Kansas State University Athletics
‘I’m Home. I’m a Wildcat’
May 28, 2025 | Women's Basketball, Sports Extra
By: D. Scott Fritchen
In the seventh grade, Jordan Speiser received her first recruiting letter. It was a letter from Connecticut, signed by Geno Auriemma. On Speiser's first unofficial visit to Iowa, Caitlin Clark served as her host and showed off the campus and basketball facilities. But the fuzzies of hearing from a Hall-of-Fame coach, and touring Iowa City, Iowa, with her favorite player, faded like those early chapters in a great book, and as years passed, pages turned, and the basketball career of one of the top 10 high school players in the country in the Class of 2025 unfurled across the country, the 6-foot-1 guard found herself confiding something to Kansas State assistant coach Staci Gregorio Foss as they drove in Manhattan in the late days of June in 2024.
"I'm going to be so honest right now," Speiser told Gregorio Foss. "I feel like they always say when you know you know, and I have that feeling."
Speiser told her parents her decision. They told her to sit on it to make sure. She did. For a little while. Finally, Speiser sat on the phone, the one that had rang incessantly for months and months from women's basketball programs across the country, and she called Oklahoma, TCU, North Carolina and Iowa to cancel her official visits — a painful process after she had built relationships with the coaches and staff through the months and years. ("They were trying to convince me, and I said, 'No, I've made my choice.' They said, 'Well, if you ever have a change of mind…' I said, 'I don't plan on it.'")
Her final call was to Gregorio Foss at K-State.
"Hey, it's official," Speiser said. "I'm a Wildcat."
Speiser and Gregorio Foss kept it a secret. They concocted a plan. On September 13, 2024, Speiser and her parents left their home in Warrenton, Missouri, and drove 4 ½ hours west to Manhattan, entered the Ice Family Basketball Training Center, and patiently waited for their cue. Gregorio Foss met them in the second-floor lobby. K-State head coach Jeff Mittie and his assistant coaches and staff were upstairs entrenched in a meeting — that is, until Gregorio Foss entered the room and announced, "I want to introduce you guys to our newest Wildcat addition."
Speiser walked in and said, "I'm home. I'm a Wildcat."
Nobody was more surprised than Mittie. A few days prior, he had visited Speiser at Lutheran High School, and she informed him that she was taking an official visit to Iowa.
"Coach Mittie was completely stunned," Speiser said, chuckling. "He didn't know what to say. He said, 'I thought you were going to Iowa.' I said, 'Yeah, we made a wrong turn.'"
On June 7, Speiser will steer her way to the Little Apple, where the 2023-24 Gatorade Missouri Girls Basketball Player of the Year for the first time will meet face-to-face fellow K-State freshmen that compile an incoming class that ranks No. 8 by ESPN. The freshmen have seemingly known each other forever by virtue of their group chats and share a common bond as the Wildcats, who come off their first Sweet 16 appearance since 2002, will be largely rebuilt following the departure of a notable cast headlined by All-Americans Ayoka Lee and Serena Sundell, and will strive to become a NCAA Tournament team once again.
"The freshmen are already so close, and we haven't even — the only one I've met in person is Aniya Foy and we're really good friends, but other than that I haven't met any of these girls and we're already so close," Speiser said. "I feel like we are going to really prove why we're one of the top 10 recruiting classes in the country.
"We all feel like we have something to prove. We feel like we need to pick up a little bit of the slack K-State lost from the past season."
Speiser graduated from Lutheran High School this past Sunday. She was only able to invite 10 guests to attend the ceremony in a school of 400 students. Reminded that the NCAA Tournament also only allots a certain number of tickets to players and their families, she laughed, "I guess this is good practice for that now." But the post-graduation celebration was on, as one of the nation's top high school athletes on the court, in the classroom and in the community took a moment to digest the enormity of her vast accomplishments. She volunteered locally as a math tutor and youth basketball trainer, and she donated her time to multiple community service initiatives through her church youth group. Her grade-point average was so high that she was exempt from final exams this spring.
Then there's basketball, and that marriage to the ball that she commanded better than almost any high school player in the country. It culminated in a final high school hurrah — three elite events in three different states in three weeks. There was the McDonald's All-American Game on April 1 in Brooklyn, New York; the Nike Hoops Summit on April 12 in Portland, Oregon; and the Jordan Brand Classic on April 19 in Washington, D.C. Speiser, who was ranked No. 6 overall by On3, and as the No. 4 shooting guard by 247Sports, was one of the stars.
"When I sit down with my parents and talk about everything, they make me sit down and think about it and just be grateful for it, because there'll be times I'm just getting through it, and going, going, going," Speiser said. "When I do think about it, it's crazy, because there are so many people in this world that would love to do what I'm doing, and there are only a select few girls getting to do what I do. I just find that mind-blowing. Yeah, I love every second of it."
