Davidson

The USC Trojans won their second straight game, beating the Pepperdine Waves 82–52 at Galen Center on Friday.

Both teams had a slow scoring momentum in the first quarter with multiple missed shots, but the No. 18 Trojans (5–2) used aggressive defense to secure an 11-point lead.

“Our defensive point of attack was really good,” USC coach Lindsay Gottlieb said. “I think Kennedy [Smith] is really elite as a disrupter and I thought everyone else fed off of her, and so it helped us to kind of change the tempo of the game when it was a little tight there in the first quarter. I thought we did a pretty good job defending the three-point line as a team. … I thought we pushed the ball well and because of that we shot it well.”

Gottlieb said the team focused on executing its game plan.

“We wanted to hold them under 30% from three. We did that,” she said. “We wanted to turn them over a bunch. We did that. And I thought we shared the ball great — 27 assists on 31 baskets is exceptional and I’m happy with a good team effort. We’re still in a place where we want to keep getting better, but you want to be able to build on one step forward and make it two or three in a row.”

Trojans guard Jazzy Davidson opened the second quarter with a three-pointer, followed by a layup from Kara Dunn and another from Vivian Iwuchukwu, plus a foul and free throw, helping USC open a 29-10 lead.

“Having that on the floor — people that can shoot, people that can post up … opens up the floor for all of us,” Dunn said. “So people are out on me and Deezy on the three-point line. That’s how Viv was able to attack and take advantage of that because they can’t really help off, and so I think us having versatile team members and having multiple ways of attack is really good for us.”

Trusting in teammates and knowing they will make the right plays helped Iwuchukwu in her execution on the court.

“Kennedy had seven assists and other people had five and were really good on getting the ball to all of us,” Iwuchukwu said. “Trusting that my teammates were gonna give me the ball, knowing that there’s not going to be someone that’s going to take it from behind me.”

Pepperdine (4–2) tried to cut into USC’s early lead but struggled to overcome 11 first-half turnovers. The Waves gained most of their first-half points from USC fouls.

USC closed the half leading 47–26.

Early in the third quarter, both teams traded baskets, with Iwuchukwu scoring first on a layup for USC, and Pepperdine’s Eli Guiney responding with one of her own. USC led 62–39 heading into the fourth.

Down the stretch, USC continued to extend the lead with a series of three-pointers, and Laura Williams scored the final points of the game.

Davidson finished with 18 points, five assists, four rebounds, three blocks and two steals. Dunn added 19 points and three rebounds. Smith contributed nine points, seven assists, three steals and three rebounds, while Iwuchukwu scored nine points.

Guiney finished with 12 points, six assists and three rebounds. Meghan Fiso scored 11 points and grabbed five rebounds.

Heading into their next matchup Tuesday at 7 p.m. against Saint Mary’s (5-3) at Galen Center, the Trojans will continue to focus on communicating as a team and stopping runs early.

“We want to keep people off the offensive glass and it’s just something we know we have to do to win at a high level,” Gottlieb said. “And I just think we wanna continue to grow together as a team, communicate more and go on runs when we’re winning and be able to stop runs when [opponents] have something going.

”… I think everyone wants to do it — like, we’ve got a great group — it’s just really finding how do we take the next step to the next level.”

When Lindsay Gottlieb put together a nonconference schedule she believed to be the hardest in the country, USC’s coach knew it would be an uphill climb. But that was the point. She wanted her team to be tested nightly, to play on “the biggest stages.”

“It’s not a schedule designed to win every nonconference game by an average of 40 points,” Gottlieb said earlier this month.

But after losing twice through a five-game gauntlet to start the season, a blowout nonconference win was precisely what the doctor ordered for USC.

Any pent-up frustration still lingering from USC’s last-second loss to Notre Dame was promptly taken out on Tennessee Tech on Tuesday in an 85-44 win for the Trojans.

“It was a really tough loss the other night,” Gottlieb said. “No doubt about that, for all of us. But the only thing you can do is utilize those lessons that are painful to get better.”

It was a particularly big night for freshman Jazzy Davidson, who bounced back from an eight-turnover performance in South Bend to tally her first collegiate double-double. Davidson nearly crossed that threshold before halftime Tuesday, and she finished the game with 20 points, 16 rebounds, 4 assists and two blocks.

The 16 boards, Davidson said, was the most she could remember having in a single game.

“She has a will to go get that thing,” Gottlieb said.

Davidson and Londynn Jones were once again USC’s most reliable options on offense. Jones, who was held scoreless in the loss to Notre Dame, poured in a season-high 20 points. Together, they made16 of 23 from the field, while the rest of the team shot a combined 17 of 40.

