When the Adidas 3SSB Palmetto Road Championships reached the quarterfinals, the bracket pitted California-based Seven Days — led by Kaleena Smith, perhaps the most recognizable player in girls high school basketball — against Mass Rivals and Fope Ayo, a highly-ranked but lesser-known prospect.
Seven Days won, 61-48, on July 20, and Smith strutted her stuff with 23 points and a dominant second half. But Ayo was quietly the second-best player in the matchup, collecting 13 points and eight rebounds. On rare defensive possessions, Ayo would switch onto Smith, with Ayo's towering, 6-foot-5 frame juxtaposed against the ultra-quick, 5-foot-6 Smith. Alarm bells rang in Ayo's mind that she was about to be on the wrong end of a viral clip, but Smith didn't score directly on her.
"In my head, I was like, 'Oh, this is not funny. Switch back, come back, this is not a good matchup,'" Ayo said. "And she didn't drive. She picked up the ball, and I was like, 'Oh thank God.' And it happened twice — and I think she shot a 3, but she missed the first time, and then she just passed the second time. And I was like, 'Oh thank goodness.'"
That's a snapshot of the Fope Ayo experience. The rising senior at Austin Prep continues to pleasantly surprise herself and anyone who watches with how far she's come in barely five years of basketball. Her role remains unglamorous and underappreciated. But in her No. 34 national ranking, her 30-plus Division 1 offers and her growing winning impact, Ayo (Methuen, Mass.) shows the true post player is still very much in style.
"Every time someone says, (it's about) being tall or just rebounding, I'm like, 'You have no idea what basketball is,'" said Ushearnda Stroud, Ayo's coach on Rivals and at Austin Prep. "The easiest thing for me to teach is to teach a kid how to shoot or to teach a guard how to be a guard. Teaching a post player to understand the side they're coming down on the court (and how) that's going to dictate their initial step to get open — it's so tedious, but it's so imperative for their growth and their confidence."
Ayo's go-to move is a turnaround lefty hook shot from the low block. It's not exactly a highlight-reel move, but she's practically automatic. It was the first move Ayo learned under Stroud: catch the ball, bring it to your chin, drop-step, layup.
But listen to Stroud explain it, and so much more goes into that one action than the eye typically catches. She watched Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's iconic hook shots on the Lakers growing up and watched Lisa Leslie advance the move during her career. Ayo has improved from someone with a "hodgepodge" of random footwork to a more precise post scorer.
"It's taking what we know about the game and showing it to her, and giving her film, and then giving her: this is how you do your routine. Your routine isn't the routine of a 3 or a 4 or a guard. This is your routine when you go in the gym," Stroud said. "So that constant repetition, because it's such a hard shot (where) your back is to the basket. If it's too much, you're going to throw it off the backboard; that's going to look crazy. If it's too soft, you're not going to get it over the defender. So the right amount of touch and enough of the flick of the wrist is something that she really is comfortable with."
The real work, Ayo and Stroud explain, happens before Ayo even touches the basketball. Establishing post position is a tireless and thankless skill that often goes unrewarded. The footwork changes depending on which side of the floor Ayo is running on and how she's being defended.
When should she use a swim move action to overcome a defender, when should she use the duck-in move and when should she seal defenders in front? Which hip should be facing the ball and how can she get open right on time for a pass? Stroud has coached Ayo to keep her hands up at all times and flash the "U" (like the popular Miami Hurricans symbol), because if she drops an arm, defenders can hook and hold it while getting away with foul calls.
Hip and lower-body strength are important for carving out space in the post. Fortunately, Ayo enjoys deadlifting; she'll throw her playlist back to Destiny's Child, Nelly Furtado and Gwen Stefani for a lift session. She's taken countless bumps from training pads and routinely faces double-teams during the prep school season.
"When you're posting up, there's somebody behind you, pushing you forward, and you have to maintain that position until the guards see you and they pass it to you. Then you have to gather yourself and then turn and do whatever you have," Ayo said. "I think just being able to stay and maintain that becomes actually very exhausting. You're not moving around as much as the other players are, but then you're getting banged around in the paint when you're going for rebounds, boxing out, getting fouled and everything like that."
Added Stroud: "No one has to go through the hand-to-hand combat that she has to go through."
Stroud has never coached up a center quite like Ayo. Her closest comparison is Piath Gabriel, who went on to play at UConn and UMass, but Gabriel started playing basketball much earlier than Ayo.
Ayo was a swimmer and dancer growing up — which may also explain her uncommon speed at her size. When Stroud first called Ayo up to the Rivals' 15U Adidas team in eighth grade, Ayo could barely play basketball. Stroud essentially wanted Ayo to just sprint up and down the floor to show off her athleticism.
"She's one of the fastest girls on our team," said Rivals teammate Elyse Ngenda, also nationally-ranked. "Really, her legs are so long, and she's literally our rim-runner. She runs back and forth — let's say the other team misses a shot, she's the first one down the court, ready to receive the ball for an easy two."
