It is impossible to miss Bella Owumi on a basketball court.
The 6-foot wing reaches into her bag and pulls out hesis, spin moves and crossovers. She’s dancing, and then she flies by defenders like she’s fired out of a cannon. She chases down blocks and smothers opponents on defense. She’ll roar in celebration or hold up three fingers for an extra beat as she trots down the court after a made 3-pointer.
What viewers might miss is Owumi’s short prayer at the free throw line. When she steps up in a pressure-packed moment, and all eyes converge on her, Owumi typically mutters a short affirmation.
You got this. God’s got you. Amen.
“It's a little bit of self-talk, a little bit of prayer. It kind of varies depending on what's going on,” she said.
Why does Owumi, of all people, need to remind herself of her capabilities? To outsiders, the Lynn, Mass., native has made high school stardom look easy.
Owumi started as a seventh-grader on an MIAA championship-winning high school team at St. Mary’s. Then she received her first Division 1 offer the following summer. Then she helped St. Mary’s win another title in eighth grade — and then another as a sophomore, when Owumi was the centerpiece. She played up multiple age levels with MCW Starz in AAU. She transferred to Tilton last year and immediately led the Rams, one of NEPSAC’s top teams.
Owumi’s loaded resume to date includes three MIAA championships, a New Hampshire Gatorade Player of the Year award and a national prep championship at Tilton, a comfortable spot at No. 29 in ESPN’s national 2027 rankings, the top spot in our Best of New England hierarchy, two invitations to the exclusive Overtime Select summer league and more than 35 scholarship offers.
New England’s basketball community has hyped Owumi up as a transcendent talent since she was barely a teenager. For years she has expected to put on a show in every game for everyone watching. That pressure has threatened to break her at times, and now, as she prepares for her next basketball chapter, it has forged her most special attribute: emotional maturity.
“There's obviously been a ton of pressure just to play well and that pressure to compete, and all these expectations. But I mean, I've just been going back to the basics. Just joy,” Owumi said.
Owumi regularly went to therapy early in high school. She uses the Bible app, often on bus rides to games, to find relevant scripture that focuses on managing stress and anxiety. In the last year, Owumi has been meeting with Scott Papek, a mindset coach at Max Out Mindset, to develop a framework for staying calm in the many high-pressure basketball situations she encounters.
“I'm a pretty vulnerable person. Even talking to me on the phone, I'm not really scared to share my truth or open up,” Owumi said. “So I was really excited to have someone to talk to that was unbiased and all that stuff, but he's helped me the most (with) probably just resetting. I think I really had a hard time with just, if I was having a hard game, I felt like there was no way out. It was just like, ah damn, we just got to get through it and play my best. But there's ways to get around it.”
Owumi first strolled into Gordon College for an MCW Starz tryout as a fifth grader wearing high pink socks, bright pink shorts and sports goggles. By this point, she had established dominance over her three younger siblings and the boys competition at the local YMCA. MCW Starz director Mandy Carter-Zegarowski knew Owumi was different right away, and she immediately moved up a year to play on MCW’s sixth-grade team.
By sixth grade, Owumi was competing on St. Mary’s JV high school team and became the youngest player in program history to score a varsity point. Heads started turning in seventh grade when she started for the MIAA Division 3 champs in 2022.
“I think the first itty bit of pressure was probably the state championship game I played, I think my seventh grade year, when I was just young and getting into it and there was just this pressure to play well,” she said.
Then came the Rhode Island scholarship offer that summer. Owumi helped St. Mary’s go back-to-back, fighting off mono in the state championship game as an eighth grader. She appeared on local TV for the first time that May because of her five scholarship offers now in hand.
But Owumi was insulated in middle school by the leadership of collegiate talents in Yirsy Queliz, Kellyn Preira and Niya Morgen. They all graduated that summer. Owumi had started, but she was a defensive-oriented role-player whose game was based more on athleticism than polish. Now people expected her to lead in all facets. St. Mary’s made the MIAA Div. 3 semifinals, and Owumi was a star, but she called freshman year one of her most challenging seasons.
