For Jahnae Duncan, growing up with basketball meant learning to compete—and deciding what the game meant to her.
By JaDarius Duncan
Before her eighth-grade basketball season, Jahnae Duncan was ready to stop playing.
Then a friend asked her to try out. Duncan agreed, although the friend ultimately missed tryouts after contracting COVID-19. Duncan went ahead, joining a team that helped her remember why she enjoyed the sport.
“I had great teammates, a pretty good coach, and the whole season was just fun,” she said.
In her first game back, the familiarity returned.
“It was like the game just came natural,” she said.
That return was one turning point in a basketball journey that began when she was 2. In interviews conducted during her senior year at Central Cabarrus High School in Concord, North Carolina, Duncan and her father, Johnnie Duncan, described the distance between showing promise and feeling confident enough to embrace it.
Johnnie coached basketball, and his daughter spent time in the gym watching her siblings and older children. He remembered her picking up skills early and playing alongside 3- and 4-year-olds.
For Jahnae, competing against older players became an incentive to work harder.
“I didn’t want anybody to look down on me,” she said. “I wanted to be seen the same as them.”
She said those experiences helped her adjust to the pace of high school basketball. Attention, however, brought another kind of challenge. Adults pressed her toward things she did not feel ready for, she recalled.
Her father saw a gap between the ability others recognized and the confidence she felt.
“As talented as she is, she’s never felt that she was talented,” he said.
He also described a loss that affected her experience of the sport: her mother’s death. As both father and coach, he said, he had to treat Jahnae equally with her teammates. He believed she missed having her mother in the stands as a source of encouragement.
By the summer before sophomore year, time away from basketball brought Jahnae another moment of clarity. Her first knee injury kept her from playing, and the absence helped her recognize how much she wanted to return.
“I realized I actually wanted to be around it,” she said.
She remembered that summer as the one when she put in the most work. Her motivation included wanting to help her teammates win.
By senior year, the growth she valued most was becoming more vocal. Encouraging teammates and doing small things to support them had become a source of pride.
“I have gotten better with speaking to my teammates,” she said.
Her father pointed to accomplishments beyond basketball, too. At the time of his interview, he reported that she held a 4.0 grade point average. He described her as caring and unselfish.
“She mainly just has a good heart,” he said.
Jahnae has stepped away from basketball to focus on her education at Livingstone College, according to a family update provided for this story. Her earlier experiences were documented in a February profile. This account revisits those interviews with her next chapter in view.
Looking back as a senior, she had already identified a change that mattered to her: learning to speak up and support the people around her.
“For the people who knew me before,” she said, “I’ve came a long way.”
Portraits: Basketball and Graduation
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