Jada Williams has heard the noise. She’s seen what people post on social media. Once a darling of online hooper culture, Williams has been relegated to a footnote. A ‘what happened to her’ kind of story.
Except that isn’t her story, at least not right now.
At just 20 years old, the 5’6 Iowa State point guard is ready to write a new chapter in her career. It took many trials, tears and days of prayer. But now Jada Williams has rediscovered her love for the game and wants to remind the world why they were so captivated by her coming out of high school.
It wasn’t really until the mid-to-late 2010’s that the high school hype machine arrived on the shores of women’s basketball land. While the culture of Overtime and House of Highlights had already been engrained in the men’s hoops psyche, their attention on the next generation of future WNBA stars was somewhat novel.
Whether it was Paige Bueckers, JuJu Watkins, Hailey Van Lith, the world was just starting to pay attention. As Name, Image and Likeness legislation changed, a gold rush ensued for the rapidly growing women’s sports audience. Williams was a part of the 2023 class, profiting off of the wave established by the likes of Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese and other superstars of the game. At just 16 years old, Jada signed an NIL deal with Spalding while amassing an audience of over 300,000 followers on Instagram. By her senior year, she already had a half-a-dozen deals and almost every college program kicking down her door for a signature.
While she was committed to UCLA for over a year, she flipped at the last minute to join Adia Barnes and what was thought to be a transformative recruiting class at Arizona. Alongside fellow five star recruits Montaya Dew and Breya Cunningham, Williams was going to be the engine that made everything go.
Unfortunately, things didn’t go as planned.
Arizona finished 18-16, exiting the NCAA Tournament in the first round. The very next season, the Wildcats missed March Madness, losing in the opening round of the WBIT. It was a flatline for a program that was the NCAA Runner-up in 2021 and Williams was starting to notice what people were saying about her.
“You’re gonna take some punches,” she says of the last two years. “Like, ‘Jada Williams fell off. Your fall off needs to be studied. You suck.’ All those things and I’m just sitting back like, ‘Man, you don’t even know what I’m going through’.”
Despite averaging modest numbers at Arizona, it was far from the lofty expectations the world set for her when she got to college. She began to fall out of love with the game and questioned if the culture that she was in in Tucson was the right one for her.
“I went through a lot of things in the two years I was at Arizona,” explains Williams.
So she, like many others in college athletics, hopped in the transfer portal to see what was out there. Both Iowa and Iowa State recruited her heavily and she wanted to be closer to her home in Kansas City. In Rockport, Missouri, her family still owns and operates a farm that primarily produces sweet corn and the idea of being in a place like Ames or Iowa City wasn’t an issue to her at all.
Many players will tell you that transfer recruitment is very different than high school recruitment. All the pomp and circumstance is gone. It’s less about how you look in a uniform, the hype videos you get or the promises you receive. Instead, the questions are more pragmatic and the intention is more driven. When Jada visited Ames, she had a long conversation with the Cyclones two stars, Audi Crooks and Addy Brown, to get their unvarnished truth about their experience at Iowa State.
“I asked [them] a lot of tough questions,” Jada recalls, “And I trust them. They answered honestly. They didn’t lie. Even the pros, cons, good, bad, ugly, they told me everything.”
A lot of her questions revolved around culture, fit, Coach Bill Fennelly’s style and demeanor but the most important ones to Williams revolved around mental health. How supportive were teammates when one of their own was going through something? Would Coach Fennelly lend a compassionate ear? Could she feel safe being vulnerable with her team and would they help uplift her?
All of those questions were burning a hole through her mind after her experience at Arizona. Jada’s two years in Tucson had forced her to lean heavily on her faith and relationship with God, helping her find the courage to transfer and the clarity to see the right path forward.
“It’s something that I wear on my sleeve and it’s something that I’m very passionate about,” she explains. “I’m not going to force it on you but I think for me, even at Iowa State we go to church together. God is in a phase right now in my life that I can feel him going. It’s head down and grind.”
Interestingly, Williams’ adherence to her faith hasn’t inhibited her ability to seek mental health help when she’s needed it. Instead, she’s married the two concepts. Some days, she’ll casually pray and use her faith as a sounding board to verbally process what she’s going through. On other days, she’s working with a sports psychologist to help her deal with the ebbs of flows of being a passionate player.
While everyone’s journey towards that type of enlightenment is different, Jada has found something that works for her and a support system at Iowa State that fosters it.
“I’ve taken an embracive approach to it,” she says. “Knowing that [mental health] is something that challenges you, let it challenge you and get better at it. I’m a competitive person so I’m like, ‘Man, I’m gonna get real good at this. I’m gonna get on my bible study each week, I’m gonna talk to the sports psych’, and it’s getting competitive.”
“I don’t know if that way would work for everybody,” Williams continues, “But it’s worked for me and I’ve definitely gotten a lot better with it. It’s helped me grow as a person, it’s helped me grow as a player and it’s helped me grow as a leader.”
It’s that journey she’s taken that makes Jada so confident in what’s to come at Iowa State. Alongside Crooks and Brown, she feels she can be the missing piece. A sparkplug scorer who can push pace and take defenders off the dribble to open up more chances for the Cyclones highly touted frontcourt.
After two years of being discounted and labeled as an overhyped prospect, Jada Williams is ready to remind the world who she is.
“I feel like the old Jada,” she says, her energy rising over the video call, “My smile is back and honestly, I’m giving that props to the Lord, I’m giving that props to my teammates because whether they know it or not, they brought the old Jada back. I’m back joking with everybody, I’m back doing the things that I love and it just feels amazing.”
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