rom the outside, college athletics recruitment presents itself as an extremely straightforward process. It seems simple: you play your sport, you play it well, you get noticed by scouts, and then, you finally get recruited to the school of your dreams. However, this could not be further from the reality for most student-athletes. In America, nearly 8 million student-athletes compete in high-school sports and a significantly less near 480,000 move on to compete as NCAA athletes. The already small likelihood of becoming an NCAA athlete is infinitely smaller for Black women, who make up the smallest demographic percentage of NCAA athletes, just 5%. The percentage of Black women in Division I athletic programs is even smaller, as the 5% encompasses all three divisions of the NCAA’s athletic programming. And so, though getting recruited onto college sport teams is an incredibly difficult and pressurized for anyone, it is especially so for Black women.

For every perfect college athletics recruitment story the public is exposed to, there are a multitude of imperfect stories left unheard. Empower Onyx spoke with Jordan Smith, an incredible Black woman and basketball player, who is living to tell the tale.

Jordan Smith is now an 18 year-old postgraduate student at the Ethel Walker School, a private, college preparatory, boarding and day school for girls where she is on the basketball team and re-starting her college process. However, Jordan didn’t always imagine that she would be there. Two years ago, she thought her student-athlete career was over.

In 2019, Jordan was having a great basketball season on her high school’s basketball team, the Briarcliff Bears, until she tore her ACL during a tournament game, a crushing injury that took her out of the season for an indefinite amount of time.

“It was devastating,” she said in the interview. “One of the most difficult parts was seeing everyone play without me. It made me feel like I didn’t really have a place on my team anymore.”

Nevertheless, Jordan continued to persevere through recovery. “It was an intense, everyday process to get back,” she said. “I did have frequent physical therapy, three times a week, but the most grueling part of recovery was the mental. I’ve played basketball for so long that it feels like the sport is a part of me. Not being able to play anymore, I’d felt like I lost a part of myself.”

In early 2020, Jordan had finally reached full recovery. She performed extremely well during her come-back game with 16 points,10 rebounds, and 10 blocks and started receiving offers from multiple colleges. Things were looking up until the COVID-19

Pandemic hit in March of 2020 and all sporting events, even practices, were temporarily shut-down. She lost all of her offers, many teams opting to retain the players they already had due to the absence of opportunity to continue being scouting because the NCAA issued an official “dead-period” in that March.

“It was really hard for not just me but a lot of others too,” she said. “Especially being a Black woman, it is already hard to be a student athlete. There are not many of us and there is a lot of racism we put up with. For me, after dealing with the reality of that, plus my injury, and then a global pandemic, I wasn’t sure how much more I could take. Though I was finally physically ok, mentally I was just in a really bad space.”

However, Jordan persevered and now she is back playing basketball as a power forward and center on the Varsity Basketball team in her post-graduate program.

When asked what she would say to her March 2020 self, Jordan says, “I would’ve said it’s okay to cry. We aren’t often told in the sports world that it’s ok to process your emotions and take time to care for yourself, especially as Black women. It took me a long time to get reacclimated to playing basketball again and that’s ok. Performing well can’t exist without self-preservation.”

Jordan is a champion whose story isn’t so cut and dry. Though her recruitment journey may not have gone perfectly to plan, she still worked and ended up just where she needed to be. Her story is a reflection of the hard work and tenacity that she and so many other athletes have displayed whether due to injury, the pandemic, or other complications, they’ve kept working hard to get recruited and follow their dreams of being a college athlete.

“As Black women,” Jordan says, “it may feel like we can’t ever be imperfect or have even a blip, but we have got to reject that idea because we are still human. I’ll leave it with this: let your story be that you cared for yourself and you rose to the challenge.”

Let’s celebrate sports stories like Jordan’s, for keeping on going, even when the going got super rough.