Through grief, UK basketball’s Jaida Roper played to keep her brother’s name alive
Two years ago, during a rough sophomore season, Kentucky Wildcats guard Jaida Roper turned in a dull performance in a UK win at Mississippi.
Playing in front of family and friends only 83 miles from her hometown, the Memphis product logged only six minutes on the court, missed her only shot, turned the ball over twice and went scoreless.
Afterward, her older brother, John, offered the Kentucky women’s basketball player a blunt assessment of her play.
“He told me, ‘This isn’t the Jaida I know.’ You’ve got to go harder,” Jaida Roper recalls. “At the time, I’m like ‘Man, shut up.’ It’s things that I know, but, at that time, I don’t want to hear that.
“But he was like, ‘You’ve got to go harder.’ That’s all I remember, he kept saying, ‘You’ve got to go harder.’”
On that night, neither sibling could have known it was the last time John Roper would ever see his little sister play.
‘Like her best friend’
That it was John Roper sharing hard truths with his sister after a tough game was natural. After their parents divorced, John and Jaida learned to rely on each other.
“I told them we had to stick together,” says their mother, Kina Roper. “It was just us.”
In his own life, John Roper had faced and overcome adversity. His mom became worried when a kindergarten-aged John began spelling his name “N-H-O-J.”
“I was like, ‘No, this is not right,’” Kina Roper says. “I got him tested, and they told me he was dyslexic. But the thing about John, he was determined that was not going to hold him back in life.”
As he matured, John Roper revealed an acumen for building things. As a child, he would ask for the most complex LEGO sets and promptly build them into spaceships or rockets without ever looking at the directions.
“He was so smart,” Kina Roper says. “He figured out he loved to fix things. So if the dishwasher messed up, he would figure it out and just fix it.”
As an adult, John had become certified as both an air conditioning engineer and a diesel mechanic.
If you think Jaida Roper seems outgoing, you should have seen John.
“People always give me compliments, say, ‘We know when Jaida is in the room, it is going to be a fun environment,’” Jaida Roper says. “But he took that to a whole different level.”
To Jaida’s chagrin, one thing the siblings did not have in common was height. The 5-6 Jaida envied the 6-4 John.
“I used to tell him, ‘You are a waste of height,’” Jaida Roper says. “He played basketball, but he wasn’t that serious. I wished all the time I could have switched heights with him.”
Though John was five years older, the Roper siblings never grew apart, not even after Jaida left Memphis to come to school at UK in 2016.
“They not only talked every day, they talked two or three times a day,” Kina Roper says. “She would talk to him before her games. She talked to him, things that you don’t want to tell your parents. He was like her best friend.”
‘Screaming and crying’
For Kentucky assistant coach Kyra Elzy, the night of her 39th birthday will forever be a searing memory.
On the evening of Aug. 17, 2018, Elzy was with her husband in a Cincinnati comedy club when the name “Jaida Roper” popped up on her cell phone.
It was customary for Roper and her mother to call Elzy with birthday wishes.
Elzy answered the call expecting jovial greetings.
“But all I heard was screaming and crying,” Elzy says. “I was like, ‘What is wrong? What is happening? What is going on?’”
Jaida Roper had been on the way to the UK’s women’s basketball practice facility when she got a call from a cousin in Memphis. She was told that someone had seen John Roper crash his motorcycle.
“I’m in my car. I’m parked right outside (UK’s Joe Craft Center),” Jaida Roper says. “And I just go still. I call my mom. She’s hysterical, crying. My body just started shaking.”
Jaida called her roommate, then-Kentucky forward LaShae Halsel, who rushed to her teammate’s side.
At first, Jaida refused to think the worst about her brother’s fate. “All they told me was ‘an accident,’” Jaida Roper says. “I’m thinking, ‘OK, maybe a limb’s gone, maybe he lost his legs. OK, we can live with that.’”
Kina Roper called her daughter back to tell her that John had died from injuries suffered in the accident.
“That moment, I just kind of went numb,” Jaida Roper says. “I just, I couldn’t feel anything.”
According to the Memphis Commercial Appeal, John Kendall Roper, 25, died at Regional One Medical Center after a motorcycle accident at Knight Arnold and Lamar Avenue.
It was Halsel, using Jaida’s phone, who called Elzy.
“LaShae Halsel was like, ‘Jaida’s brother was killed in a motorcycle accident,’” Elzy says. “I was like, ‘Where are you? Where’s Jaida? Where are you guys?’”
‘Made my heart smile’
If a positive can come out of tragic loss, the reaction to her brother’s death gave Jaida Roper a demonstration of how much she meant to her Kentucky teammates.
Even before the UK coaches had figured out their plan for John Roper’s funeral, the Kentucky players “sent a text to the staff,” Elzy says. “(It said), ‘We are all going to drive down to the funeral. This is what we are giving them. This is the flowers we are going to buy.’”
Eventually, with the NCAA’s permission, Kentucky Coach Matthew Mitchell chartered a flight and took the entire Kentucky team to Memphis to support Jaida at her brother’s funeral.
When the Wildcats walked into the service “that made my heart smile, even in the midst of grief,” Kina Roper says. “It showed how much they cared.”
For Jaida, having to return from burying her only sibling to the day-to-day life of a Southeastern Conference athlete was not easy. “That’s when my teammates played such a huge role for me,” she says.
Forward KeKe McKinney checked in on Jaida every morning, asked if she needed anything, told her she loved her.
Halsel, whose father was killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq when she was 9, “just tried to do for Jaida what I had wanted people to do for me when my Dad passed,” she says. “Just be there.”
Guard Amanda Paschal, who has also lost a brother, offered advice. “Amanda told me, ‘The only way (John’s) name will go on is if you carry it forward,’” Jaida Roper says. “That’s something I think about every day.”
Working through grief is not easy for anyone. It can be especially trying for a major college basketball player.
In the immediate aftermath of John’s death, the 17th of any month hit Jaida hard.
“Every time it came up, it was like a punch to the gut for her,” Elzy says. “Obviously, some of those days, we played (games). She had to let that emotion out. I’d just try to work through it with her, ‘What would (John) want you to do?’”
This season, Kentucky returned to play at Mississippi for the first time since John Roper had given his little sister that pep talk two years ago. It was in the Pavilion at Ole Miss that the siblings took their final pictures together.
“It was kind of hard for me, going back, my family being there and him not being able to be there,” Jaida says, her voice cracking.
That night, with her brother’s admonition to “go harder” running through her head, Jaida scored 10 points and doled out six assists in a Kentucky blowout win.
An unheralded recruit who came to UK at a time when player defections had destabilized the Wildcats program, Jaida Roper — with the premature ending of the 2019-20 college basketball season — will depart Kentucky having become a starter, a team leader and a clutch shot-maker.
“She is as good an example as we have had here in taking advantage of her opportunity,” UK’s Mitchell says.
Over the past two seasons, after Roper hit a shot, you sometimes saw her look skyward and point toward heaven.
It was her way of acknowledging the brother who, the final time he saw her play, implored her “to go harder.”
“I’m not only playing for Kentucky,” Jaida Roper said shortly before this season ended. “I’m playing for a bigger reason — and that’s my brother.”
This story was originally published March 16, 2020 at 3:33 PM.
