As the sun plunged beneath the Los Angeles skyline, the street lights at Watts’ Ted Watkins Memorial Park flickered into fruition and families flooded the park’s seven acres with movement. Reliably overrun by soccer matches, a long strip of grass bisects the park, and nestled beside it, boys and girls played a game of pick-up on the park’s lone basketball court.

This is a routine sight at Ted Watkins Park as it has built generations of competitive and community-oriented individuals by offering an expansive venue for play. And one of the park’s most notable constituents is USC’s star freshman guard JuJu Watkins. 

“[Ted Watkins Park] was always real competitive. It was my first taste of real competitiveness,” said Watkins in an interview with USC Athletics. “It was fun.” 

Watkins was born and raised in Watts, and it’s where she fell in love with basketball. Like Candace Parker, Chelsea Gray and other greats in the women’s game, Watkins shined as a competitor in her youth when she dominated boys on public courts. 

“You’d have boys, scraped arms, you know, tatted up. Kids 10, 12, 13 years old rough and tumble back [at Ted Watkins Park] playing basketball on an outdoor court,” said JuJu’s grandfather Tim Watkins in an interview with USC Athletics. “They still talk about it. Those boys had a tough time trying to handle her.” 

The boys Watkins once out-hooped at Ted Watkins Park will, in all likelihood, never forget her force and finesse on the court, but her greatness is also imprinted in the minds of people in Watts who have never actually seen Watkins play. Girls playing at the same courts that spawned Watkins’ game see her accomplishments as an invitation to aspire within the game of basketball.

“It’s nice to know about [JuJu] because it’s an inspiration,” said Emily, a teenager who comes to Ted Watkins Park to play basketball every week. “[Because] I want to become a professional basketball player.”

Now, you may have noticed the park’s namesake shares a surname with Watkins — that’s because the park is named after JuJu’s great-grandfather. 

Ted Watkins moved to L.A. as a teenager in the 1920s and as he grew to identify the needs of his community in Watts, Ted organized and founded the Watts Labor Community Action Committee. Originally, WLCAC was formed as a labor union, but today, nearly 60 years since its inception, it has blossomed into a nonprofit that rents out subsidized housing, hosts cultural festivals, offers after-school arts programs and encases a homelessness safety center. 

“The impact of the Watkins family in Watts is kind of crazy to think about,” said Emily Rosale, a USC alum and WLCAC volunteer from Watts. “It’s expanded into reaching every area where they can improve the quality of life of the residents [in Watts]. They try to cover all their bases because there’s a lot going on here.”

WLCAC is framed around Ted’s principal ideology, “Don’t move … Improve,” which is evident in the Watkins’ family’s longstanding commitment to Watts. But in 1995, it was clear that having the opportunity to move within the city of Watts is vital, so the Ted Watkins Park was opened a block from WLCAC. Today, Ted Watkins Park remains the only expansive and accessible greenspace in Watts.

“A lot of the schools have to use [Ted Watkins Park] for exercise … The after-school programming helps kids get a little bit more exposure to [sports] that they wouldn’t especially be trying, like skating,” Rosale said. “[Sports] definitely brings a type of solidarity within the community.”

When JuJu was named the No. 1 women’s basketball recruit by ESPN in 2023, she received offers from championship-contending programs such as South Carolina and Stanford, but JuJu wouldn’t move. Rather, she elected to attend USC, located just a few miles north of Watts, to reinvigorate a program that’d experienced limited success for nearly three decades.

Less than two weeks into the Fall 2023 semester, months before JuJu played her first minutes for the Trojans, the community impact of her decision to stay in L.A. was already evident. I was playing basketball with elementary school students at the 32nd Street School, and immediately, both girls and boys asked if I knew JuJu. They weren’t interested in the men’s No. 1 recruit freshman guard Isaiah Collier or LeBron’s son, freshman guard Bronny James; rather, they wanted to know everything about the player they could relate to most.

“So seeing JuJu Watkins play and have that national recognition has really helped kids to put themselves in her shoes and, especially that [Watkins] has come to the center quite more often now, so I feel like the kids have really made that connection,” Rosale said.

When the basketball season began, JuJu’s influence on South Central intensified alongside the growth of her game. By the time she’d dropped a 51-piece on Stanford, broken Trojan legend Cheryl Miller’s record for the most 30-point games in a single USC season and made the Associated Press All-American team, fans both young and old were already lining up hours before and after games at Galen Center to celebrate JuJu.

“It’s really cool to see the impact we’re having,” JuJu said. “Going from nobody being outside to a bunch of people waiting hours after, I didn’t expect that going into it.”

It is really cool — and that’s the payoff of investing in your roots.

Leila MacKenzie is a sophomore writing about the relationship between public land and play in her column, “The Cage,” which runs every other Friday. She is also a sports editor at the Daily Trojan.