Speiser already knew many of the other all-stars on the tour from competition during her days starring on her AAU team, the All-Iowa Attack.
"It was a very hectic and crazy month," Speiser said. "I was on a plane every week, but I loved every moment of it. Getting to play basketball with girls I've become best friends with these past three years was amazing. We all had so much fun."
Speiser and her fellow all-stars also know their paths could cross again, perhaps in a NCAA Tournament game down the road.
"A lot of us talked about that," Speiser said. "That's going to be crazy. At the same time, we're used to it. We've been playing against each other so much on the circuit."
For now, the competition is on pause, but the work never stops.
"My routine is very busy right now," she said. "I train every day for basketball and shoot every day. I lift four days a week. I actually do Pilates and yoga every morning, called 'hot works,' and I do yoga, Pilates and stretch in the sauna. It's very good for my body and keeps me performing my best on the court."
She awaits the practice court at the Ice Family Basketball Center.
"I'm in the gym a lot of my day," she said. "I love the practice facility. I absolutely love it. I can see myself being in there almost every day. Coach Mittie keeps saying, 'Yep, you and Taryn Sides are going to be in there a lot together.'"
One 247Sports scout said that Speiser "might be the best spot-up jump shooter in the country." ESPN said that "Speiser has a strong base and a broad build to go along with a quick trigger, high-release finish." Lutheran St. Charles coach Erin Luttschwager said, "Jordan can do pretty much everything."
Speiser averaged 20.9 points on 42.8% shooting from the floor and she made 102 3-pointers on 42.0% shooting from long range. She also averaged 7.6 rebounds, 3.4 assists and 1.8 steals in 27 games during her senior season.
"My biggest strengths are I'm a big guard who can shoot and I have some pretty deep range when I shoot," she said. "If they put a big on me, I can take her out to the perimeter, and if they want to put a smaller guard on me, I can take her down in the post. My game is very versatile. I'm still continuing to improve upon my game, but those are my biggest strengths.
Ask about her biggest honor and she goes back to being named 2023-24 Gatorade Missouri Girls Basketball Player of the Year during a junior season in which she averaged 23.4 points, 9.7 rebounds, 2.6 assists and 1.8 steals. The award remains meaningful for multiple reasons.
"I came off an injury from my sophomore year and being able to come back as a junior and have the year that I did showed how much my hard work had paid off," she said. "That was a very rough and hard-working season, so to get that award was definitely worth all the hard workouts and late nights in the gym."
Speiser picked up a basketball for the first time in the first grade, but she didn't really begin playing basketball until fifth grade. Softball was her main sport. She even played football in the second grade.
"I played basketball in the fifth grade and all my friends were better than me," she said. "I told my dad, 'It's not fair. I want to be as good as them.' He said, 'Then you have to be in the gym every day.'"
Mission accomplished.
"I first realized I was better than everyone else in my first game in high school," she said. "I had a pretty good showing and at least for high school I was 10 times better than the other girls. It really boosted my confidence and made me want to work and be even better.
"Then I realized I was one of the best in the country this past summer on the All-Iowa Attack. I owe that to my AAU coach, Dixon Jensen. He brought the best out of me in every game and in every practice. This past summer I realized I was definitely one of the best in the country."
In the midst of it all, were the recruiting letters, which, of course, began with UConn.
"It was insane," Speiser said. "I didn't believe it. I looked at my mom and dad and said, 'This isn't real. You guys are playing a joke right now.'"
By the time sophomore season hit, Speiser had a mountain of letters from schools across the country.
"Sophomore year on, it got to the point where it was definitely stressful and to the point where I had to take breaks," Speiser said. "When June 1 hit my junior year and teams could call you, it definitely became a job, talking to everybody every day. It was definitely tiring."
She built a relationship with many coaches and coaching staffs. She enjoyed her talks with Gregorio Foss. She enjoyed Mittie as well.
"He's a very good coach," Speiser said. "He's going to be able to get the best version out of me and coach me to my best potential," Speiser said. "He doesn't treat us just like basketball players, and I haven't even played for him yet, but he lets us know that he values us as people, too. I really appreciate that about him."
Then came the car ride with Gregorio Foss that fateful day in Manhattan, when Speiser confided that there was no place else she wanted to go.
She wanted K-State to be her college home.
And the days tick down to her move-in date on campus on June 7.
"I literally have a countdown going until I move in," she said. "It's very, very exciting. My brother, Billy, plays offensive line, and he's going to the K-State football camp on June 1, so I'm going to K-State with him and my dad just so I can be on campus and see the coaching staff, and make it less of a countdown to get up there."
She paused.
"I really don't think anybody understands how excited I am, if I'm being honest," she added. "I'm ready to come in and do everything that I possibly can for this program. I want to bring myself and my teammates to a higher level."
