Nike Nationals: Meet the 14-year-old women’s college basketball recruit with 18 offers

CHICAGO — Last weekend, I got a brief glimpse into the long days on the recruiting trail for college coaches. Let’s just say, 12 hours on metal bleachers is not for the faint of heart.

From about 9 a.m. until 9 p.m. Friday through Monday, some of the top players in the country descended on Chicago to play in the EYBL Nike Nationals. In a room filled with 32 basketball courts, I had a chance to catch up with college coaches and assistants from across the country, catch games featuring some incredible players and meet some who are likely to be the future of women’s college hoops.

The four main courts featured some of the top 2024 talent and younger players competing up, but it was fun to also follow the hordes of coaches around to the other 28 courts, which featured younger players, to see which 15U and 16U games were also drawing 10 to 15 college coaches courtside. Every coach will tell you that relationships are the key to recruiting — a field which is otherwise an inexact science — so having longer-standing relationships with those 14- and 15-year-olds can be the difference between a commitment and a “thanks, but no thanks.”

I was pretty fascinated with the evaluation process. And since I haven’t had a chance to be at any of these grassroots events over the past few seasons, I spent a lot of my time with coaches trying to better understand how they’re watching these games and players. How does one evaluate a kid who just finished her eighth-grade league now playing against 17-year-olds who are committed to UConn or UCLA or Duke? How do you break down a player’s game when she’s only been playing organized basketball for a short while? Is there anything a player can do in a single game that would get her cut from a program’s prospect list? Even though every program is different, meaning there are no cut-and-dry answers to these questions, we’ll get to all of that in some of my observations.

Jerzy Robinson is the real deal

It feels really cliché to say, but it’s true: Robinson is just different. She doesn’t carry herself like a 14-year-old on or off the court. Physically, she’s built like someone who has been in a college strength and conditioning program for three years now. There are top players I watched in the 2024 and 2025 classes who will be great fits at programs and will be big names as juniors and seniors. Robinson will be a freshman people will know.

She comes from a multi-sport background, growing up running track, playing soccer and flag football in addition to basketball. Her dad played linebacker at Oregon State for four seasons. All of that contributes to her physicality on the floor, most evident with how well she’s able to finish through contact and absorb hits in the lane.

She already has 18 offers — including from South Carolina, UCLA, USC and Ohio State — and said she has really enjoyed the process of getting to know programs and coaches.

5⭐️ Jerzy Robinson with the double-double against Team Durant U17 at Nike Nationals 😤💪 @JerzyRobinson

Team Why Not fell to Team Durant in OT 61-60@NikeGirlsEYBL pic.twitter.com/pcF79RXg35

— SportsCenter NEXT (@SCNext) July 9, 2023

It was recently reported that Robinson is transferring to Sierra Canyon School in Los Angeles, but Robinson wouldn’t confirm that to The Athletic. However, every college coach I asked seemed confident that was the situation.

If the move is to happen, it makes sense on a lot of fronts. The program just helped produce Juju Watkins, the No. 1 player in the 2023 class and the school also plays a national schedule so Robinson would have a chance to face stronger talent game-in and game-out than she did at Desert Vista. Also, high schoolers are able to sign NIL contracts in California (and not in Arizona), so it wouldn’t surprise me if shortly after a potential transfer we also see Robinson sign with a major brand like Jordan.

Olivia Vukosa update

Robinson isn’t the only 2026 player who’s going to have an opportunity to be an instant-impact player in college. Vukosa, the 6-foot-4 center from New York who attends Sue Bird’s alma mater, Christ The King, is a Swiss Army knife. I had seen her highlights, so I knew she had a good handle and vision, a great post-up game and an ability to step out, but I was eager to see her play in person to see how she moved on the floor.

Unfortunately, she aggravated an MCL injury a few weeks ago, and she decided not to play in the game I had planned to watch, so we were only able to catch up a bit after the game. She told me that she plans to narrow her lengthy offer list to about 10 programs this upcoming year while she continues to make unofficial visits.

Vukosa recently took a second unofficial visit to UConn. “It was a lot of fun. Everyone was really welcome and hospitable,” Vukosa said. She said she’s really looking for a program that has a coaching staff with stability that she believes will be there her entire college career because she has seen how much turnover there is on the coaching front.

Updates from top uncommitted 2024 players

Kate Koval | F | No. 5 player

Koval has already taken an official visit to Stanford and has three others planned. Reportedly, those three are at LSU, Miami and Notre Dame though she didn’t want to confirm that. She wasn’t sure if she was going to add more visits, and said she would potentially add more if she was still uncertain after her planned visits. But, if I had to guess, I would bet she lands at Notre Dame or Stanford. She mentioned academics as the biggest driver in her recruitment, with another really important piece being her relationship with the coaching staff.

