Blue White Illustrated

I t had all been going so well for Jaylen Williams. She was attending a bas- ketball camp at Penn State, the school with which she had fallen in love at age 9 while tagging along on older brother Brennan's football recruiting trip, the school she was so eager to attend that she verbally committed before her soph- omore season at Archbishop Williams High in Braintree, Mass. As she took part in a one-on-one drill, Williams flashed a smile at Maggie Lucas, the Lady Lions' star guard who was working the camp as a coach. Then she made a crossover move and, in an instant, everything un- raveled. "I went to my right and planted my right knee and crossed over, and my knee just kind of gave out," Williams recalled. "It felt like I'd dislocated it. It just popped back in, and that's all I thought it was. That's all I was hoping it was." Those hopes proved unfounded. Williams had, in fact, torn her ACL. She got the news before leaving campus, and for a while she was inconsolable. "When they told me, right away, I started balling my eyes out, because I realized I was not going to be able to play basketball for a while," she said. "And I was going to have to watch a lot of basketball. That was going to make it even worse." Forced to sit out, Williams watched her entire junior season from the bench, look- ing on helplessly as Archbishop Williams fell to St. Mary's in the state semi;nals. But she comes from a family of athletes, and she was determined to show the same tenacity in her recovery that she had showed on the court throughout her career. By the summer of 2014, she felt as though she was back to normal and ready to return for her ;nal high school season. Said Williams, "I was de;nitely de- termined to be successful." That season ended with Arch- bishop Williams holding the state championship trophy aloft. The Bishops defeated Hoosac Valley, 69-46, in March to claim the Massachusetts Interscholas- tic Athletic Association Division 3 crown, and Williams, a 6- foot-4 forward, was one of the keys to the team's success. She had nine points, 11 rebounds and five blocks in a semifinal victory over Winthrop and fol- lowed that performance with a double- double – 10 points, 10 rebounds – in the state title game, as the Bishops outre- bounded Hoosac Valley 48-16. Now that her high school career is over, Williams is excited to begin living the future she imagined for herself long be- fore she had developed into a blue-chip recruit. She is arriving as part of a stellar four-player class that has been ranked eighth nationally by Prospect Nation, ninth by the All Star Girls Report, 10th by Blue Star Basketball and 11th by ESPN/HoopGurlz and the Collegiate Girls Basketball Report. The other three class members are 5-8 guard Amari Carter of Washington, D.C., 5-7 guard Teniya Page of Chicago Heights, Ill., and 6-5 post player Ashanti Thomas of Lex- ington, Ky. Coach Coquese Washington calls it "a high-impact class for our program," one that "features size, speed, athleticism and scoring prowess." "I'm con;dent they will excel," Wash- ington added. "The thing that has impressed me the most, however, is their collective passion for this university. They love Penn State." That is certainly true of Williams. She was focused on PSU from the start, even though she attracted plenty of attention from other schools. She had averaged a team-best 11.6 rebounds and 3.5 blocks per game as a sophomore in leading Arch- bishop Williams to the 2013 MIAA Division 3 title and also made a name for herself on the AAU circuit, winning two state championships as a member of the Lady Rivals select team. When she accompanied her brother Camren on a football recruiting trip to Ohio State, she was spotted by one of the Buckeyes' assistant women's bas- ketball coaches and received an impromptu scholarship o

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