Amid the cacophony of whirling toddlers at a local YMCA in Oxford, Chester County, about 14 years ago, Jermaine Palmer caught a glimpse in the corner of his eye of what was to come. He had gotten his daughter, Jordyn, into basketball, taking her to his practices, letting her crawl around the court in diapers, and involving her in youth coed rec leagues with a tiny ball and hoop.
One afternoon, as a game was going on, he noticed, Jordyn and a little boy collided going after a rebound. They both fell. The boy went crying to his mother. Jordyn stood up, grabbed the ball, and scored a layup as if nothing happened, smiling back down the court. Jermaine just shook his head, he recalled.
Jordyn Palmer, the gifted 6-foot-2 junior guard at Westtown School, tends to make a lot of people shake their heads in disbelief each time they see her play, especially the nation’s top college coaches. She is ranked as the No. 6 player in the country in the class of 2027 by ESPN’s SportsCenter NEXT — Super 60. She is averaging a humble 23 points and 12 rebounds for the Moose, who will be playing for their sixth straight Friends Schools League championship this Friday at 6:30 p.m. against archrival Friends’ Central at La Salle University.
As a junior, Palmer is on the threshold of 2,000 career points and is the leader of a star-studded team that has a/ 23-1 overall record this season and is ranked No. 7 in the country by ESPN.
What is so interesting about Palmer is that her best is yet to come. She’s always been tall for her age, and her parents, Jermaine and Kim, had to carry her birth certificate as proof of her age because of that. She has been playing varsity basketball since she was in eighth grade.
A dominant rebounder, ballhandler, and shooter, she can finish left- or right-handed and has added a more consistent perimeter game. She’s also a team player, making a point to get her teammates involved. She plays with poise, despite the constant attention she has had on her since she was 14.
She was 5-9 at age 12 playing for the Chester County Storm under-16 AAU team when Westtown coach Fran Burbidge first saw her in a summer tournament at the Spooky Nook complex in Manheim, Lancaster County. Burbidge, who coached women’s stars Elena Delle Donne and Breanna Stewart, quickly saw how much more advanced Palmer was than the teenage girls she was playing against.
“A friend of mine asked me if I ever saw her play. I remember going to one of the back courts and thinking, ‘There is no way that kid is in seventh grade,’” Burbidge said. “So, yeah, I had to convince myself she was that much better than everyone around her. If I didn’t know, I would have thought she was a high school junior.”
Palmer has evolved since then. The second-oldest of four, she’s 17 and may grow another inch.
She’s also a victim of her own success. Burbidge pulls her early in blowouts — and the Moose have many. She easily could score 40 points a game, but she plays with a pass-first, team-first mentality.
Last summer, she was playing in a league against a talented Imhotep Charter team when she dominated both ends of the court for 10 minutes. Then she turned back to being a facilitator again. She is by no means lazy, according to her coaches and her father, but she is so smooth that she can play at different levels.
“I was raised around the game. I grew up with a basketball in my hands, my dad being a coach taking me to practice,” said Jordyn, who carries a 3.5 grade-point average. “I was pretty much crawling around a basketball court before I was walking. I was always the tallest kid, that was me. I grew up playing soccer, too, but basketball was definitively my first love. I would say I was around seventh, eighth grade, when I started to think I was pretty good at this. It really changed when I went to Westtown.”
And it really changed in 2023 when she was cut from the U.S. under-16 national team in Colorado Springs, Colo., when she was 14. It was the first and only time she was cut from something. She reached the second cuts. She sat in a conference room and was told that she did very well, but she would not make the team.
When Jordyn called her parents, tears were shed — fueling aheightened determination.
“A year later, I got invited back, and I made the team,” she said. “That was the first time I faced rejection, and I thought I dealt with it well. It made me work harder. Being cut didn’t make me angry because I was not too sure I would make it anyway, but it shocked me. I began working out in the morning, and I’m not a morning person. I hate waking up early. I began taking basketball more seriously than I ever did.”
A month after she was cut that summer, she led Philly Rise to an AAU national title.
Jermaine and Burbidge want her to play more intensely for sustained periods of time. Jordyn knows she will need to maintain those levels once she gets to college.
“Jordyn has not even scratched her full potential,” said Jermaine, the girls’ basketball coach at Oxford High School. “I’m proud of her. Jordyn is a great kid. Her upbringing keeps her humble. But she does not play with the urgency that I know she has. You see it in spurts, but when you see her playing national-level players, that comes out. I get on her all the time about dominating.
“The stuff people don’t see in the gym is someone who can outplay anyone. You can’t really guard her. When she tightens her shot off the dribble and her ballhandling, she is going to be terrifying. I’m her father and a coach — you see the way games are called. She’s so strong and so solid, refs look at her a different way than they do other players. She has gotten used to it. Refs don’t understand the body difference between Jordyn and everyone else.
“No one likes Goliath. It’s part of the game.”
South Carolina, LSU, Kentucky, Rutgers, Maryland, Notre Dame, and UCLA are the schools in which she’s interested. She says she is looking to make her official visits over the summer and make a decision next spring. Jordyn and Jermaine said they want to take their time with the recruiting process.
She would get around 30 calls a day this time last year. That has been reduced to around five a day.
“It’s been a little bit of a pain,” she said. “There have been those times when I have cried by myself because it can sometimes be overwhelming. I spoke to my parents about it, and they have done a great job taking the pressure off me, telling these coaches I’m taking a break. I’m still a kid, and I’m grateful to my parents for allowing me to be a kid. They let me fish.”
Then, Jordyn went into her own “fish tale.” She got into fishing as a way to relax through her maternal grandfather. During summer vacations, she fishes with her family in northeast Maryland and the Outer Banks in North Carolina. She once hooked a baby shark when she was 7.
“Yep, it was about 100 pounds,” she said. “We took it home and ate it. My uncles helped me pull it in.”
Her father laughs at the recollection.
“Jordyn was there,” Jermaine said. “I don’t know if she caught it. But we’ll go with that story.”
One thing is certain, Jordyn Palmer is no fish tale.
