb says. "But the fact that Jazzy can step into our program and already just make a really unique and incredible impression on everybody is pretty wild."
Read more: Jazzy Davidson has strong debut as USC women rout New Mexico State
By her own admission, Davidson has never been the fastest to warm up to new people. Most outside of her circle would probably describe her as "quiet" or "reserved." It's only once you get to know her that you really see who she is and what she's capable of.
USC got a brief glimpse Sunday, with the Trojans trailing by a point to No. 9 North Carolina State and 10 seconds on the clock. Coming out of a timeout, the 6-foot-1 Davidson cut swiftly through two defenders toward the basket, caught an inbound pass and, without taking a step, laid in the game-winning bucket .
The stage gets even bigger on Saturday, when No. 8 USC meets No. 2 South Carolina at Crypto.com Arena in the first of several grueling tests on a slate that includes four games against the top three teams in the Associated Press preseason top 25 poll. Any hope of the Trojans reaching the same heights as last season hinges in part on their star freshman quickly finding her potential.
No one has seen Davidson fulfill that promise like the girls who have been there since the start. As far as they're concerned, it won't be long before the world sees what they have.
"If you know Jazzy," says Allie Roden, now a freshman guard at Colorado State, "you know she can do anything she wants, pretty much."
When Davidson's mother saw that her 5-year-old daughter was unusually tall, she signed up Jasmine — who would later be known as Jazzy — for basketball. Roden was on that first team. She has seen the video evidence of the two of them, both still in kindergarten, launching basketballs over their heads at the backboard.
"We were terrible," Roden says with a laugh, "but we thought we were really great."
Davidson moved down the street from Roden in the fourth grade, and by that point, she'd figured something out. Enough at least to catch the attention of Clackamas High coach Korey Landolt, whose daughter played for the same club program.
"I saw [Davidson] working with a trainer and just thought, 'Huh, this kid is different,' " Landolt says.
Once the others joined forces a year later on the club team Northwest Select, there wasn't much anyone could do to stop them. The six girls seemed to fit seamlessly together on the court. Off it, Roden says, "we were inseparable pretty much as soon as we met." She doesn't recall their team losing a game against their age group for two full years at one point.
It was around that time that Davidson separated herself from the pack as a prospect. She'd grown to 5-foot-10 by the seventh grade, only for the pandemic to shut down essentially the entire state, including all high school sports.
So Davidson threw herself into basketball. She and Sara Barhoum, who's now a freshman at Oregon, started working out together during free time between online classes, doing what she could to add strength to her spindly frame. Then they'd shoot together at night, each pushing the other to improve.
"It was a big time for me," Davidson says. "That was when I honed in on everything."
Two or three times per month, the team would travel out of state to test themselves. On one particularly memorable trip, just the six of them entered a tournament in Dana Point. They ended up winning the whole thing, beating some of the nation's best teams, despite the fact they'd stayed up late playing Heads Up and were sunburned from a beach visit the day before.
Those middle school trips only cemented their bond — as well as Davidson's place as a top prospect. By her freshman season, with all of them together at Clackamas High, the secret was out. College coaches came calling. Gottlieb, who had just taken the job at USC, was one.
Read more: Jazzy Davidson powers No. 18 USC to thrilling upset of No. 9 North Carolina State
Even then, there was a certain grace with which Davidson played the game — as if it flowed from her naturally. "She's so fluid," Gottlieb explains. "She glides." But there was also a fearlessness in getting to the rim against much older, stronger players.
"She had to hold her own," Landolt says. "But people couldn't stop her inside. They couldn't stop her outside. She was just so versatile. She could do everything."
As a gangly freshman, Davidson stuffed the stat sheet with 22 points, eight rebounds, four steals, three assists and one block per game on her way to being named Oregon's Gatorade Player of the Year. She won the award again as a sophomore … as well as the next two years after that.
When those four years were up, Davidson was the all-time leading scorer in Oregon Class 6A girls basketball history with 2,726 points. Still, some of her teammates contend she was even better on the defensive end.
"Jazzy is good at everything she does," Barhoum said. "But she's probably the best defender I've ever seen."
USC guard Jazzy Davidson blocks a shot by North Carolina State's Devyn Quigley on Nov. 9 in Charlotte, N.C. (Lance King / Getty Images)
The girls played on the same team for six years when Clackamas made a run to the 6A state championship game. They'd spent so much time with each other, their coach says, that it could be "a blessing and a curse." Sometimes, they bickered like sisters, too.
Landolt would urge them to hang out with other friends, only half-kidding. But all that time together made their connection on the court pretty much telepathic.
"There were so many passes I threw to Jazzy that no one else would've caught, but she was just there." said Reyce Mogel, who now plays at Southern Oregon. "We were always on the same page. And not just me and Jazzy. Everybody."
Davidson was on the bench, in foul trouble, for a long stretch of the state championship game against South Medford. But she delivered two key blocks in the final minute as Clackamas won its first state title.
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Two years later, when they returned to the state championship as seniors, Davidson was again forced to sit for a long period after twisting her ankle. This time, her absence "took the wind out of everyone's sails," Landolt says. Clackamas blew a 19-point, third-quarter lead from there, even as a hobbled Davidson tried to give it a go in the final minutes.
The six girls found each other after the final buzzer, heartbroken. They knew it would be the last time.
Their final record together at Clackamas: 102-14.
"We all were hugging," Barhoum says, "and just saying to each other, we're all off to do better things. We all made history. And now everybody is going to make history somewhere else."
They may live apart now, but the six women, all now playing on separate for college basketball programs, still talk all the time.
"I FaceTime one of them at least every day," Davidson says.
Her Trojan teammates are still getting to know her, still learning her tendencies. That will come with time. But the reason she ultimately chose USC, over every other top program, was how much it felt like home.
Through two games, Davidson seems to have settled seamlessly into a starring role at USC, inviting the inevitable comparisons to Watkins that Gottlieb would rather avoid.
USC guard Jazzy Davidson puts up a three-point shot against North Carolina State on Nov. 9 in Charlotte, N.C. (Lance King / Getty Images)
"You do not need to be anything other than what your best self is," Gottlieb insists.
Her friends have seen up close how far Davidson can take a team at her best. But no one, not even the six of them, understand the circumstances Davidson has stepped into quite like Watkins.
Her advice was simple. But it still resonated with Davidson on the doorstep of the season.
"She just told me not to be anxious about any of this," Davidson says. "You're good. Just go play how you play, and you'll be fine."
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times .
