Legacy Class

Isaiah Carroll, the son of two Penn alums, leads a star-studded batch of newcomers primed to take the Quakers to the next level.

As a freshman at Penn, Jon Carroll C’99 made sure to get men’s basketball season tickets, making a lot of noise from the student section as Ira Bowman W’96 led the Quakers to a share of the Ivy League title.

A little more than 30 years later, he’ll once again have season tickets at the Palestra. But this time, he says, “I’ll be a little closer to the Penn bench.” It’ll be a better view, after all, to watch his son, Isaiah Carroll, take the court for his alma mater.

“It blows my mind,” says Jon, who lives in Los Angeles with his wife Nkechi Okoro Carroll C’98, a showrunner for the television sports drama All American [“Running the Show,” Jul|Aug 2019]. “Any time someone asks about him, since he committed, I have just the biggest smile on my face. I was just there as a fan. He actually gets to step on that floor and experience it.”

While Jon and Nkechi both loved their time at Penn, meeting for the first time at Convocation—“She was one of the first Black women I ever met who had a British accent,” Jon laughs—they didn’t push their son to go to college there too. And after a standout career at Los Angeles high school basketball powerhouse Harvard-Westlake and then at New Jersey prep school Blair Academy, Carroll had the opportunity to play at a big-conference program.

But he chose Penn and the Ivy League over several other offers last September, becoming the program’s highest-rated recruit this decade. When he Facetimed his parents to share the news, “that was probably the happiest I’ve seen them in a long time,” Isaiah says. His dad was driving when the call came in and later joked that he nearly crashed the car. “I definitely was like, This is one of those calls where I need to pull over,” recalls Jon, who grew up in West Philadelphia and whose mom, brother, and sister still live just a short drive from Penn’s campus. “I certainly had a great experience at Penn. My wife had a great experience at Penn. We have lifelong friends that we still consider our village to this day. And for him to make that decision when we never pushed it at all … it meant everything.”

Carroll says he never thought Penn would be his landing spot when he was at Harvard-Westlake. At one point, playing college basketball anywhere might have seemed far-fetched. He played baseball for most his childhood, until tearing his meniscus and switching to basketball early during the pandemic. “We had really become a classic baseball family,” says Jon, but believed that his son had the work ethic—along with having “won the height lottery”—to succeed at a new sport.

Isaiah eventually became a key player at Harvard-Westlake but didn’t get much attention from colleges until he took a year at Blair Academy, which allowed him to get “bigger, faster, and stronger,” Isaiah says, while also “letting a lot of the East Coast schools see what I have to offer.”

Penn head coach Fran McCaffery was one of the coaches who saw potential, and he believes the freshman’s arrival could be a shot in the arm for a program that stormed to a surprise Ivy League tournament championship in his first year in charge last season [“Sports,” May|Jun 2026]. “He’s different than some of the guys we have,” McCaffery says. “He can dribble, pass, and shoot. He’s got length. He’s six-seven. He’s bouncy. He really defends. He’s just a winner, and we’re thrilled to have him.”

Carroll is a key component of a freshman class that also includes six-foot-five guard Ethan Lin. Both were ranked among the top seven players coming out of New Jersey last season. “I know a lot of people have expectations for us coming into our first year, and I think we’re both excited to meet and exceed those expectations,” Carroll says. But they’ll have to carve out playing time on a deep roster that includes four returning starters in junior point guard AJ Levine, senior sharpshooter Michael Zanoni, senior big man Auggie Gerhart, and star senior TJ Power, a first-team All-Ivy forward who had a performance for the ages to lift the Quakers into March Madness last year.

Carroll calls Power’s Ivy tournament showing “special,” saying that he watched it on TV while locked “in the defensive stance with the rest of the team” from his living room. Now, he’s excited to take the floor with Power, who “definitely has a target on his back,” Carroll says, “but I think he’s also the guy who’s going to be able to rise to the occasion and lead us back to where we were last year.” The freshman is equally excited to play with the other veterans, including Zanoni, whom he calls the best shooter he’s ever played with.

For their part, Power, Zanoni, and the rest of the upperclassmen have embraced a leadership role in welcoming in Penn’s promising newcomers—not only six freshmen but a pair of transfers who are poised to make big impacts, Sir Mohammed (Notre Dame) and Dorian Glogovac (Caltech). “They’re so good with the young guys,” McCaffery says. “They’re competing with each other, but they’re still great mentors.”

With such a deep and talented roster, McCaffery knows “expectations are high” in his second year. The Quakers were picked to win the Ivy League in the preseason media poll, and Carroll can’t help but dream of “the next step of getting that first-round [NCAA tournament win],” which hasn’t been done at Penn since before his dad was in college. “It’s definitely something that’s on all of our minds, especially mine,” he says, adding that the Ivy tournament being hosted at the Palestra during the gym’s 100th year carries extra motivation.

Jon Carroll says he joked with McCaffery that his son’s freshman class—the head coach’s first recruited group at Penn—reminds him of the “golden era that I remember” from the 1990s, specifically the class of Mike Jordan C’00, Matt Langel W’00, and Geoff Owens C’01 that sustained the program’s dominance after key departures.

“So I just can’t wait to see it all play out,” says Jon, who plans to come to as many games as his and Nkechi’s busy careers in California permit. An educator who earned a master’s in education from Drexel and a doctorate in urban education from UCLA after graduating from Penn (where he was a varsity swimmer), Jon is the founding head of school at Jabali Academy, a new private school focused on African cultural pride. He previously was the middle school dean at Harvard-Westlake while Isaiah was there, serving as the public address announcer during his basketball games.

Nkechi, meanwhile, has several projects in the works following the recent conclusion to All American’s eight-season run. She was invited by Penn Alumni to be a featured guest and speaker at Penn Spectrum Weekend in October to discuss her creative journey.

“They’re both incredible,” McCaffery says. “His mom and dad are just really interesting people to talk to. It’s easy to see why [Isaiah] is the way he is.”

Isaiah says his parents exemplify the value of a Penn education, and that their success has “only driven me to work harder.”

“I just hope to leave the same kind of lasting impact on the community that they made while they were here.” —DZ