The Outsized Talent of Ny'ceara Pryor

Though she be but little, she is fierce

Feature article from the Fall 2023 issue of the Sacred Heart University Magazine

by Elizabeth Grace Coyne ’22, ’23 

On game day, the noise in the Pitt Center can be heard from across the campus. Inside, standing shoulder-to-shoulder in red and white, fans fill up the wooden bleachers. Students rise with elbows locked, clutching Sharpie-stained poster boards while parents point to blurry numbers on the backs of flashing figures. With beads of sweat lacing their brows and sticky jerseys lining their backs, the Sacred Heart women’s basketball team soars through the gymnasium to the sound of a roaring crowd. Between the shuffling bodies, all eyes are on the five-foot-three-inch point guard as she cuts through the noise.

Ny’ceara Pryor, a native of Baltimore, MD, has spent her whole life playing basketball––though not always to the standard for which she is now known. In the beginning, the first grader just had fun on the court, surrounded by both boys and girls with more enthusiasm than talent, all dressed in oversized jerseys and untied laces. But time moves on, kids develop, and a confused Pryor soon found herself watching her teammates pass her on the court, wondering why she hadn’t yet found her stride.

The Pryors are an “extremely close-knit family.” So it was only natural for a confused young Ny’ceara to turn to her father for guidance. “My dad told me to distinguish between being the best and trying my best,” she recalls, reciting his lesson. “‘You’re not going to be the greatest player your first time doing it, but you gotta keep staying with it.’ That really stuck with me.”

With the support of her entire household, the young athlete eventually began to improve. Building muscle and moving faster, she caught up with those peers who had passed her before. Suddenly she was the one passing them. The more she found her footing, the more she found her home on the court, until her relationship with the sport became all-consuming.

The next several years of her adolescence were dedicated to basketball. “I started really training and taking it super seriously,” says Pryor, who received her first offer from college scouts in the beginning of her ninth-grade year. It was an early recognition of both her talent and success, setting the tone for everything that’s come after. “From there you have to keep grinding,” she says. Or “keep staying with it,” as her father taught her. Refusing to slow down, Pryor focused on nothing but improving her game.

Eventually, after entertaining numerous offers from universities all over the country, Pryor chose Sacred Heart as her new “family” for the next four years. And once again, she immediately redefined what it means to be a freshman student-athlete. In her first year of college, Pryor became not only the first player in program history, but in league history, to be simultaneously named NEC Player of the Year, Defensive Player of the Year and Rookie of the Year.

And yet, her physical height aside, somehow none of this is surprising once you meet her. Indeed, her outsized presence is so evident that after only six games, Sacred Heart women’s basketball head coach Jessica Mannetti, approached Pryor about advancing as team captain. Mannetti saw in Pryor “a person of high character,” possessing the ability to prioritize the needs of the team. “She is selfless and humble,” Mannetti says. “She never wants to have the spotlight or be given a credit, because she cares more about the success of others than she does of herself.”

Understandably, Pryor had her concerns about the role. New to both college and play at the D1 level, she worried about what the position would mean to the friendships she was beginning to build with her teammates––particularly as a young leader amongst her older peers. “Coming in as a freshman, I didn’t want to step on anybody’s toes,” she recalls.

But her father’s lesson continued to resonate long after those days of running aimlessly for the ball, and Pryor once again found herself distinguishing between “being the best and trying her best.”

She focused on the most important part of growing a successful team. “When you play on a team, you have to trust whoever has the ball no matter what,” she explains. And so Pryor set about earning the trust of her teammates by putting her trust in them.

It paid off. “I think she does a wonderful job leading our team,” says Ciara Brannon ’24, a senior teammate and now a close friend of Pryor’s. “She is a great leader and role model.”

Mannetti has coached numerous players in the same challenging role, and even she’s noticed the ways in which the team has grown stronger since Pryor took on the position. “Being a leader amongst peers is a challenge, because there is always a balance you have to find between friendship and accountability,” she says. “But her teammates respond so well to her because she invests in getting to know them and making sure that she is always trying to stay positive and supportive even through the hardest times.”

Perhaps her natural capacity for leadership shouldn’t come as such a surprise, however. Because while her father’s words ring ever-present in her ears, her mother serves as the role model for Pryor that defines what leadership looks like. Tamika Pryor has been an elementary school teacher for as long as Pryor can remember. She recalls visiting her mother in the classroom. “I saw that all the kids thought of her like a second mother,” Pryor says. “She changed a lot of people’s lives by teaching. So that’s what I want to do.”

To that end, Pryor is currently a sophomore in Sacred Heart’s Isabelle Farrington College of Education & Human Development, where she majors in interdisciplinary studies. Keeping her passion for sports aligned with her fervor for education, Pryor sees herself teaching physical education or even sports communication as a way to finally combine both halves of her life.

Julianne Howard, Pryor’s mathematics professor, teaching young teachers how to teach math, says the student-athlete is on the right path. “Ny is one of the few students who perfectly balances her academics with her athletic career,” she says.

From the moment they met, the professor could sense her student was comfortable in the role of a leader. “Ny is a team player both on and off the court,” she says. “She’s a fast learner, so during group work she’s the one found teaching others who are struggling. She’s very patient with her peers.”

It’s a talent that may be uncommon, but not unsurprising for someone like Pryor for whom relationships––whether with friends or family, classmates, colleagues or coaches––are the glue that keeps any team together.

To that end, there’s one practice she never misses.

At the end of every week, Pryor pulls her phone from a scuffed scarlet red SHU backpack and makes a call home to Baltimore. Smiling back at her via FaceTime are her parents and siblings, rooting for her from several states away. Here, in the reassuring comfort of her family’s gaze, with her sneakers kicked off and her jersey in the closet, the young team captain, conference all-star and campus celebrity gets to be something more than a Google search result, more than a “triple threat,” “dominant force” or even a “top defender.”

She gets to be a small part of something great. She is a daughter once again. A sister. She is the Ny’ceara Pryor she’s always been. And that’s more than enough.