That mobility is what helps separate Ayo from an older-school center and further intrigues college coaches. Every level of basketball uses switching defenses more today, and offenses are better at dragging mismatches out onto the perimeter. Ayo and Stroud focused on defending in space particularly during the June and July months of AAU. The Rivals ran a lot of 3-on-3 in practices that gave Ayo reps defending guards, and the team went with a switch-everything defense for most of their Palmetto Road weekend. Stroud harps on Ayo to maintain a wide defensive stance and slide her feet.
"LeBron James has made his career on (attacking) the switch," Stroud explained. "So I said, Fope, when they switch out, you're defending the perimeter, and we've worked on so much of your footwork, your lateral quickness, your hands (and) how you close out.' We're going to close out high with two hands. We're going to show (our jersey) numbers. We're never opening up the door. If you hear me a lot, I'll talk to all of my players: 'Stay legal, stay legal, stay legal.' You keep your shoulders square. You don't open up the door (to a drive). You take away, as I call it, the ushering lane — like the person ushering someone down to church."
Ayo has taken a leap in turning her athletic potential into actual production. She averaged 24.5 points, 19.5 rebounds and 4.5 blocks at Austin Prep, taking home our NEPSAC Class AA Defensive Player of the Year award, and posted 11.0 points and 4.8 rebounds on the Adidas circuit. The accolades and physical stature are in many ways a stark contrast to Ayo's personality. She still has no social media, she's an avid reader who loves history, and she's already thinking about a political science or international relations major in college.
"People tend to be intimidated by Fope just because she's tall, but getting to know her, she's one of the sweetest girls anyone would ever talk to," Ngenda said. "She's so genuine, she's so soft-spoken, she's so nice. It's crazy. She honestly looks like a giant because she's huge, but she's the friendliest person I've probably ever met."
Confidence has been perhaps Ayo's most significant growth area in the last two years. She has spoken in the past about basketball not being her first love, and how she felt the eyeballs watching her and expecting her to dominate at her size. Ayo said that even last year, when she burst onto the national scene and got ranked for the first time, she still was afraid to communicate on defense because she felt like she didn't know what she was doing.
That has been challenged and changed in 2025, exemplified at the Adidas 3SSB championships. Ayo played an "awful" game by her own admission against Next Level, letting bad missed shots get in her head. She says a loose ball rolled by her on one play, but she was so distracted that she didn't even go get it (Stroud and Ayo's dad had to tell her that later because she didn't remember). After that game, Stroud had a serious conversation with Ayo about moving on to the next play.
"You're gonna make mistakes, but you have to move on, because if you sit there, first of all, it's unfair to your team, " Ayo said. "Because now I'm in my feelings and thinking about it, and I'm slow to get back on defense. I'm not playing the way I should. So it affects everything."
The next game was the Seven Days quarterfinal matchup. At one point in the game, Ayo went to the foul line and "wildly" missed one free throw. Stroud often sees Fope audibly sigh and look up at the ceiling in those situations, knowing everyone is watching her. But this time, she shook it off and ran back into her defensive stance. The ensuing sequence: Ayo got a steal, passed the ball out, ran the length of the floor, got it back, finished a layup through a foul, yelled after the bucket and made the and-1 free throw.
Stroud likes to use the term "E.Q." to define emotional intelligence, as opposed to basketball I.Q., and says it's become one of Ayo's signature strengths.
"The E.Q. is the emotional intelligence — that I'm battling the forces of physicality and the emotion of the game, because this game is emotional," she said. "It's all a series of plays — 'Oh, I messed up on that last play, or my coach got on me for that, or my teammate is having a breakdown, or I'm not getting to the spot.' That emotional intelligence, to constantly rise, that's what people don't realize is what makes Fope, bar none, one of the best players in the country."
Ayo is the headliner for New England's 2026 class, which is filled with an atypically deep cast of elite post players. Some may think the post player is a relic with today's emphasis on pace, 3-point shooting and switching defenses, and the position has undergone an evolution. But Ayo and Stroud can rattle off stars they watch for their post presence: Aliyah Boston, Kiki Iriafen, Candace Parker, A'ja Wilson, Kamilla Cardoso, and even Breanna Stewart and DeWanna Bonner, who are closer to wings but still lean heavily on scoring out of the post.
Stroud often talks about playing the long game with Ayo and many of her players. Though Ayo is slowly expanding her shooting range and ball-handling skills, the primary goal is still for her to dominate the paint because it's a role colleges and pro teams value. During this summer on the Adidas circuit, Ayo noticed that the long game was starting to come to fruition.
"When I played and I did well, I was like, 'Oh, wow.' It was kind of like me being able to see the progress I've made," she said. "Because I started so late, I've always felt like I was kind of behind in my progress — other people see the progress, but I don't always see it. And so me being able to hang around with other people who've been playing for longer, I was like, OK, now I can kind of see that. I can see that progress has gotten better."