“What the fans or the media or opposing teams see on game night is the best version of a finished product that you can put out there,” said St. Mary’s coach Jeff Newhall. “What they don't see is the days before and days after that, where there's a tough practice, there's tears because of frustration or pressure or not playing well, or there's injuries and there's sickness or there's whatever. ‘I bombed a test. My friend won't talk to me at lunch.’ I mean, those are bizarre things, but for a young kid coming into her own, it wasn't just handed to her.”
Newhall lives half a mile from the Owumi family and is a longtime friend of Owumi’s parents, Becca and Johnson. Owumi considers him almost a second father and still stops by the Newhall family home frequently on a whim.
Newhall had coached Division 1 players before, but never someone of Owumi’s national stature. He recalls being stunned that a Louisville coach, hours after playing Duke, flew to Boston and walked into Dracut High for a holiday tournament just to see Owumi play. Newhall watched Owumi admirably push aside her performance anxiety and never let it negatively affect the team. But part of his job as her coach, early on, was to get Owumi out of her own head.
“To her credit, she would never let the opposition or anybody there know that something was bothering her,” he said. “She's coming to timeouts with tears in her eyes, and we'll go at it pretty good. And part of that is to change the direction of her mind. Argue with me. Stop worrying about whatever's in your head.
“She's like, ‘How could I be playing this bad? Louisville's here.’ They didn't come to watch you play good or bad. They came to watch you play, and to a certain degree, they want to see you play bad, because they want to see if you can handle the adversity of that and not melt down. So it was certainly a process — again, probably a little easier of a process with someone that talented, but never as easy as it looks.”
Owumi soared as a sophomore, leading St. Mary’s back to a title, earning our MIAA Defensive Player of the Year award and noticeably growing as an all-around player and leader. The spotlight on her would glare even more harshly soon.
Owumi had long played above her age, sometimes multiple years, with MCW Starz. She was often a cutter and complementary player who soaked up mentorship from the hard-charging Ahnay Adams and calm, composed Jasmyn Cooper.
But as a rising junior, Owumi was now the top prospect. That spring came with a new label: No. 30 in ESPN’s national 2027 rankings. She felt pressure to lead and to score because that’s what people expected of her. Carter-Zegarowski said Owumi averaged probably eight points per game that season and still wound up with dozens of college offers.
“Her and I talk about that a lot — what is leadership — and everyone has different ideas of it,” Carter-Zegarowski said. “I think Bella definitely leads by how hard she plays. She sets the standard of hard work, and just every second of the game, she works really hard. And I said to her, sometimes, if you don't know what to say to your teammates or how to lead, doing it with your actions is huge.”
Aside from infrequent workouts with Carter-Zegarowski’s husband, Zach, Owumi has never used a personal trainer. She would walk from St. Mary’s to the YMCA to shoot around by herself or play pickup. It makes her work ethic and dramatic year-over-year growth even more impressive, and it partially explains Owumi’s firm ties to her Lynn home city.
When she transferred from St. Mary’s to Tilton a year ago, Owumi sacrificed the comforts of home for what she believed would benefit her basketball journey. Newhall stayed supportive and so did her Lynn supporters, but Owumi felt more pressure to show she made the right choice. NEPSAC coaches believed she would be one of the conference’s best players from the moment she stepped on the floor. Tilton was defending its Class AAA championship.
As Becca recalls, “basically the entire city of Lynn showed up” to Tilton’s first home game against Worcester Academy along with college coaches from Louisville and Indiana. The Rams rolled to a 77-38 win, but Owumi had a pedestrian performance by her standards.
She broke down crying in the locker room. Everything felt wrong. Owumi thought she didn’t live up to the expectations. So many important people in her life had made the trip to watch her play. She missed her routine at St. Mary’s and missed playing for Newhall.
