SOUTHLAKE — It’s unusual to have four siblings in high school at the same time. Even rarer is the fact that all four of Southlake Carroll’s Jordan sisters — Milania, Natalia, Gianna and Nadia — are starting and starring for one of the best girls basketball teams in Texas.
Here is what really makes them unique. There is about a one-year difference in age from one sister to the next.
Milania is a 17-year-old junior, 16-year-old Natalia and 15-year-old Gianna are sophomores, and 14-year-old Nadia is a freshman. Natalia and Gianna are 11 months apart.
Is it tough having four daughters that close together?
“Absolutely,” their father, Walsh Jordan, said with a laugh. “They are sisters in every sense of the word. They love each other, but they get under each other’s skin sometimes.”
It can also be rough on the parents for a different reason.
“Someone always has to sacrifice,” Walsh said. “You might have one girl or two girls that are really, really great, and the rest of them are going to be role players. When it’s your daughters, it’s like, who is going to be the role player?”
In last Tuesday’s 45-34 win over Keller, the Jordan sisters showed why they are so remarkable, combining for 38 points, including all 17 of Carroll’s first-quarter points and 19 of the team’s 21 second-half points. For the season, the sisters, who are all guards, combine to average 49.2 points — 82.8% of the scoring for the state’s 17th-ranked Class 6A team — along with 18.8 rebounds and 11.4 assists.
“We have all played with each other our whole lives. To be in high school together is just a blessing,” said the 5-11 Milania, who is the tallest of the four and averages a team-leading 17.6 points. “I love playing with them. Our chemistry is on another level.”
Off the court, they are always together and enjoy being regular teenagers — shopping, swimming, skating, bowling and visiting amusement parks and arcades.
But none of that would have been possible without a miracle. One of the sisters nearly died when she was born.
A lifesaver
Gianna was born with her lungs closed and had to be taken by CareFlite to Cook Children’s Medical Center. It was a life-threatening emergency, and surgery appeared imminent.
“They told us that she wasn’t going to make it,” the sisters’ mother, Tierny Jordan, said. “They couldn’t figure out what was causing her lungs not to open all the way. She was on life support for her first seven days of life. They put her in a coma basically.”
Something inexplicable happened at the last minute.
“On that seventh day, they were going to have to take her off the machine at some point, because your body can’t just stay on it. They were just keeping her alive,” Tierny said. “But on that seventh day, her lungs opened on their own, and she went from being the most critical baby at Cook Children’s to normal.”
Now she doesn’t have any underlying health conditions and there have been no issues with her playing sports. The name Gianna means God is gracious, and her middle name, Valentina, means healthy and strong.
“It was very scary,” Walsh said. “We prayed about it. In those situations, there isn’t anything you can really do. You have to lean on God.”
Gianna averages 14.6 points per game, second-most on the team. She leads Carroll in assists (4.2 per game), and her 45 made 3-pointers are second behind Natalia’s 50.
“It’s just a blessing,” Gianna said. “My mom said when I was born that she saw an angel. It’s good knowing that God is on my side.”
Training routines
The sisters are part of a basketball family. Walsh played at Ole Miss, and there is a fifth sister, 28-year-old Aurmani Degar, who played at Mansfield Timberview and SMU.
“I don’t have any more,” Walsh said. “People always ask, did I want boys? I was like, absolutely. What man doesn’t? But when my girls came, I got so close to them and I fell in love with them.”
Before getting into the real estate business, Walsh trained some of the best players in the Dallas area. That included current NBA players Marcus Smart and Jordan Walsh, former NBA player Emmanuel Mudiay, longtime WNBA standout Moriah Jefferson (a four-time national champion at UConn) and former Mansfield Legacy five-star recruit Harmoni Turner, who is now a first-team all-Ivy League guard at Harvard.
He got his daughters involved with basketball at an early age and trained them himself. But after seeing Degar undergo four knee surgeries after tearing both of her ACLs in high school, and after seeing the rigors that were involved with traveling for AAU, Walsh pulled Milania, Natalia, Gianna and Nadia out of basketball for four or five years before they became teenagers.
“It was not hard [coming back from that break],” Gianna said. “We were among the top players when we were younger. We just had to get back in it and get our groove on.”
Now, all four are ranked among the top 25 players in the state in their age group. Milania has offers from SMU, Abilene Christian, Old Dominion, George Mason, St. Mary’s (Calif.) and La Salle.
Carroll coach Robyn McCoart can appreciate the situation. Her and her sister Shannon, who both went by the last name Anders in high school, played basketball together at Southlake Carroll in the late 1990s.
“I didn’t realize how cool it was until years later,” McCoart said. “Those were some of my best memories.”
Getting to know them
Each girl has a unique personality. Gianna is “the funny one,” Natalia said, and is involved in speech and likes to dance. Milania is a people person who wants to get into architectural design.
Natalia is a self-described leader, and Nadia said, “She is more like a mother.” Nadia enjoys singing and dancing and likes to read Bible scriptures and take them to social media, her parents said, and Walsh added, “I think she could be a great real estate broker. She could run a company.”
Perhaps what has helped the sisters the most are the late-night film sessions that they have with their father, when he breaks down their play after each game. They hold those, even though Carroll (26-5, 10-0 District 4-6A) has an average margin of victory of 18 points and has won 23 games by double digits.
“They are constructive criticism,” Gianna said. “We learn a lot from them and just go out there and try to fix it the next game.”
Milania added: “Even if we blow out a team, he is going to see those errors that we’ve made, and he is going to get on us so we won’t make those same errors against the better teams that we are going to face in the playoffs.”
The girls have a basketball goal at their house and can often be found playing one-on-one.
“Usually me or Gianna win,” Milania said.
So who would take the last shot in a game out of the four?
“I feel like all of us are capable of doing it,” Nadia said. “Whoever has the ball in their hand, they’re going to take the last shot.”
Not surprisingly, her answer was the same as each of her sisters.
On X: @DMNGregRiddle
The scouting report
Tierny Jordan broke down her daughters’ strengths on the basketball court.
Milania: “She can score whenever she wants.”
Gianna: “She is very crafty with her ball-handling skills and setting other people up. She is a tough defender.”
Natalia: “She has a very high basketball IQ, and she is pretty much the glue. She is telling everybody what to do, and she is making sure that they win, just with her leadership. She can also score whenever she wants to.”
Nadia: “She is the most athletic of all of them. She has the most hops. She is the youngest, so she is OK with letting her sisters shine. She may end up being the best out of all of them, because she is the youngest.”
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