Jenica Lewis extends her hand – fingers curled into a fist – into the middle of a tightly-packed huddle, and her teammates follow suit.
The Johnston High School senior breaks the huddle, speaking over her chattering teammates despite a voice that is soft and scratchy from battling a cold. And then practice gets underway, and Lewis rarely stops moving.
Advertisement
The 18-year-old works through each movement with a smile on her face, even as sweat collects in droplets on her forehead and her curly hair – pulled into a low bun with short ringlets falling by each of her ears – becomes frizzy.
Her talent is on full display as the team moves through exercise after exercise.
When the team splits into two groups – with the goal of making 10 free throws in a row – Lewis is the only player to sink every single one of her attempts. Each time a teammate misses, the group’s total is reset.
Johnston’s Jenica Lewis stands for a portrait before practice on Nov. 19, 2025, at Johnston High School.
The number reaches eight, and Lewis squats, tenting her fingertips on the hardwood. She looks up, nervous about being sent back to zero with a miss. But her teammate hits both free throws, and Lewis jumps up, throwing her arms in the air.
Advertisement
On this court, donning an all-purple uniform, Lewis is just another high school athlete, one who must run through rigorous practices, take limited breaks and do whatever else needs to be done for the betterment of the team.
Behind the smile and the school spirit, though, Lewis is one of the best girls basketball players in the country.
And she has been for quite some time.
Johnston’s star senior backs up Division I offers with talent, personality
Twenty-four.
That’s the total number of Division I offers Lewis collected before she ever played a minute of high school basketball.
In 2021, Dan Olson, a national girls basketball recruiting analyst who runs the Collegiate Girls Basketball Report, ranked Lewis at No. 3 overall and the No. 1 guard in the 2026 class. Top Spot Basketball had her as the No. 1 player nationally in the 2026 class.
Advertisement
Over the past four years, other players blossomed and overtook the top spots in the rankings. But Lewis remained a figurehead of her recruiting class, and her desire to be the best never wavered.
At the end of her recruitment, Lewis held four dozen offers.
What did all those Division I coaches see in Lewis, though, from her middle school days all the way to when she made her college decision at the beginning of November?
Well, there are a lot of things to like about her game.
In Iowa, look no further than Dickson Jensen for someone who keeps their finger on the pulse of girls and women’s basketball.
Advertisement
The All Iowa Attack founder has come to know some of the top players in the state – and beyond – coaching the likes of Caitlin Clark, KK Arnold (UConn) and Sahara Williams (Oklahoma). His teams are ranked among the best club basketball programs in the nation, and top players want to compete for him.
But at least early on, Lewis didn’t feel that way.
She spent most of her childhood playing for her father, LC, who coached her club team. Even as her recruiting stock rose, Lewis remained loyal to Pure Prep – where she played through her first couple seasons of high school, alongside her friends.
Still, Jensen recognized Lewis’ talent. He saw some special in the budding star.
Johnston’s Jenica Lewis practices with her teammates on Nov. 19, 2025, at Johnston High School.
And then, there came a time when Lewis and her team played in a tournament hosted by Jensen. Pure Prep played on the Adidas circuit; All Iowa Attack played on the Nike circuit, which is considered more competitive.
Advertisement
Lewis and her teammates went toe-to-toe with one of the programs that played at the Attack’s level, and a crowd formed to watch the matchup.
In that moment, Lewis knew she wanted to play with and against that level of talent all the time.
She waited for her older teammates to graduate and move on to college programs. Then, Lewis took her talents to the All Iowa Attack.
“Her fundamentals are as good as there is out there,” Jensen said. “She can play multiple positions. She passes the ball extremely well, and she’s one of the best shooters I’ve ever coached. She certainly can guard well, and she’s very athletic. She just brings a lot to a basketball team.”
Advertisement
She isn’t just a good basketball player, though.
“She’s a light in the gym,” Jensen said. “Not all kids are that way, unfortunately. A lot of kids walk in the gym, and the attention gets drawn to them, or they make things complicated. Jenica’s quite the opposite.
“She wants to make sure everybody in the gym is happy and working hard and getting better. She’s brought a level of maturity and personality to the gym, and then on top of it, she’s a tremendous player.”
She is a baller, but she is also a battler.
Except her fight – a daily challenge – is largely invisible.
Lewis continues her rise to the top, despite diabetes diagnosis
In 2022, Lewis returned home from a summer practice and reported to her parents what a coach had told her: It looked like she’d lost a lot of weight.