Eventually, Owumi talked with teammate Bela Cucuta’s mom, who told her Cucuta’s initial adjustment to living away from home also took some time. Owumi then had a meaningful chat with Tilton coach Tara Brisson, who worked through compartmentalizing Owumi’s storm of emotions and how it can impact those around her.
“You can do this in private, but as a leader, you can't be visibly crying after games that we just won, because then people start to think, ‘Oh, this is about Bella. She didn't play well, so this is about Bella. Is it really about the team?’ And she's so about the team,” Brisson said. “She's always been team-first. It is never about Bella Owumi. So I do remember that moment, and I remember reminding her, ‘You made the right decision, right? You may not know that right now, in this moment, but at some point you're gonna feel that you made the right decision.’”
On Feb. 18, Owumi found herself in a similar situation, playing in front of a large home crowd who had driven to Boston for Tilton’s matchup at Newman. This time, Owumi felt secure in both her decision and her ability, and both she and Brisson believe it was a turning point in her time at Tilton.
Owumi has made Tilton’s campus her second home. She’ll gravitate to the gym and fire away from the shooting gun during free time. She joined open skates when the hockey rink was free, and when the seniors left for their honorary trip, Owumi and other Rams went whitewater rafting.
But most notably, Owumi has created a place to practice her Catholic faith.
Though her family is not overly devout, Owumi attended an overnight retreat while at St. Mary’s that changed her life and inspired her to be more seriously faithful. She and Lily Norton, her close friend who transferred with her from St. Mary’s, pushed to add a nearby church to Tilton’s “RamTram” weekend shuttle stops for students. They also joined the school’s Bible study group.
Owumi’s favorite Bible verse is Matthew 19:26, which includes the phrase “Through God, all things are possible.”
“Obviously it's pretty self-explanatory, but I feel like I can do anything when I'm walking with God,” she said. “It really means a lot to me that my faith is part of my basketball journey.”
The next part of her basketball journey has loomed for four years, since Tammi Reiss first called and offered Owumi a scholarship while coaching at Rhode Island (she’s now Florida’s coach and still heavily recruiting Owumi).
Owumi felt pressure during the May and June live periods to make a final statement for college coaches. But by July, with so many offers in hand already, she relaxed a bit. It’s a new world for Becca, Johnson and their daughter. Owumi has an agent — Emily Jo Roberts at The Team (formerly Wasserman) — who advises on potential NIL and college opportunities. But the family has been hands-off in the NIL conversation and wants it to come second, after the recruiting process.
“I think we're in the minority of people. We're not talking money,” Becca said. “I know some families, they lead in with, ‘How much is she gonna make?’ I don't like that because you can't just go somewhere for money. You have to love where you're at. If you're not getting paid, do you want to stay at that school?”
Owumi has visits scheduled with Duke, Florida, Central Florida and Florida State, but she may add more to the list before she commits, tentatively around the end of September. She wants a program that will develop her into a WNBA-caliber player.
She also wants a school where she can stay for four years and build a home.
Owumi has won over every fan base so far with her star power and ability to connect with people. Carter-Zegarowski calls her an “old soul” for her empathy, appreciating how Owumi would often watch and advise younger MCW Starz teams when she wasn’t playing. Owumi is considering leading Tilton’s Bible study club next year and she’s already head of student congress.
In Lynn, Owumi chose Centerboard, a local community center, as the recipient of her $1,000 charity prize as Gatorade Player of the Year. One of her favorite St. Mary’s memories is being mobbed by children after she scored her 1,000th career point. The summer after she left St. Mary’s, Owumi coached the school during the Wally Seaver Invitational. She’s considering rejoining the overnight retreat this fall.
Owumi will face even greater pressure wherever she plays next, far away from Lynn and Tilton. But the support systems in her basketball and Catholic communities remind Owumi: She’s got this.
“You gotta protect your peace,” she said. “There's gonna be a lot of people that are gonna say things, and you're gonna have a lot of different things in your ear, but take it with a grain of salt. Do what you need to do and just protect your peace. You're gonna be stressed during this process, but at the end of the day, you're meant to be here.”
