Basketball is the family business for the Udo-Ema family, but it wasn’t what patriarch Etop wanted for his daughter Asia.
“I got into volleyball at, like, nine or 10 years old,” Asia said. “My parents, obviously, they were working a lot beforehand, so I didn’t have the opportunity to play any other sports. But when I went to my dad to be like, ‘What sport are we playing?’ He was like, ‘No basketball.’ Basketball was out of the question. He was like, ‘Absolutely not.’ And I was like, ‘Why?’ Because I really wanted to play basketball when I was a kid, and I was always shooting around in the gyms, trying to be a basketball player and he was telling me, like, stop and stuff. Just didn’t let me play. He said I wasn’t built for it. And I was like, okay, so volleyball. Thank God I got into volleyball, because it’s definitely my sport.”
While the pins definitely get the attention in volleyball, Asia likes that it requires the whole team moving as one to succeed. It’s fulfilling both on the court and off.
“You cannot get the ball over the net without three contacts from different people,” she said. “Or you can’t play the sport without having someone else help you in the sport. You can’t. You have to have such good chemistry with your team and the bonds that you make through the sport, I feel like are unmatched. I’ve met so many girls that are just amazing, and people that I know that I would be great friends with throughout my whole life. I would be best friends with people from volleyball more than high school or anywhere else. I think volleyball is the main touch point for me when it comes to bonding with other people.”
Basketball still had an influence on her destiny, as the 6-foot outside hitter will follow many of the young men her father mentored to Arizona. The class of 2027 prospect committed to head coach Rita Stubbs and the Wildcat volleyball team in late June.
Etop is the co-founder and CEO of the Compton Magic AAU team that has been sending top players to Arizona and elsewhere since the days of Lute Olson. Among the Wildcats who came through the program are Jerryd Bayless, Dennis Latimore, and Dalen Terry. This season, Koa Peat will transition from the Magic to the Wildcats. The family also has ties to Carter Bryant and Parker Jackson-Cartwright. Most important in the life of Asia is Gabe York, who played for the Wildcats from 2012-13 through 2015-16.
York didn’t know his own father, so Etop took on a sort of surrogate father role. As a teenager, York often lived with the Udo-Ema family during the summers. It became a second home, and he played the role of a teasing older brother to Asia.
“We’d always joke around,” she said. “And I’d be laughing. I just, I don’t know. I had some draw towards him all the time.”
As she got older, Asia remained attached to York.
“In elementary school, my mom was like, ‘Are you ever gonna think about having a godfather or anything?’” Asia said. ‘I was like, ‘If I had a godfather, it’d be Gabe.’ Like, that’s it. That’s the only one that I’d have as a godfather. And she was like, ‘Yeah, you should tell him. You should ask him.’ And I asked him. He was like, ‘Of course.’”
Those ties didn’t end just because York left for college. On his senior day at Arizona, the Udo-Ema family traveled to Tucson to celebrate the occasion with him. A picture of York holding young Asia at the event was included in her commitment video.
Asia is also very close to Bryant and his sister Cydnee Bryant, whose father played for Etop. Cydnee is a four-star recruit in basketball going into her senior year, but she also plays alongside the younger Udo-Ema on the Centennial High volleyball team.
“I have baby pictures of them,” Etop said.
“Big ol’ baby pictures, and we’re all like little,” Asia added.
The involvement with so many young men who came to and succeeded at Arizona certainly helped Asia feel that Tucson was a place she could spend four years and thrive as a volleyball player. It wasn’t the whole story, though. It took a lot of time, travel, and contemplation for her to make the final decision.
It was an advantage to have a father who had helped other families through the college recruitment process. Still, there were things to learn even for someone like Etop, who has helped run his own travel team since 1993.
For one, the timelines for basketball and volleyball are dramatically different, with the top volleyball players generally committing within the first few weeks they are eligible to do so, just weeks after the end of 10th grade. Basketball players use that time to meet people and get offers, but often don’t commit until the late fall or even spring of their senior years.
In women’s basketball, ESPN only lists 18 of its top 100 recruits for the class of 2026 as verbally committed. Those players will arrive on campus next summer. In volleyball, many of the teams in the Power 4 leagues have already completed their high school classes for 2027 or are very close to doing so. Prep Dig lists 71 of its top 125 players for 2027 as verbally committed. Those players won’t leave for school for two years.
Asia actually took a bit longer than some of her similarly situated peers. It took her a whole 11 days to make her announcement.
Although coaches can’t officially offer players until June 15th after their sophomore year of high school, elite camps help players get a feel for programs and the styles of various coaching staffs before that. Asia attended the Arizona camp that started on June 13, 2025, but the family spent the summer of 2024 traveling the country to a host of other camps so she could experience a number of schools that they felt were possibilities.
“Last year, we went to Washington first, which was like on its own,” Asia said. “And then we went to Texas A&M, Baylor, Auburn, Duke. We went to those all back-to-back-to-back, and that’s when the computers went down at the airports. For days. Yeah, we got stuck in airports for over like 20 hours coming back home. We were in the airport for over 24 hours trying to get back home going to Duke. We got stuck in the Raleigh airport for I don’t know how many hours, like six hours. And then we had to go to a different airport to get over there.”