Advertisement
She and her parents didn’t agree – at least initially – but then they started to notice changes. Her clothes didn’t fit properly; she would drink glass after glass of water and still feel parched; she felt lethargic, almost weighed down, by just existing.
But while working out with her father, something clicked.
“I told him I needed a drink, like I was so thirsty,” Lewis recalled. “He’s like, ‘Jenica, you seriously haven’t even done a drill yet.’ I went and got a drink, and then I worked out for five more minutes and I’m like, ‘I can’t, I’m so thirsty.’”
Something felt weird, and when LC shared that interaction with his wife, Shannon, she decided to enter everything they’d noticed into a search engine.
Advertisement
Weight loss, unquenchable thirst, frequent trips to the bathroom, blurry vision and headaches. And this is what Google spit out: Those are all symptoms of undiagnosed diabetes, both Type 1 and Type 2.
There were uncertainties about that diagnosis, though.
Johnston’s Jenica Lewis (10) shoots the ball over Iowa City Liberty’s Ava Casey (1) on Monday, March 3, 2025, at Wells Fargo Arena.
Lewis followed a rigorous training schedule, spending most days in the gym either working out or playing for her club basketball program. She spent more time at friends’ houses – since it was summer break – and her parents didn’t know how much or what types of food she ate.
Some of her symptoms could be explained by those factors.
Still, Shannon wanted to rule out that possibility, and she dragged her unwilling soon-to-be high schooler to the doctor. One prick of the finger and a blood test later, the Lewis family had an answer.
Advertisement
Her numbers came back close to 600 – at or below 100 is the recommended reading. She was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes a couple of days before the start of her freshman year.
“We both broke down and cried,” Shannon remembered. “And I’ll never forget, the first thing Jenica asked the doctor was, ‘Can I still play basketball?’”
Her favorite sport remained front of mind, even during one of the lowest moments of her life.
But – in the immediate days following her diagnosis – the sport that turned Lewis into a household name in recruiting circles needed to be put on the back burner.
“One of the biggest things we kept telling her is that this doesn’t define her,” Shannon said. “You can be the exceptional athlete that you want to be. You can be a normal kid. Yes, diabetes is there and it’s going to change, but it doesn’t define you.”
Advertisement
The Lewis family’s memories of the next few days blur together.
A trip to the hospital – where doctors put her on an IV to stabilize her hydration levels and gave her a long-acting insulin – and a four–hour class to learn about managing their daughter’s diabetes feel like much shorter blips on the radar in hindsight, with everything that’s happened in the three-and-a-half years since.
She spent the early months of her diagnosis scared, and she did everything in her power to hide the fact that she had diabetes. One day, her mother picked her up from school, and Lewis’ blood sugar was so low that she could barely walk.
Lewis needed to learn how to count carbs, and she cut back on some simple pleasures: slushies before basketball games, Mountain Dew with dinner, B-Bop’s cheeseburgers.
Advertisement
She made adjustments on the court, too.
Chad Jilek – the Johnston girls basketball coach – acknowledged that it was a learning curve for him and his staff. They monitored how she looked during games, even unofficially assigning an assistant coach to get Lewis onto the bench when she needed a break.
Sometimes, it looked like she was running through sand, and that’s when her parents knew she needed something like fruit snacks or a sugary drink.
She adjusted her pregame meal, opting to eat just a steak, which is a food she doesn’t need to balance out with a dose of insulin.
Her game day outfit almost always included wearing a short-sleeve compression T-shirt underneath her jersey. That conveniently covered the glucose monitor on her arm, but it didn’t prevent complications – like getting hit and having it come off during games.
Advertisement
“Keeping it on my body and playing a physical sport is especially hard,” Lewis said. “If I get hit, it hurts really bad, because the needles are in (my arm).”
Despite all her best efforts to keep her levels in check, some factors are out of her control. Outside of just food and drink, her hormones, stress and the adrenaline of a game can all impact her blood sugar count.
Sometimes, her body puts her back on the roller coaster ride.
Last year, she experienced a severe low while at basketball practice in Ames. Her parents took her to the hospital, where they got her numbers back up and were able to discharge her. She was home for about an hour before she started to tank again.
Advertisement
On the car ride back to the hospital, Lewis drank soda and ate ice cream in an attempt to keep her stable. By the time she arrived, her blood glucose level was 32 and still dropping, putting her in a state of severe hypoglycemia.