In the seventh grade, Jordan Speiser received her first recruiting letter. It was a letter from Connecticut, signed by Geno Auriemma. On Speiser's first unofficial visit to Iowa, Caitlin Clark served as her host and showed off the campus and basketball facilities. But the fuzzies of hearing from a Hall-of-Fame coach, and touring Iowa City, Iowa, with her favorite player, faded like those early chapters in a great book, and as years passed, pages turned, and the basketball career of one of the top 10 high school players in the country in the Class of 2025 unfurled across the country, the 6-foot-1 guard found herself confiding something to Kansas State assistant coach Staci Gregorio Foss as they drove in Manhattan in the late days of June in 2024.
"I'm going to be so honest right now," Speiser told Gregorio Foss. "I feel like they always say when you know you know, and I have that feeling."
Speiser told her parents her decision. They told her to sit on it to make sure. She did. For a little while. Finally, Speiser sat on the phone, the one that had rang incessantly for months and months from women's basketball programs across the country, and she called Oklahoma, TCU, North Carolina and Iowa to cancel her official visits — a painful process after she had built relationships with the coaches and staff through the months and years. ("They were trying to convince me, and I said, 'No, I've made my choice.' They said, 'Well, if you ever have a change of mind…' I said, 'I don't plan on it.'")
Her final call was to Gregorio Foss at K-State.
"Hey, it's official," Speiser said. "I'm a Wildcat."
Speiser and Gregorio Foss kept it a secret. They concocted a plan. On September 13, 2024, Speiser and her parents left their home in Warrenton, Missouri, and drove 4 ½ hours west to Manhattan, entered the Ice Family Basketball Training Center, and patiently waited for their cue. Gregorio Foss met them in the second-floor lobby. K-State head coach Jeff Mittie and his assistant coaches and staff were upstairs entrenched in a meeting — that is, until Gregorio Foss entered the room and announced, "I want to introduce you guys to our newest Wildcat addition."
Speiser walked in and said, "I'm home. I'm a Wildcat."
Nobody was more surprised than Mittie. A few days prior, he had visited Speiser at Lutheran High School, and she informed him that she was taking an official visit to Iowa.
"Coach Mittie was completely stunned," Speiser said, chuckling. "He didn't know what to say. He said, 'I thought you were going to Iowa.' I said, 'Yeah, we made a wrong turn.'"
On June 7, Speiser will steer her way to the Little Apple, where the 2023-24 Gatorade Missouri Girls Basketball Player of the Year for the first time will meet face-to-face fellow K-State freshmen that compile an incoming class that ranks No. 8 by ESPN. The freshmen have seemingly known each other forever by virtue of their group chats and share a common bond as the Wildcats, who come off their first Sweet 16 appearance since 2002, will be largely rebuilt following the departure of a notable cast headlined by All-Americans Ayoka Lee and Serena Sundell, and will strive to become a NCAA Tournament team once again.
"The freshmen are already so close, and we haven't even — the only one I've met in person is Aniya Foy and we're really good friends, but other than that I haven't met any of these girls and we're already so close," Speiser said. "I feel like we are going to really prove why we're one of the top 10 recruiting classes in the country.
"We all feel like we have something to prove. We feel like we need to pick up a little bit of the slack K-State lost from the past season."
Speiser graduated from Lutheran High School this past Sunday. She was only able to invite 10 guests to attend the ceremony in a school of 400 students. Reminded that the NCAA Tournament also only allots a certain number of tickets to players and their families, she laughed, "I guess this is good practice for that now." But the post-graduation celebration was on, as one of the nation's top high school athletes on the court, in the classroom and in the community took a moment to digest the enormity of her vast accomplishments. She volunteered locally as a math tutor and youth basketball trainer, and she donated her time to multiple community service initiatives through her church youth group. Her grade-point average was so high that she was exempt from final exams this spring.
Then there's basketball, and that marriage to the ball that she commanded better than almost any high school player in the country. It culminated in a final high school hurrah — three elite events in three different states in three weeks. There was the McDonald's All-American Game on April 1 in Brooklyn, New York; the Nike Hoops Summit on April 12 in Portland, Oregon; and the Jordan Brand Classic on April 19 in Washington, D.C. Speiser, who was ranked No. 6 overall by On3, and as the No. 4 shooting guard by 247Sports, was one of the stars.
"When I sit down with my parents and talk about everything, they make me sit down and think about it and just be grateful for it, because there'll be times I'm just getting through it, and going, going, going," Speiser said. "When I do think about it, it's crazy, because there are so many people in this world that would love to do what I'm doing, and there are only a select few girls getting to do what I do. I just find that mind-blowing. Yeah, I love every second of it."