USC also got a critical contribution from sophomore big Vivian Iwuchukwu, whose work inside gave the Trojans their most consistent frontcourt threat of the season on Tuesday. After playing strictly a reserve role a year ago, Iwuchukwu scored 11 points on five-of-six shooting in a performance Gottlieb said was indicative of her progress so far this season.

But it was USC’s defense that really overwhelmed Tennessee Tech. The Trojans were especially suffocating underneath, blocking 15 shots — their most since 1984, when they tallied a program-record 18.

“What was impressive about this is our length that we can put in a number of different places,” Gottlieb said. “Laura [Williams] had a couple. Kai [Milton] had a couple. But you also had Jazzy and [Kennedy Smith].”

USC’s length was so difficult for Tennessee Tech to deal with that it managed just nine total buckets inside the arc.

“There was an emphasis for us just being the hardest-working team tonight,” Davidson said. “I think our defense really showed that.”

USC held Tennessee Tech scoreless for the first five minutes of the game, then the first six minutes of the second quarter. Midway through the second, Davidson had more total points than the Golden Eagles had as a team.

It didn’t get any easier for Tennessee Tech from there, as the Trojans rolled to a resounding victory, bouncing back as best as they could have hoped.

Before she came to USC, it had never occurred to Jazzy Davidson how charmed her basketball upbringing had been. Growing up outside of Portland, nearly all of her years playing the game were spent with the same tight-knit group of girls — girls who’d been best friends since before the fifth grade and who, after all that time, could anticipate her every move before she made it.

“They’re basically my sisters,” Davidson says.

They’d been that way pretty much as far back as she could remember. Allie, she met in kindergarten. She and Sara joined the same squad in second grade. By 10, Dylan, Reyce and Avery were on the club team, too. For the next eight years or so, up through March’s Oregon girls 6A state championship, they were inseparable, the six of them spending almost every waking moment together.

But now, a few days before the start of her freshman season at USC, Davidson is in Los Angeles, while her former teammates are scattered across the Pacific Northwest playing with various other Division I schools. It’s an odd feeling, she admits, but a thrilling one, too — to be here with a new team, continuing her basketball journey without the girls who’d been there the whole way.

Reyce Mogel, left, Avery Peterson, Dylan Mogel and Jazzy Davidson played together on youth and high school teams.

(Courtesy of Reyce Mogel)

“Being here made me realize how comfortable I was with them,” Davidson said. “It’s definitely different now, definitely a learning experience.”

Within that well-worn dynamic, Davidson developed into one of the top women’s hoops prospects in the nation, all while she and her friends led Clackamas High on an unprecedented, four-year run of success. Now, early in her freshman season at USC, Davidson steps into circumstances that no one would have anticipated when she signed with the school.

At the time, the expectation was that she could be brought along as a talented No. 2 while the Trojans’ generational star JuJu Watkins commanded all the outside noise and nightly double teams. But then Watkins injured her knee in March, forcing her to sit out the 2025-26 season. Suddenly, the Trojans’ top prospect also became their saving grace.

No one, for the record, is saying that out loud at USC. Nor does anyone in the building expect Davidson to step seamlessly into Watkins’ shoes.

“Those are very unique shoes,” USC coach Lindsay Gottlieb says. “But the fact that Jazzy can step into our program and already just make a really unique and incredible impression on everybody is pretty wild.”

By her own admission, Davidson has never been the fastest to warm up with new people. Most outside of her circle would probably describe her as “quiet” or “reserved.” It’s only once you get to know her that you really see who she is and what she’s capable of.

USC got a brief glimpse Sunday, with the Trojans trailing by a point to No. 9 North Carolina State and 10 seconds on the clock. Coming out of a timeout, the 6-1 Davidson cut swiftly through two defenders toward the basket, caught an inbound pass and, without taking a step, laid in the game-winning bucket.

The stage gets even bigger on Saturday, when No. 8 USC meets No. 2 South Carolina at Crypto Arena in the first of several grueling tests awaiting on a slate that includes four games against the top three teams in the Associated Press preseason top 25 poll. Any hope of the Trojans reaching the same heights as last season hinges in part on their star freshman quickly finding her potential.

No one has seen Davidson fulfill that promise like the girls who have been there since the start. As far as they’re concerned, it won’t be long before the world sees what they have.

“If you know Jazzy,” says Allie Roden, now a freshman guard at Colorado State, “you know she can do anything she wants, pretty much.”

When Davidson’s mother saw that her 5-year old daughter was unusually tall, she signed Jasmine — who would later be known as Jazzy — up for basketball. Roden was on that first team. She has seen the video evidence of the two of them, both still in kindergarten, launching basketballs over their heads at the backboard.

“We were terrible,” Roden says with a laugh, “but we thought we were really great.”

