At this point, it’s tough for University of Louisville guard Jayda Curry to remember a time when she wasn’t playing basketball. The way she remembers it, her dad Gary put the ball in her hand at four – and she just never put it down.

Gary recalls things a little differently. For starters, Jayda and her sister Layla, who are a year and a half apart, were playing golf before they ever touched a basketball. One day Jayda saw former NFL wide receiver Terrell Owens on TV and decided that’s who she wanted to be and she started asking her dad to throw a football with her. “She would wave her arms and set up and do exactly what she saw Owens do,” he explained. “I would throw her the ball, and she would run to the door, slam it, and then go down and run and jump into my arms.”

The family had a hoop in the yard, and one day a then-preschooler Jayda started shooting around with her dad. He asked her to do a specific move – bounce the ball between her legs, step back, make a jump shot – and she nailed it. Gary said, “I asked, ‘Where did you learn that? I never taught it to you,’ and Jayda said, ‘On TV.’”

Soon Jayda and Layla began playing in California’s National Junior Basketball league. Organized in 1984 by Dennis Murphy Jr, NJB is a non-profit that offers year-round basketball programs for kids K-12. The young girls played on teams filled with boys, and Jayda came out on top as MVP of the entire league.

Jayda’s basketball career played out like countless others have over the years: from NJB she moved on to AAU ball, and from AAU she played for her high school. It was clear that she was excellent. “Some girls quit because she was better than everybody on the team her freshman year,” Gary said.

Despite a high school career that included routing through both West Coast Elite and West Coast Premiere, two of the largest basketball circuits available to her, Jayda wasn’t heavily recruited out of school – a fact that really bothered her. The reasons weren’t exactly clear; Jayda more than held her own against JuJu Watkins, Rayah Marshall, and Kiki Iriafen, three players who were named All-Americans, but didn’t necessarily receive the same accolades that they did, despite being just as good.

One school did come calling: the University of California, Berkeley. As it happened, Cal was a good fit for Jayda in a lot of ways. It was close to home, which kept her near to her family. She also knew a handful of players from time on the West Coast circuit, so the decision to sign with a school sight unseen in the thick of the Covid-19 pandemic wasn’t the most difficult to make.

But a good vibe wasn’t everything Jayda was looking for, and coming out of high school unranked without a lot of recruitment prospects left her with a chip on her shoulder. The only thing she could do was to go into her first collegiate season like a storm, so that’s what she did.

“I hit the ground running in the sense of, ‘I got to play,’” Jayda explained. “I wasn’t heavily recruited out of high school. I wasn’t ranked out of high school … you just feel like you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.” She headed into the season with one goal: “to show people why they should have recruited me”.

Her teammates and coaches rallied around her, and by early 2022 Jayda’s name was floated as a first-round draft pick for the 2025 WNBA draft. But something changed during her sophomore year at the school, and Jayda began to lose her way. She switched to the University of Louisville to play under the school’s coach Jeff Walz, something Jayda says was the right call.

“I love the coaching staff, love the girls, love the environment,” she explained. “The fan base here is insane. Like they like they ride and die with you. And it’s a cool thing to see and to be a part of.”

The move didn’t immediately translate into consistent court dominance. She soon dealt with plantar fasciitis, a foot disorder she began to struggle with in high school but that grew progressively worse each year. She tore her labrum, cartilage that’s found in the shoulder joint, in her left arm and played with the injury the entire season before undergoing surgery (“Luckily it was my left arm” she explained casually, “so I could still shoot.”). The injuries slowed her down, and slowing down temporarily rattled her confidence – but now she’s ready to move forward more confidently, as intended.

Throughout the years Jayda has been open about the role her faith has played in her game, and she began to pull on that faith as she struggled on the court. Her family was “very faithful” as she grew up and attended church weekly, and “my religion and my faith has definitely played a big role in my game and in my basketball journey.”

“Everybody should be consistently working on better faith,” she added, “and during my time in college, that’s something that I found I really wanted to better myself at – being consistent with my faith in college, going through the hardships you go through in basketball, and navigating that as a student.”

But as many athletes detail, becoming the best also requires a certain mental strength that necessitates the ability to completely lock in. Jayda knows what that feels like, but somewhere along the way she’s forgotten how exactly to get there each and every game.

That’s where international basketball trainer and philanthropist Tremaine Dalton entered the chat. Dalton, the technical director of Portugal’s NBA Basketball School, and the founder of The Process Basketball, through which he has worked with national team players from Europe (Mathias Lessort), the Middle East (Roman Sorkin) and Guinea (Tidjan Keita), as well as Louisville’s own Angel McCoughtry, a two-time Olympian. He invited Jayda to his program in France for three weeks before the beginning of her fourth, and likely final, collegiate season.

Dalton’s primary goal was to help Jayda tap into a mental edge that will push her above her peers. To that end he enlisted the help of award-winning physiotherapist David Roche, who traveled from Ireland to make sure Jayda is fit and healthy, and Shahd Abboud, who became the first Arab-Israeli to be named a captain of a men’s or women’s team in Israel in 2018. Abboud’s job was to push Jayda to places she hasn’t reached yet.

“Mentally, Jayda has to feel like a pro,” Roche explained. “So we created a professional environment. Whether it’s housing and accommodations, transportation, mental health, or her post-basketball career, we created an entire professional environment for female basketball players, and specifically Jayda, to maximize her success.”

In addition to one-on-one and group training, Jayda also completed part of her broadcast journalism internship while in France, an added element to Dalton’s program. Including an educational component helps bring to fruition part of his goal to counter the pay gap in women’s sports, and to provide pathways through which athletes can enjoy a professional sports career and begin working in other fields of interest. Each internship is tailored to the interests of the athlete in question, and Jayda finished hers by interviewing legendary Coach Dawn Staley for SB Nation’s WNBA site, Swish Appeal.

For Jayda to dominate the way she can and should, Dalton also said, she needs to remember that she has nothing to lose. “When she transferred to Louisville, you can see that she felt like she had everything to lose,” Dalton said. “At the end of the day, it took away from what she needed to do. We need to change that back to a situation where she has nothing to lose. She needs to be reminded that she’s not at the top level” – yet.

To that end, it seems like Jayda agrees. “I’ve always been taught that it’s bigger than me,” Curry said at one point in our conversation. “My life is bigger than me. I don’t want to be in the gym [sometimes], but I do it for my family. I should be doing it for myself.”

Making her family and friends proud is something Jayda carries with her at all times. To do so, she added, she has to do “whatever I can to be someone who can be there for them in any way, shape, or form”.

“It’s bigger than me,” she emphasized again, something she’s all too aware of as she stares down a critical season. All that’s left is for her to tap into that 3-year-old who learned a complicated skill from watching TV.