Rock, paper, or scissors. The odds of winning the age-old game of chance is roughly 33%. At the start of the 2024-25 Ohio State women’s basketball season, guard Kennedy Cambridge had the upper hand on her
younger half-sister, point guard Jaloni Cambridge.
Player introductions are as elaborate as they are diverse, but when the older Kennedy Cambridge heard Jaloni’s name, it was a battle. Rock beats scissors, paper covers rock and scissors cut paper. With a little help from their dad Desmond Cambridge, Kennedy racked up the wins.
Adversity is nothing new to athletes. Even the best players lose sometimes. The by-product of facing challenges is what it brings out of a person.
Jaloni Cambridge is an often times quiet introvert who, from a young age, knew what she wanted. The Ohio State point guard made difficult decisions early in her life to pursue those goals.
Goals that Jaloni Cambridge has a knack for achieving.
On Her Own
On April 5, 2024, Long Island Lutheran guard and current Michigan Wolverines star Syla Swords hit a free throw with 6.6 seconds left in the fourth quarter. It put the No. 1 high school team in the country, the Long Island Lutheran Crusaders, ahead 78-77.
This was not just any game. It was the semi-final of the Chipotle Nationals, a tournament featuring the best teams in the country, all battling for a chance to call themselves the undisputed high school champions.
That one-point lead had special meaning for Long Island Lutheran. The Crusaders were only seconds away from getting back to the championship game. With a win, it avenged the 2023 National Championship final, when Montverde Academy, out of Florida, won a tightly contested game to send the Crusaders home with a second-place trophy.
Montverde did not have Jaloni Cambridge in 2023, but it did on that day.
Cambridge received the inbound pass from that free throw and darted up the court, only for Kayleigh Heckel, current UConn Huskies guard, to foul as Cambridge passed half-court. Montverde had 3.9 seconds remaining to get the ball inbounded, find a shot, hit it, or get fouled trying.
The Eagles stunned the Crusaders 79-78 even though Long Island carried a 43-30 lead into halftime. More specifically, Cambridge stunned the Eagles.
Standing in the backcourt, as if waiting for a gun to go off for the start of a track sprint, Cambridge heard the whistle and bolted into the offensive half of the court. Heckel tried to keep up, a laughable idea once Cambridge gets going.
As a perfect pass graced Cambridge’s fingers, the guard kept in stride, ran to within a couple feet of the left side of the paint, jumped in the air and hit a runner with 1.7 seconds left on the clock — Heartbreak for Long Island and elation for Cambridge.
A day earlier, Cambridge notched a 19-point, 14-rebound and 12-assist triple-double. That game-winning shot capped off a 33-point game in the semi-final, and Cambridge was not denied a national title the next day with 17 points and nine assists.
Those three games were the entire reason the Tennessee-native played basketball for a school in Florida in the first place.
When Cambridge was a middle school student, she made a list of goals. On it was that national championship, a trophy that Cambridge could not win if she stayed in Tennessee, since the state does not allow teams to compete on the national level.
So, to even have the chance to make that dream a reality, Cambridge moved without her parents or siblings to Montverde, Florida.
“Florida was tough,” Jaloni Cambridge’s mom Stephanie Cambridge told Land-Grant Holy Land. “Desmond [Cambridge] tell you — I cried. He took me to the airport. I cried the whole way. I cried. I cried. I cried.”
It was not the first time the basketball star was on her own. After all, Cambridge won two gold medals with Team USA on the youth level. That took the guard to Mexico, where her mom tagged along, but Cambridge followed that up with a solo trip to Hungary.
“Other people’s family were there, but my family wasn’t but I was okay,” Cambridge told Land-Grant Holy Land. “I had to learn how to just, you know, be okay.”
On that trip for the 2022 FIBA U17 Women’s Basketball World Cup, Jaloni Cambridge played alongside fellow top prospects like guards JuJu Watkins, Hannah Hidalgo and forward Madison Booker. The young Cambridge averaged 5.1 assists, the most on Team USA and third highest in the tournament.
Jaloni Cambridge learned to be okay off the court, and the success on the court did not hurt. Two gold medals in Mexico and Hungary checked another two pieces off the goal list. Another was winning National Gatorade Player of the Year, an award that did not go Jaloni Cambridge’s way, but she made up for it with Gatorade Player of the Year awards for Tennessee and Florida throughout high school.
Inspired Maturity
Those experiences line a journey of maturity unlike other high school kids. Playing basketball has a way of forcing students to grow, but it can also have the inverse effect. Not everybody makes it, even on nationally ranked high school teams.
