Where were you when Ella Peper dunked for the first time?
Dexter Southfield had finished up school on Oct. 2, 2023, leaving Peper to shoot around in the gym. Her father, Craig, was nearby, watching his son Jack’s fourth-grade practice. Orlagh Gormley, the Massachusetts Gatorade Player of the Year, had been teasing Peper, in eighth grade at the time, that she was still a few years away from being able to dunk.
Peper had seen a video of another girl dunking in high school, and she set her mind to do the same. She lifted with her team, added box jumps and other workouts at home, and grabbed weights for calf raises while watching the Celtics. She quickly realized she was getting pretty close.
“I jumped, tried to dunk it with the boys ball and I was like — hold on a second. Hold on a second. I'm up there,” she said.
Peper told her teammates to pull out their phones, and on her third attempt that day, casually jogged up to the rim, extended up with her right arm and threw the ball down. The video cuts quickly as players react to the magnitude of the dunk.
“I had just left, and I got about seven calls from the girls on my team: ‘Where are you? Where are you? Ella just dunked,’” Dexter Southfield coach Kristen Campopiano said. “I literally just left with my kid. But then they sent me the video, and I was like, oh my God.”
Peper (pronounced like “peeper”) is shattering our typical expectations of a rising high school freshman. The Newton, Mass. native started every contest last year on a 22-6 Dexter squad that came up a point shy of the NEPSAC AA title game. She hasn’t dunked in a game yet — Peper says she will within two years, while Campopiano half-jokingly tries to steer her away.
She’s one of the better defenders in the conference, a 6-foot-4-inch forward who’s still growing. Peper averaged 12.3 points, 7.2 rebounds, 2.4 steals and 2.3 blocks, and her signature skill might be her effortless three-point shot. She already has verbal offers flowing in from elite programs like Louisville, Alabama and Michigan. Campopiano said college coaches have compared her to Dirk Nowitzki and Elena Delle Donne.
It’s rare for a player of Peper’s age to be this talented, this obsessively process-driven, and this “swaggy,” as Gormley described her. Peper wants to play college basketball at a high level, but many of her goals are focused simply on mastering the game.
“Whenever I'm working on a new skill or something, and I do it in a game — even if I miss it, but it works — it's like, great. I did that. Now I can add that to my bag,” she said. “It's nice just to see the results in the game.”
The question for those around Peper becomes: How do we make sure a young girl who tries to achieve everything (and at this rate, it feels like she could) keeps her love of the sport as the stakes get higher?
It starts with building habits at home. The Pepers are a basketball family. Craig Peper played in college at Vermont and then overseas, and her mother, Mary Vadnais, played in high school at Fair Haven Union (Vt.). The three will battle in the driveway along with Peper’s two younger brothers, Max and Jack. Even watching games together can ignite fierce competition; bowls have spilled over because of popcorn shooting contests during commercial breaks.
Craig and Mary wanted Peper to choose her passion naturally. She played both soccer and basketball for most of her young life before ultimately committing to hoops. Mary is a physician, and the Peper children have grown up in an environment that emphasizes eating and sleeping healthy. Peper watched most of Game 1 of this year's Eastern Conference Finals, but when it needed overtime, she went to her room and listened to the call of the Celtics’ big win before falling asleep.
“For Ella, with basketball in particular, we focused on sleep a lot because I think it's an important part of injury prevention,” Mary said. “And we definitely talk about putting fuel in your body that will serve your body well, and sort of recognizing that the typical American diet may not be the best option, especially if you have athletic goals in mind.”
Peper’s smooth, reliable jumper comes from specific form work with her father. Craig had a rule for early shooting practice: he would only rebound for Peper if she shot from within 10 feet of the basket.
“You get some of these kids, they'll start shooting from really deep, really early, and it causes problems in their form,” Craig said. “If you want her to be good — and she wants to be good — there's really no reason for kids, at any really young age, to be shooting much further outside than that. So she developed a healthy rhythm on how to kind of release the ball.”
When Peper reclassified down and joined Dexter Southfield in seventh grade, there was some risk. She immediately made the varsity team, but she would be playing with and against college-bound basketball players who were more physically and mentally developed.
Campopiano brought Peper along slowly during her first year. She played sparingly, only as a shooting specialist (and made her first 14 three-point attempts). After grueling game weekends, Peper would skip the more intensive portions of practice and focus on stretching and foam rollouts. The Dexter coaching staff took strength training especially carefully with Peper and classmate Avery Bollin.
“Even though they're on the varsity team, with them, our strength coaches have really pulled them back and said, ‘If you don't have a good foundation, we are not moving to the next step.’” Campopiano said. “So they wanted to make sure that their squat form was really good. Especially being that tall, you want to make sure you have excellent form before we start adding a lot of weight [because] that's when injuries happen.”
Peper developed a close bond with Gormley. The two practiced alley-oops together, dished trash talk back and forth, and crafted a signature celebration, putting three fingers on their arms whenever Gormley passed to Peper for a three.
“She's got such a good work ethic, like I've probably never seen before,” Gormley said. “She's always in the gym, always shooting. I tell her to take a step back sometimes — you don’t want to hurt yourself — but I don't think she can. She just loves the game, she plays with so much joy, and it's just really fun to watch.”
Gormley, who is headed to Providence, was also heavily recruited during high school. She assisted Peper on and off the court. One time, Peper approached Gormley for advice on if she should retweet a complimentary write-up from an analyst, not wanting to come off as arrogant. When Gormley hyped up her teammate in the comments, Peper felt validated.
“She was just super helpful because she always knew what was best, and she also experienced everything that I had already went through,” Peper said. “So it was good for me to go to her. When something was happening to me that she or he had been through, it was nice for me to be like, ‘OK, what do I do in this situation?’”
Peper was jumping up and down in her mom’s room when she got her first verbal offer, from Boston College, in April of seventh grade. Craig and Mary realized they had to accelerate talks about college with their daughter — how to be grateful but noncommittal when receiving an offer, and how to appreciate it while remembering college is far away. Now Peper comfortably chats with coaches on the phone by herself.
Peper has control over her own social media, but unlike most 14-year-old girls, she knows coaches might already be monitoring her profiles. She draws plenty of compliments and positive feedback online, but she knows that as her star rises, critics will come. She’s prepared to tune out the noise and focus on the important voices.
“People can say things, but if the coaches, who are the main goal, say good stuff, it's like — all right, now you have your reassurance. Get back to work,” she said.
Basketball and Peper are inseparable. Coaches and family members often have to tell Peper to stop practicing. She’s a massive Jayson Tatum fan and occasionally trains with Brian Scalabrine. During Christmas break, she admits she went a little stir-crazy because of the time off from playing.
“I can't go a day and a half without touching a basketball,” Peper said. “It's weird to say, but I crave touching a basketball. I crave playing.”