It was quite an investment just to get back to Los Angeles from Durham.
“We had to take a $500 Uber from Atlanta to Birmingham to catch the last Southwest flight to get to LA, because all the flights were booked for five days because Delta shut down,” Etop said.
Still, Asia felt the camp tour helped a lot in both her development and her ability to make a decision when the time came.
“I was just trying to showcase myself, and I knew that these camps were very important when it came to recruiting,” she said. “So I was just like, I’m gonna go in there and just try to be the best personality that I can be, just stand out in any way that I could. I actually learned a lot from what they’re teaching. I could see that those camps actually helped kids learn about volleyball and especially the college way of doing things, because college, club, high school, everything’s totally different. There’s not a lot of similarities through those, especially when it comes to techniques and things like that. So I got to learn a lot that way. And I also just got to meet a lot of people, a lot of coaches, a lot of people who are already there, and I really got to understand what their lives were like transitioning from high school into college, because I got to talk to the girls at camp. So I think the camp thing helps a lot. And it also gives you clarity on what they think of you.”
That didn’t necessarily make it simple for the player or her parents as June 15th approached.
“I feel like I have a crystal ball when it comes to other people’s kids,” Etop said. “Your own kid, it’s so different. It was hard. Because you know that you go through all these things you do to develop your kid, and you try to put them in a position to where that June 15 day could be special for them, because these girls are so nervous for that day, because all the top girls you’ve been competing against, these girls since you’ve been little, everyone’s come in jockeying for space and trying to figure out, like, who’s who. And, you know, really, the tell-all is on the 15th. Who really has recruitment, who has schools? That’s really going to tell you what other people think about your game.”
It helped that Etop had a clear view of where his daughter fit in relative to her peers. He had even run a small volleyball club for a while when Asia was younger so he could figure out which clubs were the best, which schools were a good fit, and who the players in her age group were. They were looking at schools that they felt had good foundations and might rise in the future but were not the heavyweights in the sport.
“I know all the top outsides in her position,” Etop said. “I know them. I’ve seen them play a million times, and I kind of know where she fits. I feel like we tried to put ourselves with a group of schools that would avoid those girls that were going to Nebraska and Wisconsin, and all those girls that all go to the same schools. The group of schools that we were dealing with was a really good group of schools that could compete with those schools at some point but possibly weren’t at that level now. That’s what we tried to do. I was in no unrealistic phase of thinking that she’d go play right away at Nebraska or something like that. So the schools that we had—Arizona and Arizona State and Duke and Texas Tech—were really good schools for us.”
Asia got about 50 texts on June 15th, including quite a few from schools she didn’t expect. The family then set up Zoom meetings to talk to the coaches. In total, they had 17 online meetings.
“We didn’t leave the house for like two days,” Etop said.
It came down to Stubbs, who Asia said had shown the most interest from the start.
“I thought that she was the most present when it came to the coaches,” Asia said.
Asia was also drawn by Stubbs’ way of interacting with people on both athletic and personal levels.
“I just like her honesty,” she said. “I like how she’s very transparent with you and how she thinks of you as a player. And I also think that she’s very transparent about her own life and how that goes into being a player, or just being a part of the team.”
She also thinks she meshes well with what she knows of the Wildcat culture.
“Ultimately, I felt like my brand and how I carry myself as a player was very connected to the Arizona culture, and I just really saw myself there, saw that being like home, especially because it was close,” Asia said.
It didn’t hurt that she was getting some encouragement from the basketball side of things.
Now that the commitment is out of the way, Asia has two more years of high school volleyball to prepare for her time in Tucson. High school practice for her junior season started on Monday, July 21. She says that her league is likely not going to be as tough this year, so she’s hoping to see Centennial make some noise.
“I just want to put at least Centennial’s name on the board,” Asia said. “Just completely. I want people to know who we are nationally now. I think we have the talent to go really far. I think we can hang with a lot of really good teams out here, and I think we can be thought of nationally, just because we built this team from the ground up, and I think we have a lot of grit, and we’re gonna work really hard to keep up with these teams. I can see ourselves going really far, especially this year.”
As for what happens when she gets to Arizona and what she needs to improve on, Asia said that Stubbs envisions her as a six-rotation outside. That means being strong in the back row as well as the front. She has a love for defense, although she admits that not everything about back row play is as thrilling.
“Serve receive is always a mental game,” Asia said. “Not my favorite skill ever, but I’ve worked really hard at it, and I’m continuing to work really hard at it, so I think my passing is going to be good. And my defense, I think, has been like night and day. I think I’ve really improved on defense, especially with the training that I have now. Even at Nationals, I can see myself getting a lot more balls than I did before. So I think I can be a threat in the back row as well. So, yeah, I like defense. I like service receive when it’s really good, but if it’s not really good, I get really mad. But I’m working on it.”