City of Basketball Love

Josh Verlin (@jmverlin)
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Reagan Jamison has been playing basketball since her pre-elementary school years — “as long as I can remember,” the Camas (Wash.) native said — but she had a choice to make; softball was also in the mix for athletic teen, and playing both was only feasible for so long.

“I’d kind of go back and forth between the two being my favorites,” she admitted during a Wednesday phone call. 

COVID solved that problem for her. When the world shut down for the pandemic, basketball restarted first, both through workouts with her travel program (Northwest Select) and a shortened high school season her freshman year at Camas. 

“Just the speed of the game and the competitiveness overruled softball, so I started to focus more on that,” she said.

Softball’s loss is Penn’s gain.

The Camas High School standout announced that she’d be traveling across the country for her collegiate years, committing to play for Mike McLaughlin’s Quakers earlier this month. She’s the second member of their committed 2024 class, along with Manasquan (N.J.) forward Katie Collins. (Edit: make that three; Hockaday (Tex.) senior Ashna Tambe committed on July 1).

A trip to University City in June, her second on-campus visit, sealed the deal as she picked Penn over Ivy League rival Columbia and a selection of West Coast mid-majors, and will be applying to the Wharton School of Business this fall. She’ll be joining a program that’s coming off a 17-12 (9-5 Ivy League) season, aiming this winter to snap a string of five straight seasons and a COVID year without a March Madness appearance, almost always one of the top contenders in the Ancient Eight. 

“I went out to lunch with the coaches and I feel like we all just connected really well; I even talked to some of their girls, and they were also super-welcoming,” she said. “They made all fears about committing go away, they assured me that Penn is a great spot and I kind of decided this is the place to be.”

The youngest of three children of Kris and Thea Jamison, Reagan’s the first collegiate hooper in her family, though her mom played both in her native Bulgaria and continued doing so in high school, once she had moved to the United States.

She knew she’d picked the right sport when she got her first Division I offer, from nearby Portland, as a freshman.

“That was super-helpful, it really assured me,” she said. “I knew deep down, my heart was always — I wanted to play basketball, but that was definitely assuring.”

A 6-foot-tall guard/forward, Jamison is a versatile wing guard who was on track to set all sorts of program records at Camas — steals, 3-pointers and potentially points, according to Papermakers head coach Scott Thompson — before a hip injury cost her most of her junior season. She returned a few weeks earlier than expected, enough to help Camas to the 4A (large school) state championship game, where they fell just short of the title. 

Jamison (above) played with Northwest Select's 17s at Spooky Nook in Manheim (Pa.) during a Girls' Under Armour Association stop this spring. (Photo: Josh Verlin/CoBL)

Playing for a high-level Northwest Select 17U squad on the girls’ Under Armour Association circuit, Jamison flashed her shot-making and defensive abilities during a GUAA stop at Spooky Nook in April, but that was only a taste of what she brings to the floor for her high school squad.

“Reagan fills up box scores as good as anyone I’ve ever coached,” Thompson said. “Defensively, she can play the passing lanes and get steals; she can block shots, she gets rebounds, she kind of does a little bit of everything. Very analytical, smart player, and then offensively she’s kind of, in my history, she’s been her best in the biggest moments.”

It was in February, able to get away for a college-seeing trip due to her injury, that she first visited Penn’s campus, along with a few others in the Northeast. That’s when McLaughlin officially extended to her the offer to play on his team, the Ivy League school not able to give out athletic scholarships.

The distance was the biggest hurdle to get over, no doubt. But it helped that McLaughlin, entering his 14th season as Penn’s head women’s coach, and his staff have had several other players come in from the Pacific Time Zone — most notably star guard Kayla Padilla, who’s doing a grad year at Southern Cal after scoring 1,355 points in just three years in a Quaker uniform.

“Obviously it’s a long way, West Coast to Philly,” she said. “That was one of the parts I was scared about, going into the process with them, but seeing (their West Coast players) have such great success, it was really assuring, to see that they got over that distance.”

Both Jamison and Thompson agreed that the biggest target for her over the next 12 months is getting more prepared for the physical nature of the college game, adding some muscle to her lean frame, helping to avoid further injuries in the future. 

The obvious plan for the senior year is to capture that elusive state title, with her and fellow D-I commit Addison Harris (Montana State) leading the way. Thompson and Jamison agreed that Harris is the more ‘rah-rah’ of the two; Jamison’s strength comes in her ability to read her teammates and know what they need at any particular time.

“She’s caring, she’s understanding,” Thompson said. “If someone’s having a bad day, she’s going to be the one that goes and figures out why they’re having a bad day, helping them through it.”

“I love building relationships with people,” she said. “I like to get hype for my teammates but I don’t have the loudest voice in the gym — even though I try to, it doesn’t always happen. I like to know where my teammates are at, know how they’re feeling [...] forming relationships is more my way of doing it.”