Davidson moved down the street from Roden in the fourth grade, and by that point, she’d figured something out. Enough at least to catch the attention of Clackamas High coach Korey Landolt, whose daughter played for the same club program.

“I saw [Davidson] working with a trainer and just thought, ‘Huh, this kid is different,’” Landolt says.

From left to right, Avery Peterson, Sara Barhoum, Dylan Mogel, Jazzy Davidson, Reyce Mogel, Allie Roden played together for years, leading Clackamas High in Oregon to a state championship.

(Courtesy of Reyce Mogel)

Once the others joined forces a year later on the club team Northwest Select, there wasn’t much anyone could do to stop them. The six girls seemed to fit seamlessly together on the court. Off it, Roden says, “we were inseparable pretty much as soon as we met.” She doesn’t recall their team losing a game against their age group for two full years at one point.

It was around that time that Davidson separated herself from the pack as a prospect. She’d grown to 5-foot-10 by the seventh grade, only for the pandemic to shut down essentially the entire state, including all high school sports.

So Davidson threw herself into basketball. She and Sara Barhoum, who’s now a freshman at Oregon, started working out together during free time between online classes, doing what she could to add strength to her spindly frame. Then they’d shoot together at night, each pushing the other to improve.

“It was a big time for me,” Davidson says. “That was when I honed in on everything.”

Two or three times per month, the team would travel out of state to test themselves. On one particularly memorable trip, just the six of them entered a tournament in Dana Point. They ended up winning the whole thing, beating some of the nation’s best teams, despite the fact they’d stayed up late playing Heads Up and were sunburned from a beach visit the day before.

Those middle school trips only cemented their bond — as well as Davidson’s place as a top prospect. By her freshman season, with all of them together at Clackamas High, the secret was out. College coaches came calling. Gottlieb, who had just taken the job at USC, was one.

Even then, there was a certain grace with which Davidson played the game — as if it flowed from her naturally. “She’s so fluid,” Gottlieb explains. “She glides.” But there was also a fearlessness in getting to the rim against much older, stronger players.

“She had to hold her own,” Landolt says. “But people couldn’t stop her inside. They couldn’t stop her outside. She was just so versatile. She could do everything.”

As a gangly freshman, Davidson stuffed the stat sheet with 22 points, eight rebounds, four steals, three assists and one block per game on her way to being named Oregon’s Gatorade Player of the Year. She won the award again as a sophomore … as well as the next two years after that.

When those four years were up, Davidson was the all-time leading scorer in Oregon Class 6A girls basketball history with 2,726 points. Still, some of her teammates contend she was even better on the defensive end.

“Jazzy is good at everything she does,” Barhoum said. “But she’s probably the best defender I’ve ever seen.”

USC guard Jazzy Davidson blocks a shot by North Carolina State’s Devyn Quigley on Nov. 9 in Charlotte, N.C.

(Lance King / Getty Images)

The girls played on the same team for six years when Clackamas made a run to the 6A state championship game. They’d spent so much time with each other, their coach says, that it could be “a blessing and a curse.” Sometimes, they bickered like sisters, too.

Landolt would urge them to hang out with other friends, only half-kidding. But all that time together made their connection on the court pretty much telepathic.

“There were so many passes I threw to Jazzy that no one else would’ve caught, but she was just there.” said Reyce Mogel, who now plays at Southern Oregon. “We were always on the same page. And not just me and Jazzy. Everybody.”

Davidson was on the bench, in foul trouble, for a long stretch of the state championship game against South Medford. But she delivered two key blocks in the final minute as Clackamas won its first state title.

Two years later, when they returned to the state championship as seniors, Davidson was again forced to sit for a long period after twisting her ankle. This time, her absence “took the wind out of everyone’s sails,” Landolt says. Clackamas blew a 19-point, third-quarter lead from there, even as a hobbled Davidson tried to give it a go in the final minutes.

The six girls found each other after the final buzzer, heartbroken. They knew it would be the last time.

Their final record together at Clackamas: 102-14.

“We all were hugging,” Barhoum says, “and just saying to each other, we’re all off to do better things. We all made history. And now everybody is going to make history somewhere else.”

They may live apart now, but the six girls, all now playing on separate for college basketball programs, still talk all the time.

“I FaceTime one of them at least every day,” Davidson says.

Her Trojan teammates are still getting to know her, still learning her tendencies. That will come with time. But the reason she ultimately chose USC, over every other top program, was how much it felt like home.

Through two games, Davidson seems to have settled seamlessly into a starring role at USC, inviting the inevitable comparisons to Watkins that Gottlieb would rather avoid.

USC guard Jazzy Davidson puts up a three-point shot against North Carolina State on Nov. 9 in Charlotte, N.C.