She spent the next five days in the hospital.
In May, there was another scare before school. She fell into a bit of a diabetic coma – as her parents described it – where she kept dropping her phone and she would stare at her parents, but she didn’t seem all there. She was drenched in sweat.
Shannon feared that her daughter might have a seizure, and she called for an ambulance. Lewis took another trip to the hospital, again with severely low numbers.
Advertisement
These experiences forced Lewis to make a decision about her health.
For anyone – let alone a teenager – managing diabetes is both physically and mentally draining. Her second trip to the hospital in a matter of months put things into perspective, and she opted to get an insulin pump, which is attached to her right leg.
“She’s taking control,” Shannon said. “And she’s not afraid of it anymore.”
It took three years, but Lewis went from hiding her diagnosis to accepting it. She went from avoiding the mentor role to being there for others going through similar experiences. And she found someone close to home who needed someone like Lewis to look up to.
Advertisement
Jensen – her All Iowa Attack coach – understands that as people progress through life, they find themselves in special clubs that no one wants to be a part of. Lewis found herself in the club of having diabetes, and so did Jensen’s granddaughter, Berkeley.
Like Lewis, Berkeley is very active and followed in the family footsteps with her love of basketball. The 6-year old is at all her grandfather’s games, and Jensen believes that Lewis will be an important figure in Berkeley’s life for a long time.
“Literally thousands of kids get diabetes and think, ‘I’ll never play football or basketball or do all these things,’” Jensen shared. “And Jenica is proving that all that is not true. So for my granddaughter, she has an example of somebody that says you’re not going to be any different.”
Notre Dame or nothing for one of the top women’s basketball recruits in the country
The Lewis family departed their home in Johnston around 1 a.m. on Saturday, Nov. 1, pulling into South Bend, Indiana about seven hours later.
Advertisement
The trio stopped at a department store to purchase a few pieces of Notre Dame apparel and then made their way to Purcell Pavilion, home to the Notre Dame men’s and women’s basketball and volleyball teams.
Lewis donned a disguise: a tan bucket hat, a pair of oversized glasses, a Columbia puffer jacket, zipped up past her chin. She posed as a camera person to surprise assistant coaches Carlos Knox, Michaela Mabrey and Carol Owens with her commitment to the Fighting Irish.
She made her way out onto the court, where members of Notre Dame’s current women’s basketball team were running through practice. Lewis shared the news with her future teammates, and the team got head coach Niele Ivey on a video call, so she could be in on the moment, too.
And then, Lewis turned the vehicle around and headed back towards Iowa.
Advertisement
Shortly after 6 p.m., the group stopped in Cedar Falls. The Upper Iowa men’s basketball team was scheduled for an exhibition game – a mock season opener – against Northern Iowa, and Trey – the older of the two Lewis siblings – had earned a spot in the Peacocks’ starting lineup.
The Panthers won that game, but Trey played the most minutes of any Upper Iowa player and contributed eight points, a rebound, a steal and an assist.
Five days later – on Nov. 6 – Lewis publicly announced her commitment to Notre Dame women’s basketball.
“I loved it there,” Lewis said about choosing the Fighting Irish. “When I went (on a visit), I didn’t want to come back. I was talking with the football team and the men’s basketball team and the girls, and it’s really just a family environment. I just felt really loved there.”
Advertisement
Lewis struggled to vocalize her feelings about Notre Dame, but the smile that appears on her face when discussing her future team doesn’t disappear. She talks about her trust in the coaching staff and about Ivey’s honesty during the recruiting process. She noted the rigorous academic standards and the school’s focus on faith, something that plays an integral role in Lewis’ life.
But she didn’t always see Notre Dame as the top choice.
Lewis admitted that, when she first visited the campus, she couldn’t see herself going to school or playing basketball there. She can’t identify exactly what made her feel that way; all she knows is that something had changed by the time she returned to South Bend.
The Fighting Irish came from behind and won over the No. 24 senior recruit in the country, but several other schools were vying for Lewis’ commitment.
Advertisement
In August, she announced her top five: Iowa, North Carolina, Notre Dame, Oregon and TCU. In early November – two days before announcing her commitment – Lewis shared that she was down to four schools, removing the Tar Heels from contention.
And even down to the wire, Hawkeyes fans were ecstatic about the possibility of adding the top in-state player to Jan Jensen’s roster.