The desire for a family atmosphere is something you’ll hear from most recruits, but with Koval, it does mean something a bit different. She moved to New York two years ago from Ukraine, and when Russia invaded, her mom left for Canada but her dad stayed in Kyiv to fight. Her mom has split her time between Canada and Kyiv, with visits to the U.S. and her dad has been able to come visit the states a few times.

“It has changed me as a person,” Koval said. “It has changed the way I view the world, the way my life is.”

Justice Carlton | F | No. 6 player

The Texas native announced her top five about a month ago, and her visits to Arizona, UConn, LSU, Texas and South Carolina will start in September (the Longhorns will be getting the first visit). She has no plans to add more visits. Carlton said she’s looking for a family atmosphere and a program where she’ll be able to make an impact as a freshman.

“A lot of people tell me that when I go on my visits that I’ll feel the place I’m meant to go and where I belong,” Carlton said. “Right now, it’ll be based on how I feel when I get on campus.”

I was really excited to see Carlton play because she’s on an absolutely stacked Cyfair team that has seven players ranked in the top 50 for their respective classes — Aaliyah Chavez (No. 1 player in the 2025 class), Bella Hines (No. 23, 2025), Ayla McDownell (No. 28, 2025) Aniya Foy (No. 31, 2025), Sania Richardson (No. 46, 2025) and Me’Arah O’Neal (No. 35, 2024 class and Shaq’s daughter). But unfortunately, Carlton suffered a knee injury on Friday before I was able to catch her in a Cyfair game. As of Saturday, she had been told that it was presumably a meniscus injury that would keep her out four to six weeks at worst if it’s torn, but she was waiting to get back to Katy, Texas, to get an MRI to confirm.

It was a pleasure having @SHAQ spend time with our girls today! #NikeNationals #EYBL #CyFairElite pic.twitter.com/A5TreYMfe9

— CyFair Elite Sports (@CFEliteSports) July 9, 2023

Maddy McDaniel | PG | No. 11 player

McDaniel has already taken her official visits to Tennessee, Georgia and South Carolina, and she’ll be announcing her decision on Aug. 12 on ESPN at the Elite 24 basketball game.

McDaniel said she was really impressed with how tight-knit the Gamecocks were given their roster turnover, and she specifically watched how coach Dawn Staley interacted with her guards. “That was really important to me, her being a point guard’s coach,” she said. “She’s tough on them, but she loves them hard, too.”

At Tennessee, McDaniel said she could feel the history and legacy of the program. Georgia felt like a bit of an outlier here given that coach Katie Abrahamson Henderson has only been in Athens for one season, but McDaniel said she was impressed that Abrahamson Henderson called her last season before she had even moved into a house in Georgia, making McDaniel understand how big of a priority she was for the program. “She had just gotten to Georgia,” McDaniel said. “Her leaving UCF and coming to Georgia and seeing how much she has turned it around, that was really important to me.”

Mikayla Blakes | G | No. 16 

Blakes said she’s planning to announce her top seven (or so) in about a week on Twitter. She said she has an idea who’s already making her list, but she was focused on Nike Nationals and wanted to play in that before she made any college moves.

Once she has that top seven, she said she’d start making official visits this fall.

Most intriguing prospect I saw

Abuna Ruop, Class of 2026, is not a name you’re going to find on any top-50 boards because this was her first EYBL season. She wasn’t the most polished player on the floor, but at 6-8 (and still growing) it was impossible to miss her, and I would guess that she’s now on a lot of coaches’ radars.

Ruop started playing basketball in May 2019 with the Luol Deng Foundation while she was living in South Sudan with her family. She moved to North Carolina this fall and began playing organized basketball in October.

She didn’t play that much over the weekend (averaging seven minutes a game) and her stats don’t jump out as a “we need to offer this player today” for most programs. But in conversations with coaches about how they evaluated a player like Ruop, there was the obvious: her height. Her dad is 7-3; her mom is 6-6; her older brother is 7-4. Her height and length are things you can’t teach and assets that a lot of college rosters don’t have. But beyond that, she moves pretty well, and she seems to be picking up the game and its nuances — how to move without the ball, decision-making — for someone who has played on a competitive team for only nine months.

As someone so new to the game, it’s hard to project out too far. But if she keeps growing, keeps adding to her game and stays healthy, it’s hard not to imagine her on a power conference roster during the 2026-27 season.

As one coach told me, “It’s a lot easier to take a chance on a kid with that kind of height than it is to take a chance on a guard or wing.”

(Top photo of Jerzy Robinson: Courtesy of Nike Girls EYBL)