Duke head coach Joanne P. McCallie’s parents could never afford to buy their daughter braces when she was young. At age 54, now an established leader at a top basketball program, McCallie sprang for Invisalign, a rather expensive form of transparent braces.
Enter Jaida Patrick, Jada Claude, Jayda Adams and Jade Williams—the first two freshman guards, the third a junior guard and the fourth a junior forward. That’s omitting the Blue Devils’ final ‘J’, freshman Jennifer Ezeh, who brings the ‘J’ total to five, enough to fill out a starting lineup.
“It’s hard to talk, let alone get those words out,” McCallie admitted during the team’s media day last week. “Let’s keep it real. I can barely speak, and then I’ve got all these J’s? I’m 54 with braces—check that out.”
The frustrating overlap in names is a significant, sometimes laughable obstacle for McCallie and the other eight members of the team. And sometimes they just aren’t up to the task.
‘A little crowded’
Duke’s odd pileup on Highway J forced the team to quickly devise a method to distinguish between all the ‘J’s’, so players quickly doled out nicknames. Patrick got "JP" and Claude got "JC,", while Adams and Williams kept a monopoly on their first names. (Adams can thank her seniority for her exclusive name rights.)
That system was certainly clear enough for Jade Williams, a veritable juggernaut at 6-foot-5.
“It gets a little crowded,” Williams joked, “but there’s not that much confusion.”
For a junior who has already spent two years with a teammate named Jayda, it might be easy for Williams to handle this year’s ‘J’ explosion. However, the rest of the team hasn’t been so assimilated into ‘J’ culture. What about for Ezeh, a freshman from Nigeria?
“At first, it was hard, but now it’s pretty easy,” Ezeh said.
Not everyone can learn so quickly as Williams and Ezeh, though, and the freshmen Patrick and Claude haven’t grasped the finer points of the nickname code quite yet. Redshirt senior guard Haley Gorecki has found herself in a sticky predicament after calling out for ‘Jayda’ and seeing three heads whip around to greet her. Unfortunately, it’s a common occurrence.
“[It happens] all the time,” Gorecki said. “They’re all spelled differently, too, so it’s funny. In practice, we’ll be like, ‘JC, I mean, JP, come here. One of you, come over here.’”
The season has not started yet, so there is still time left for both Gorecki and the casual observer to learn the difference between each similarly-named Blue Devil. Let's go for it.
Jaida, Jada, Jayda and Jade
When asked whether recruiting all the Jayda’s was a concerted effort, McCallie dodged the question. You can’t blame her—the two assistant coaches in charge of recruiting, Rene Haynes and Hernando Planells, left in April following the tumult of last season.
Regardless of the former coaches’ recruiting strategies, the J's are a geographically diverse bunch. Jaida Patrick hails from West Haverstraw, N.Y., Jada Claude calls Fayetteville, Ga., home, Jayda Adams is from Irvine, Ca., and Jade Williams’ hometown is a Dallas suburb famous for its sports fanaticism. The J’s are a suitably diverse tapestry full of intrigue, heartbreak and good fortune.
Though Jaida Patrick grew up in West Haverstraw, N.Y., where infamous American traitor Benedict Arnold turned over plans to the British in the Revolutionary War, Patrick attended Saddle River Day School just across the border in New Jersey. There, she turned into a savvy defender and playmaker. Alongside three other Division I commits, she made her school’s first state championship game since 1991, but lost.
In Duke’s press release following Jada Claude’s commitment, McCallie said that Haynes had witnessed Claude put up a 38-point, 25-rebound performance in Georgia. It must have been good timing—Claude was not ranked in ESPN’s list of top 100 recruits. Her hectic summer workout schedule granted her what McCallie calls “almost sophomore status,” but we’ll see if that helps her garner any minutes this season.
Jayda Adams is an offensive spark plug for the Blue Devils—she shot 36.5 percent from three last season—but constantly plays with a chip on her shoulder because of under-recruitment. Now, she has a chip in her knee. Adams went down May 1 with an ACL tear, following in the painful footsteps of her Duke point guards and her sister, Jordan.
“[I’m] trying to help out in every way I can—trying to be those set of eyes that you can’t see when you’re playing during the game,” Adams said.
Jade Williams, the outlier of the group in terms of first name phonetics, height and recruitment, offers the most promise among the J’s. The former No. 13 recruit boasts a polished post game and added a deep ball to her arsenal last year. However, Williams, a native of The Colony, Texas, is a liability in transition, on defense and on the boards, where opponents ate Duke’s dinner every night last year.
Sounding off
At media day, McCallie embarked on a long, seemingly unprovoked rant about how parents of highly-touted recruits influence the increasing frequency of transfers. It’s possible, though, that it was simply misdirected anger for naming their children so similarly.
McCallie also promised to abandon her Invisalign during games so she could speak more clearly, probably to the chagrin of her orthodontist. At least she is jilting dental harmony for the sake of the team, which is hoping to bounce back from its worst season in McCallie’s 13 years as head coach.
Some aren’t so worried about pronunciation. Redshirt senior guard Kyra Lambert is still recovering from yet another ACL tear. Lambert graduated last year and is now in the master’s program at Duke's Fuqua School of Business, but senioritis still lingers dangerously. In her interview last week, Lambert patiently explained the group’s nickname system, then paused.
“But I just call them all ‘J’,” Lambert finished, with a knowing smile.
Editor's note: this is a part of The Chronicle's 2019-20 Duke women's basketball preview, the rest of which can be found here.
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