That is something that Lewis struggled with: choosing a program other than Iowa. The Hawkeyes were one of the first programs with a foot in the door, handing Lewis her second Division I offer – behind only Iowa State – in the summer of 2021. She spent years building relationships with the coaching staff; she developed friendships with several current and former Hawkeyes.
Ultimately, something nagged at Lewis, something that Iowa’s coaching staff couldn’t do anything about. She says the call to the Iowa head coach to inform her of her choice was one of the hardest things she’s done.
Advertisement
“I didn’t know if I wanted the high school experience again,” Lewis shared. “It’s a good and a bad thing being from Iowa, and going to Iowa. You know everyone, everyone knows everything about you. I didn’t really want to live that again.”
Johnston’s Jenica Lewis practices with her teammates on Nov. 19, 2025, at Johnston High School.
Despite the spotlight, despite rising to the top of the recruiting rankings, despite being at the forefront of several college coaches’ minds, Notre Dame offers Lewis the opportunity to be somewhat unknown.
She’ll be another piece of the puzzle, and on campus, she’ll be just another student.
And that’s what she wants.
Lewis’ decision made sense to her parents – even if she kept them in the dark for some of the process.
From day one, LC and Shannon allowed Jenica to take charge of her athletic life. She chose whether she wanted to attend certain camps and tournaments; she communicated with and developed relationships with coaches; she set her own boundaries as her status in the recruiting world rose.
“You can’t force a kid to do something they don’t want to do, because then they’re not going to give their full heart, their full effort,” Shannon said.
Even when she told her parents that she’d decided on Notre Dame, they didn’t question her as to why or ask for all the details. LC and Shannon – who watched Jenica handle her own recruitment for over four years – trusted that their daughter knew what she wanted.
“Seeing her come to the Notre Dame decision, it made perfect sense as far as who she is as a person, what they represent,” LC said. “We didn’t really dig into what made her choose Notre Dame over this place or that place. Never really asked her that.
“When she said, ‘when you know, you know,’ that’s all I needed to know.”
Jenica Lewis will finish her high school career as one of Johnston’s greats
Four years have passed since Lewis asked the doctor if she could still play basketball.
And well, she’s done more than just compete in her favorite sport. She’s set the tone in Iowa’s largest class for the last three seasons.
Johnston wins the 2025 Class 5A girls state title over Dowling Catholic on Friday, March 7, 2025, at Wells Fargo Arena in Des Moines.
Before the start of her senior season, Lewis totaled 1,088 points, 298 rebounds, 227 assists, 200 steals and 72 blocks. She went from averaging 12.2 points per game as a freshman to 18 points per game as a junior.
“She came in as the best freshman in the state,” Jilek said. “Her sophomore year, she really got into the groove of things, and the team trusted her more. And then last year, we had some really good kids graduate, so she had to take that step to the next level.”
She lost two games – total – across her first three seasons at Johnston, compiling an overall record of 76-2. She helped the Dragons to a runner-up finish in the state tournament as a freshman, and she led her team to back-to-back, undefeated state titles in 2024 and 2025.
Her high school resume is something that most young athletes dream about.
Ever the perfectionist, though, Lewis still isn’t satisfied with how her freshman season ended.
“I’m still not over that game,” Lewis said, referring to the 59-56 loss to Pleasant Valley in the 2023 championship game. “Still haven’t watched it; I don’t have the shoes anymore.”
The Dragons went on a revenge tour the next season, and winning the championship during her sophomore year is still one of the best moments of Lewis’ career. Sure, she enjoyed claiming the title the next season too, but it didn’t feel as good as that first championship.
And the stakes are high for her senior season.
The Dragons started the season strong with a convincing win over Cedar Falls, shortly before the fall break. Lewis wants to piece together 25 more victories, or at least end the season by raising the championship trophy one more time.
“She’s all in, and a team player, and Johnston comes first for her,” Jilek said. “That’s one thing you might worry about with some kids that are getting a lot of attention, but that’s not Jenica.”
Johnston wins the 2025 Class 5A girls state title over Dowling Catholic on Friday, March 7, 2025, at Wells Fargo Arena in Des Moines.
In this moment, that’s all she cares about.
Not her individual statistics, not Notre Dame, not the WNBA.
Just Johnston, and crossing off the final set of high school goals she set for herself.
Alyssa Hertel is the college sports recruiting reporter for the Des Moines Register. Contact Alyssa at ahertel@dmreg.com or on Twitter @AlyssaHertel.
This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Jenica Lewis lives up to the hype during Johnston basketball career
