AAt this point, it’s hard for University of Louisville guard Jayda Curry to remember a time when she wasn’t playing basketball. As she recalls it, her father Gary handed her the ball when she was 4 — and she just never put it down.
Gary remembers things a little differently. For starters, Jayda and her sister Layla, who are a year and a half apart, played golf before they ever touched a basketball. One day, Jayda saw former NFL linebacker Terrell Owens on TV and decided that was what she wanted to be and began asking her dad to throw a football with her. “She waved her arms and got ready and did exactly what she saw Owens do,” he explained. “I threw her the ball and she ran to the door, slammed it shut and then went downstairs and ran and jumped into my arms.”
The family had a basketball hoop in the yard, and one day, a then-preschooler named Jayda started shooting hoops with her father. He asked her to do a specific move—bounce the ball between her legs, step back, make a jump shot—and she did it perfectly. Gary said, “I asked, ‘Where did you learn that? I never taught you,’ and Jayda said, ‘On TV.’”
Jayda and Layla soon began playing in the National Junior Basketball League of California. Founded in 1984 by Dennis Murphy Jr., NJB is a non-profit organization that provides year-round basketball programs for children ages K-12. The young girls played on teams full of boys, and Jayda went on to win the league’s MVP.
Jayda’s basketball career unfolded like countless others have over the years: from NJB she went to AAU ball, and from AAU she played for her high school. It was clear that she excellent“Some girls quit because she was better than everyone on the team her freshman year,” Gary said.
Despite a high school career that saw her run through both the West Coast Elite and West Coast Premiere, two of the biggest basketball circuits available to her, Jayda was not heavily recruited after college – a fact that Real bothered her. The reasons weren’t entirely 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 get the same accolades as her, despite being just as good.
One school did call: the University of California, Berkeley. Cal turned out to be a good fit for Jayda in many ways. It was close to home, which kept her close to her family. She also knew a handful of players from her days on the West Coast circuit, so the decision to sign with a school she’d never seen before in the heat of the Covid-19 pandemic wasn’t the hardest to make.
But there was no good atmosphere everything Jayda was looking for, and came out of high school without many candidates for a recruiting opportunity, which gave her a chip on her shoulder. All she could do was go into her first college season like a storm, so she did.
“I just went into it full force in the sense of ‘I had 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 gotta do what you gotta do.” She went into the season with one goal: “to show people why they should have recruited me.”
Her teammates and coaches supported her and in early 2022, Jayda’s name was announced. was driven as a first-round draft pick for the 2025 WNBA draft. But something changed during her sophomore year of college, and Jayda began to lose her way. She transferred to the University of Louisville to play under the school’s coach, Jeff Walz, something Jayda felt was the right decision.
“I love the coaching staff, love the girls, love the environment,” she explained. “The fan base here is insane. They love to ride and die with you. And it’s cool to watch and be a part of it.”
The move didn’t immediately translate into consistent dominance on the court. She was soon faced with plantar fasciitis, a foot condition she began struggling with in high school but which worsened each year. She tore the labrum, the cartilage that lines the shoulder joint, in her left arm and played through the entire season with the injury before undergoing surgery (“Luckily, it was my left arm,” she explained nonchalantly, “so I could still shoot.”) The injuries slowed her down, and the slowing temporarily shook her confidence—but now she’s ready to move forward with more confidence, as she was meant to.
Over the years, Jayda has been open about the role her faith has played in her game, and she began to lean on that faith when she was struggling on the court. Her family was “really faithful” growing up, attending church weekly, and “my religion and my faith have definitely played a huge role in my game and in my basketball journey.”
“Everyone should consistently work on having a better faith,” she added, “and during my time in college, that was something I really wanted to get better at: being consistent in my faith in college, going through the struggles that you go through in basketball, and dealing with that as a student.”
But as many athletes point out, becoming the best also requires a certain mental strength that requires you to give it your all. Jayda knows what that feels like, but somewhere along the way she forgot how to achieve that every competition.
Enter international basketball coach and philanthropist Tremaine Dalton. Dalton, the technical director of Portugal’s NBA Basketball School, and the founder of The Process Basketball, where he’s 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 join his program in France for three weeks before the start of her fourth, and likely final, college season.
Dalton’s primary goal was to help Jayda gain a mental edge that would elevate her above her peers. To achieve that goal, he enlisted the help of award-winning physiotherapist David Rochewho came to Israel from Ireland to ensure Jayda was fit and healthy, and Shahd Abboud, who in 2018 became the first Arab-Israeli player to be named captain of a men’s or women’s team in Israel. Abboud’s job was to take Jayda to places she had not yet reached.
“Jayda needs to mentally feeling like a pro,” Roche explained. “So we created a professional environment. Whether it’s housing and accommodations, transportation, mental health, her career after basketball, we created a complete professional environment for female basketball players, and specifically Jayda, to maximize her success.”
In addition to the individual and group training, Jayda also completed a portion of her internship as a journalist in France, adding an extra element to Dalton’s program. Adding an educational component helps fulfill part of his goal of closing the wage gap in women’s sports and providing pathways for athletes to enjoy professional sports careers and move on to work in other areas of interest. Each internship is tailored to the interests of the athlete, and Jayda wrapped up hers by interviewing legendary coach Dawn Staley for SB Nation’s WNBA site, Swish Appeal.
For Jayda to dominate in the way she can and should, Dalton also said, she has to remember that she has nothing to lose. “When she moved to Louisville, you could tell she felt like she was everything “It’s taken away from what she needed to do,” Dalton said. “We’ve got to bring that back to a situation where she has nothing to lose. She needs to be reminded that she’s not at the highest level yet” — not yet.
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 do it for myself.”
Making her family and friends proud is something Jayda will always carry with her. To do that, she added, she has to “do everything I can to be someone who can be there for them in whatever way, shape or form.”
“It’s bigger than me,” she stressed again, something she’s all too aware of as she looks toward a critical season. All she has to do is call on that 3-year-old who learned a complicated skill by watching TV.