A key piece to Jaloni Cambridge’s success is a maturity that is different for someone with five older siblings. Normally, the younger kid gets away with the most and expects the most. Jaloni Cambridge was sixth of seven, not the youngest but close. The youngest Cambridge, Jasiah, had to not only act right for his parents, but his older sister too.
“She’s always keeping her brother in line, the youngest one, even to this day,” said Stephanie Cambridge. “She’s probably more of a mama to him than I am, because she just does not play around with him when it comes to being obedient and being disciplined.
That next level maturity for such a young teenager also surfaced in unconventional ways, like with Jaloni Cambridge’s first bedroom suite. At the age of 13, the young basketball star received her first set of furniture for her room.
“She’s very meticulous about where things are, and at a very young age, she took on a trait from her father, where she loves to move her room around. She loves to redecorate,” said Stephanie Cambridge. “She took pride in what she owned and what was hers, and she takes care of it. Now, she would mess her room up, but she would straighten it back up, she would clean it back up.”
Its no surprise that Jaloni Cambridge majors in Interior Design. However, that back and forth of cleaning up messes and taking care of what is her own (whether its a bed or a brother) is a trend that stretches to the basketball court.
As the sixth in line, Jaloni Cambridge learned a lot from the older five siblings. Some went away from home for prep school, all left for college and the Ohio State guard learned from their experiences and mistakes. But life is also a good chunk of learning from your own actions.
Desmond Cambridge coached nearly all of his kids until middle school. From there, the Cambridge patriarch wanted his kids to have the ability to play for different coaches. At games for the Buckeyes, Desmond still sits back and watches quietly. He does not yell or provide constructive criticism to the referees, that is more Stephanie Cambridge’s game.
However, when he coached the young Cambridge kids, he was not playing favorites. The young standout guard Jaloni Cambridge was no different and because of her ability, talent and work ethic, she often played with kids older than herself. Look back at the U17 tournament in Hungary and Watkins, Hidalgo and Booker were all a year older than Jaloni Cambridge.
There was a learning curve for the point guard.
“She had moments where she might have made a mistake, and I took her out and she pouted, and I just sat at the end of the bench away from the whole team. I said, ‘when you be an individual, you can sit over there and be into it by yourself,’” Desmond Cambridge told Land-Grant Holy Land.
Even as his assistant coach told him that Jaloni Cambridge needed to be in the game so the team won, a saying from Desmond Cambridge’s college basketball days held firmly in his own coaching philosophy. “From one to 10 gotta be held accountable.”
Through moments like a parental benching, Jaloni Cambridge’s leadership competencies formed. Fast forward and Jaloni Cambridge and fellow Buckeye guard Ava Watson joined a new AAU side that featured a trio of older playmakers, including former Ohio State point guard Diana Collins.
On the new AAU side, Collins was the starting point guard but when Jaloni Cambridge came in, coaches made the decision to put her into the starting position, while still keeping a starter’s amount of minutes for Collins.
That caused a stir within the team, including a call from Collins’ mom to the coaching staff, including Desmond Cambridge, and he approached Jaloni Cambridge about coming off the bench instead.
“Jaloni said to me, almost verbatim, ‘Dad, why? Why I got to come off the bench? I’m the point guard,’” said Desmond Cambridge.
The coaching staff listened and Jelani Cambridge kept the starting role, but with the warning that as the starting point guard, the quarterback of the team, she carries the weight of the team’s success on her shoulders.
“From a young age, she’s been that person that take that shot,” said Desmond Cambridge. “We lost the game, boo hoo crying. And she been that person who took that shot and won the game. And as she got older, she learned that when it when the ball is in my hand, and I’m making plays, and people are following me. I have to live with if I can make that shot or miss the shot, and it can’t be like high and low.”
Jaloni Cambridge carried that lesson through high school. In 2023, then with The Ensworth School, Jaloni Cambridge led her team to the state title game in the first season following Kennedy Cambridge’s move to the Kentucky Wildcats. In the championship game, Jaloni Cambridge’s side faced Knoxville Catholic and lost 64-59. Jaloni Cambridge scored 41 of Ensworth’s 59 points and outscored the tournament MVP in the title game.
After the game, athletes from Ensworth were visibly upset. The emotion that came with a tough defeat for a talented group of athletes at that formative age. Jaloni Cambridge was not part of that show of emotion.
“Her teammates, I think they felt like they let her down, and they were just bawling crying. And she was just like, ‘Hey, if I’m not crying, What are y’all crying for? Hold y’all heads up. Like we played our best,’” said Stephanie Cambridge. “‘Hold your heads up high. We’re not going to allow them to see us down like this.’”
Ohio State Leader
Following the heartbreak of one title lost and the elation of a national title one year later, Jaloni Cambridge joined the Buckeyes. No longer the biggest fish in the pond, the point guard still made a name for herself in the Big Ten.