(Lance King / Getty Images)

“You do not need to be anything other than what your best self is,” Gottlieb insists.

Her friends have seen up close how far Davidson can take a team at her best. But no one, not even the six of them, understand the circumstances Davidson has stepped into quite like Watkins.

Her advice was simple. But it still resonated with Davidson on the doorstep of the season.

“She just told me not to be anxious about any of this,” Davidson says. “You’re good. Just go play how you play, and you’ll be fine.”

PETE Davidson and Colin Jost’s Staten Island Ferry wreaked havoc on the New York City Marathon and caused major delays for runners, a source has said.

The U.S. Sun can exclusively reveal that the massive ship’s trip through the waters between Staten Island and Brooklyn to display a Nike ad during the New York Marathon created issues for anxious racers on Sunday, November 2.

“Pete and Colin’s ferry caused a delay for runners taking the ferry to Staten Island for the start of the marathon,” a source claimed.

Despite the ferry being owned by a couple of comedians, no one was laughing. 

“Some people thought it was a joke but it wasn’t,” the insider continued.

Runners waiting at Pier 79 in Manhattan to get to Colin and Pete’s native Staten Island for the start of the marathon grew irritated as workers told them they were delayed due to the JFK Staten Island Ferry’s troubles in the harbor.

The Saturday Night Live co-stars ferry, which had been painted bright pink for the Nike advertisement, was tugged from its dock in Staten Island.

“The runners’ ferries were leaving about 20 minutes later than they should’ve, and they were told there were issues with Staten Island helping the guys out with the ferry. It was causing a backup on the river.

“Everyone was already anxious so it was a bit frustrating.”

The U.S. Sun reached out to a rep for the JFK Ferry for comment. 

ROUGH RIDE 

In photos exclusively obtained by The U.S. Sun last month, the ferry was seen painted bright pink with a hint of the Nike logo in its dock in Staten Island.

The massive vessel looked rusted and rotted in its slip, appearing far from the upscale entertainment venue the Saturday Night Live stars had envisioned.

From one vantage point, the famous ferry’s orange paint had faded to a faint pink after being left unattended on the salty water under the hot sun. 

The ship’s sides showed extensive rusting and what seem to be saltwater stains beneath the windows.

The opposite side of the decommissioned New York City Department of Transportation vessel showed the bright pink paint job with the Nike logo peeking out from behind giant tarps.

The comedians have been racking up huge docking fees for the boat they hoped to transform, but they also have unpaid legal bills, according to a lawsuit filed in New York against their company, Titanic 2. 

The suit claims an outstanding bill of $13,000 is owed to the law firm Nicoletti, Hornig, Namazi, Eckert & Sheehan.

The ship’s last public sighting before the marathon was when it was used for the Tommy Hilfiger show during New York Fashion Week in September 2024.

A video posted to the fashion house’s Instagram showed the ferry wrapped in their signature red, white, and blue logo, docked in New York’s harbor with the Statue of Liberty in the background, before it was docked for the event. 

PETE & COLIN’S GRAND VISION AND SETBACKS

In a December 2024 interview, Pete laid out his ambitious plans for the vessel.

“We do have, believe it or not, an in-depth plan,” Pete told the Wall Street Journal at the time. “Every day I get asked about this f***ing boat, and we’re raising the funds.

“We’re going to do a floor at a time. There’s a full plan in motion, and meanwhile, people are renting it out.”

The ferry was indeed rented for the Tommy Hilfiger show (which Colin Jost attended, though Pete did not) and also served as the set for a horror film, Steamboat Willie.

The ship’s planned renovation has faced numerous delays over the last three years.

FRIENDSHIP ON THE ROCKS

Once close friends and SNL castmates, Pete and Colin’s relationship soured in 2024 amid Pete’s personal struggles.

“Something big happened and Colin is now refusing to be in the same building, let alone the same room as Pete,” an insider exclusively told The U.S. Sun at the time. 

“Colin doesn’t want to be associated with Pete.”

The pair were seen shaking hands when Pete made a cameo on SNL in November 2024, but the interaction was visibly tense.

Pete seemed to hint at his rumored rift with Colin when discussing his friend and fellow comedian, John Mulaney, and the few friends who have remained loyal.

“I watched him as he took it on the chin a couple of years ago and had to completely revamp his life,” Pete said in the WSJ interview. 

“I’m kind of in the midst of that now, and he’s been helping me so much. It was so inspiring to watch him beat his addiction, become an even bigger comedian, go on an arena tour, start a family.

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“He’s so happy now and it looks effortless, but it’s not.”

He concluded by naming his closest confidants: “And I’ve got to say, he’s always had my back and he’s always there, and not a lot of people are for me. I would say it’s just him, Lorne [Michaels] and Machine Gun Kelly.”