Speiser already knew many of the other all-stars on the tour from competition during her days starring on her AAU team, the All-Iowa Attack.
"It was a very hectic and crazy month," Speiser said. "I was on a plane every week, but I loved every moment of it. Getting to play basketball with girls I've become best friends with these past three years was amazing. We all had so much fun."
Speiser and her fellow all-stars also know their paths could cross again, perhaps in a NCAA Tournament game down the road.
"A lot of us talked about that," Speiser said. "That's going to be crazy. At the same time, we're used to it. We've been playing against each other so much on the circuit."
For now, the competition is on pause, but the work never stops.
"My routine is very busy right now," she said. "I train every day for basketball and shoot every day. I lift four days a week. I actually do Pilates and yoga every morning, called 'hot works,' and I do yoga, Pilates and stretch in the sauna. It's very good for my body and keeps me performing my best on the court."
She awaits the practice court at the Ice Family Basketball Center.
"I'm in the gym a lot of my day," she said. "I love the practice facility. I absolutely love it. I can see myself being in there almost every day. Coach Mittie keeps saying, 'Yep, you and Taryn Sides are going to be in there a lot together.'"
One 247Sports scout said that Speiser "might be the best spot-up jump shooter in the country." ESPN said that "Speiser has a strong base and a broad build to go along with a quick trigger, high-release finish." Lutheran St. Charles coach Erin Luttschwager said, "Jordan can do pretty much everything."
Speiser averaged 20.9 points on 42.8% shooting from the floor and she made 102 3-pointers on 42.0% shooting from long range. She also averaged 7.6 rebounds, 3.4 assists and 1.8 steals in 27 games during her senior season.
"My biggest strengths are I'm a big guard who can shoot and I have some pretty deep range when I shoot," she said. "If they put a big on me, I can take her out to the perimeter, and if they want to put a smaller guard on me, I can take her down in the post. My game is very versatile. I'm still continuing to improve upon my game, but those are my biggest strengths.
Ask about her biggest honor and she goes back to being named 2023-24 Gatorade Missouri Girls Basketball Player of the Year during a junior season in which she averaged 23.4 points, 9.7 rebounds, 2.6 assists and 1.8 steals. The award remains meaningful for multiple reasons.
"I came off an injury from my sophomore year and being able to come back as a junior and have the year that I did showed how much my hard work had paid off," she said. "That was a very rough and hard-working season, so to get that award was definitely worth all the hard workouts and late nights in the gym."
Speiser picked up a basketball for the first time in the first grade, but she didn't really begin playing basketball until fifth grade. Softball was her main sport. She even played football in the second grade.
"I played basketball in the fifth grade and all my friends were better than me," she said. "I told my dad, 'It's not fair. I want to be as good as them.' He said, 'Then you have to be in the gym every day.'"
Mission accomplished.
"I first realized I was better than everyone else in my first game in high school," she said. "I had a pretty good showing and at least for high school I was 10 times better than the other girls. It really boosted my confidence and made me want to work and be even better.
"Then I realized I was one of the best in the country this past summer on the All-Iowa Attack. I owe that to my AAU coach, Dixon Jensen. He brought the best out of me in every game and in every practice. This past summer I realized I was definitely one of the best in the country."
In the midst of it all, were the recruiting letters, which, of course, began with UConn.
"It was insane," Speiser said. "I didn't believe it. I looked at my mom and dad and said, 'This isn't real. You guys are playing a joke right now.'"
By the time sophomore season hit, Speiser had a mountain of letters from schools across the country.
"Sophomore year on, it got to the point where it was definitely stressful and to the point where I had to take breaks," Speiser said. "When June 1 hit my junior year and teams could call you, it definitely became a job, talking to everybody every day. It was definitely tiring."
She built a relationship with many coaches and coaching staffs. She enjoyed her talks with Gregorio Foss. She enjoyed Mittie as well.
"He's a very good coach," Speiser said. "He's going to be able to get the best version out of me and coach me to my best potential," Speiser said. "He doesn't treat us just like basketball players, and I haven't even played for him yet, but he lets us know that he values us as people, too. I really appreciate that about him."
Then came the car ride with Gregorio Foss that fateful day in Manhattan, when Speiser confided that there was no place else she wanted to go.
She wanted K-State to be her college home.
And the days tick down to her move-in date on campus on June 7.
"I literally have a countdown going until I move in," she said. "It's very, very exciting. My brother, Billy, plays offensive line, and he's going to the K-State football camp on June 1, so I'm going to K-State with him and my dad just so I can be on campus and see the coaching staff, and make it less of a countdown to get up there."
She paused.
"I really don't think anybody understands how excited I am, if I'm being honest," she added. "I'm ready to come in and do everything that I possibly can for this program. I want to bring myself and my teammates to a higher level."
Players Mentioned
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