This story first appeared in the 29th issue of Born & Bred, the exclusive magazine for Rams Club members.

A cornerstone of a Carolina women’s basketball team that returns four starters for the 2022-2023 campaign, Deja Kelly almost wasn’t a Tar Heel.

“In 2019, I was sitting in a gym with a few coaches recruiting and said, ‘Oh, she’s really good.’ The coaches said, ‘Oh, you’re not going to get Deja Kelly,’” recalled women’s basketball head coach Courtney Banghart. “I asked, ‘Why not?’ and they told me, ‘Well, she’s been committed to Texas since the seventh grade. You think she’s just going to answer your call?’ and I told them we were going to find out.”

Thus began a recruiting courtship that Coach Banghart joked was “my first three months on the job, it was me and Deja Kelly, on my back porch, on FaceTime. Every day.” After a campus visit in the fall of 2019, Deja Kelly would become a Tar Heel. Like for many Tar Heels, Carolina just “felt like home” to the San Antonio native.

“Just the environment and family atmosphere that it gave off – that was something that I was looking for, especially coming from Texas,” Kelly said. “I just wanted to go somewhere and have it feel like a second home to me, and Carolina did that right away. I just knew that it was the place for me.”

A FACE OF THE NIL ERA

In July of 2021, when the world of college athletics entered new and uncharted territory as it related to allowing student-athletes to profit off of their name, image and likeness, then rising-sophomore Kelly was ready.

“I’d heard talks about it, but there were always a lot of ifs, so I didn’t really expect it to come into play when I was in school,” she recalled. “But I think that I was already prepared for it. My mom really helped me carry myself as a brand all through high school when I was younger. She really emphasized the importance of making connections early. Once NIL came, I was already a few steps ahead.”

Soon after, the connections would lead to NIL deals. Considered by many to be a “face of the NIL era,” Kelly signed with an agency, and inked partnerships with multiple companies including Dunkin Donuts, Outback Steakhouse, Beats by Dre, Actively Black sportswear, and Barcode Sports Drink. While many student-athletes across the country are the sole beneficiaries of their own NIL deals, for Kelly, it was important to take her women’s basketball teammates along for the ride.

“None of my success would happen without my teammates,” Kelly said. “That’s just the reality of it. They have contributed a lot, and none of the NIL opportunities would be here without the team’s success. It’s very important to include them in anything that I have going on because they’re definitely a huge factor in my individual success.”

There’s no finer example of Kelly looking out for her teammates than with an off-season team dinner this past summer. Following the dinner, Kelly had one more surprise for teammates and coaching staff: a pair of custom Carolina Blue and White Beats by Dre headphones, each personalized with her teammates’ jersey numbers with a special message engraved inside.

“A small thank you to my sisters I go to war with every day,” the headphones were inscribed. “Let’s finish strong.”

The gesture wasn’t lost on Kelly’s head coach.

“I think as women, we have to lift as we rise. Those are words we use directly to the team,” Banghart said. “I think for Deja, she’s such a competitor that it’s not lost on her that this is not a solo enterprise – the better her team is, the better she can be. The better her team is, the more she can win. I think she comes by it honestly. It’s not something she thought through, but it’s something she felt through.”

EDUCATING FOR THE FUTURE

Kelly’s teammates and coaching staff aren’t the only ones the point guard looks after – she’s also eager to provide inspiration and assistance to the next generation of future women’s basketball players. With the change in NIL rules, it also allowed Kelly to host her own basketball camp – the DK25 EmPOWERment Camp – at Texas’ Duncanville High School, where just two years ago, she graduated as a McDonald’s All-American.

“I think it was definitely important to take it back to Texas just because that’s where I’m from. That was my foundation, everything, and a lot of my success came in Texas. It started in San Antonio and in Dallas,” Kelly said. “It was super important to show where I came from and start there with this being my first camp. I think it was only right to bring it back to the city where I came from and where I played, and where I had a lot of success in high school.”

The EmPOWERment camp wasn’t the traditional basketball skills camp that you remember from your youth. In addition to basketball skills, Kelly’s camp, with an elementary school session and a middle and high school session – both free to attend, also focused on business skills and life skills – both of which Kelly was eager to impart on her campers.

“It’s important have those skills and knowledge because the ball stops bouncing at some point. You cannot play basketball forever, that’s just a given. To be able to have that other side, the business side, the life skills facts about recruiting, I think all of that is very important for other success outside of the basketball court if you really want to be an all-around successful human being,” said Kelly. “I think it was really important and just being able to empower the young girls with knowledge that I’ve received over the years from a lot of influential people in my life.

“You don’t see a lot of people really teaching those things at [a basketball] camp,” she continued. “It’s typically all about basketball, which is great, but I wanted to be more real with the campers and really show them the real world and give them real world examples just from my life, from the camp coaches I had there as well. It was great being able to show them all aspects of it.”

DRIVEN TO SUCCEED

The ball isn’t going to stop bouncing for Kelly anytime soon – she has a clear set of goals that she’s been working towards her entire life. Kelly has had a vision board since elementary school, and is constantly setting new goals each season and off-season.

“What drives me is knowing that I’m working towards something, knowing that those are goals that I desperately want to reach and attain,” Kelly said. “I think that’s something that really drives me every day because I know that I’m working toward a better me.”

When asked about the goals for the upcoming season, Kelly led with, of course, a goal for the team.

“We want to make it past the Sweet 16, that’s obviously the first goal. Further down the line, our main goal is to make it to the Final Four and to win a national championship,” she said. “We know what we’re capable of and we know with the run we had this past year that it’s very possible.”

Individually, Kelly has goals of her own – an eventual successful WNBA career, followed by a career as a broadcast journalist – a career she’s already working towards.

“I developed a passion for broadcasting in high school just from watching so many WNBA and NBA games,” she said. “Watching Maria Taylor, Holly Rowe, Rebecca Lobo, Kara Lawson, really seeing how much fun they were having with their job and just being able to talk about the sport you love in a way that keeps you tied to the game, I think is really exciting and it’s really something that I wanted to do.”

“UNC has one of the top media and journalism schools in the country, and that topped it off even more,” Kelly, a broadcast journalism major, continued. “My passion keeps growing for broadcasting each day. I’m getting hands-on experience and it’s really making me more excited to pursue that career as well.”

Making the All-ACC first team as a sophomore, Kelly also has more short-term aspirations to be named ACC Player of the Year, a goal she feels is attainable. But she remains, as expected, focused on her team.

“At the end of the day, I know a lot of that comes with winning as a team,” Kelly concluded. “Honestly, I know the individual accolades will come with how we perform as a team. I’m going to do whatever it takes, whatever my team needs me to do to win some games, and everything else will fall into place.”