Coaches named Jaloni Cambridge unanimously to the First Team All-Big Ten and the freshman won the Freshman of the Year award from both the media and coaches. In 29 games, the point guard co-led the Buckeye offense alongside fellow playmaker, forward Cotie McMahon.
Individual efforts against the Belmont Bruins, where Jaloni Cambridge hit the game-winning shot and then followed it with a game-sealing stop on defense and scored 29 points against the Michigan Wolverines to once again upset Swords after Michigan built a 16-point lead. Jaloni Cambridge lived up to the hype that followed the No. 2 overall recruit of the 2024 class and No. 1 overall point guard.
Near the end of the 24-25 season, Ohio State looked like a team of strained relationships. The Buckeyes’ offense lost its spark and Jaloni Cambridge’s performances diminished. After a 16 points per game average in the regular season, scoring shrunk to an 11.8 points per game average. There was a noticeable struggle between who would lead the side between McMahon and Jaloni Cambridge.
That tension ended soon after Ohio State’s Second Round NCAA Tournament exit when McMahon transferred to the Ole Miss Rebels. Now the team rests solely in the hands of Cambridge.
Before returning to Columbus for summer practice and conditioning though, Jaloni Cambridge took part in Kelsey Plum’s Dawg Class, where Plum took notice of the guard’s demeanor. “Jaloni [Cambridge] is super mature,” Plum told The IX Basketball. “I was really impressed with her. She took things in and got better every rep.”
Cambridge also tried out for Team USA’s Americup team over the summer, under the leadership of Duke head coach Kara Lawson. That put Jaloni Cambridge back in the red, white and blue alongside Hidalgo and Booker, the point guard’s former gold medal teammates. Lawson went with Hidalgo and the Notre Dame guard’s former teammate Olivia Miles instead.
The ups and downs of the end of the 24-25 season and a busy offseason have all had an impact on the guard. They are learning moments and Jaloni Cambridge is not one to focus too much on the downs.
When asked about taking over a lion’s share of the offensive responsibility with McMahon gone, Jaloni Cambridge said that its about the team and she is not alone. When the subject switched to Team USA, it was a learning experience to play alongside such a talented group.
It is not media training to talk away tough subjects, its in line with the character and wisdom of an underclassmen acts like a grad student. It is someone who takes full responsibility for her role in all of that comes with college basketball at its pinnacle.
“I don’t think that title of what grade you’re in matters. That does not matter to me, because at the end of the day, if you are mature enough to handle situations and go get a bucket at the same time, you could be the senior of the team. You could be the fifth year of the team. I think it’s all about maturity level,” said Cambridge.
Now Cambridge leads a team that did not enter the season with the same weight of expectations last previous seasons. Through seven games of the 25-26 season, the leadership voice of Cambridge caught up with the on-court effort and ability.
Cambridge’s game hit a new level this season. The point guard has improved poise and is shooting more often, while not sacrificing efficiency. It is just the opposite. Cambridge’s shooting improved from 42.9% up to 51.9% and averages 4.5 more points per game than her explosive freshman season. It is the performance of someone who does not shy away from the spotlight. Cambridge understands the weight of leading a team and is thriving under the pressure.
The stage is larger and the lights brighter, but the muscle memory is already there.
Off the court, Cambridge is more likely to stay inside, build a LEGO set and relax. She has no issues being alone. Cambridge did that in high school, hundreds of miles away from home. Its a stark contrast to who Ohio State fans see on the court. Cambridge is not immune to displays of emotion, she gives feedback to her teammates and metaphorically and physically lifts them up.
Combine Cambridge’s upbringing, hard work, and adversity and what comes out is a young adult who exudes maturity. From the highs of trophies and the lows of defeat, Cambridge stays somewhere in the middle. The guard sums up the source of her maturation process concisely, albeit pessimistically.
“It came from me just having to grow up,” said Cambridge. “When you get out in the real world, no one cares. You’re on your own, so you have to start making decisions ahead of time. And I was blessed to be able to be in the position that I am — traveling across the country by myself at a young age, playing basketball/ I had to learn how to grow up.”
That kind of response can come from a place of anger towards the world. Towards the cards you were dealt. That does not apply to Cambridge. Jaloni Cambridge has that state of mind based on gratitude for the ones who came before her.
“I had five people to go in front of me that taught me right from wrong, that knew what to do. And all of all of them are mature,” said Cambridge. “I learned everything from them, honestly, all my siblings. I’m still a kid at heart. Always, I will forever be a kid at heart, but in real life situations. Yes, I’m very mature for my age.”
Cambridge is not afraid to play up to those siblings too. In basketball or rock, paper, scissors — which Jaloni Cambridge won by a six-game margin.
