Getting a commitment from a player to your women’s basketball team in October isn’t anything all that unusual. But with a new coaching staff and to not have played a single game yet, there’s a lot of things to like about Aniya Trent’s 2025 commitment to Virginia Tech today.
For openers, she’s a very good player, ranked as a 4-star player. She’s from Springboro, Ohio, and as a freshman, the 6-foot-2 standout started 25 of the team’s 26 games, averaging 7.4 points, 8.9 rebounds, 2.6 assists, 2.2 blocks, and 1.1 steals per game. She also connected on 55.5 percent of her shot attempts from the field.
She was in demand by several name programs, as she chose the Hokies over Washington, Clemson, North Carolina, Virginia and Penn State.
But in a story by Women’s Basketball expert Talia Goodman, there is a quote that kind of hits you between the eyes on not only what a good player Trent is, but how good the new coaching staff for Virginia Tech is going to be.
Trent had not been considering Virginia Tech under the previous regime. Of the schools she was considering, one was Kentucky, where former VT head coach Kenny Brooks went in a rather contentious offseason for Hokie fans. Megan Duffy was hired as the successor to Brooks, and then things changed.
“They came in when the new staff came in, but their one coach from Kentucky has been recruiting me for a while,” Trent told Goodman in this story. “She moved from Kentucky to Virginia Tech – Jen Hoover – so she’s been recruiting me for a while. So I’m super comfortable with her. The new head coach called me. She FaceTimes me all the time, so that’s super nice. We’ve been building our relationship… I just want to go down there and kind of see what it’s like.”
She did, liked what she saw, and mentioned her priorities of the culture, the family aspect of the program, being comfortable and being part of a winning program that were all present as to why she committed.
So let’s recap: The Hokies get a commitment from a 4-star prospect, they take a potential recruit away from a program Virginia Tech fans now consider the evil empire (Kentucky), they showed again that they can recruit top talent, and the keys to her commitment were the Hokie culture, the family aspect of the program, and the fact Virginia Tech is a winning program.
Slap that on billboards everywhere.
Like I said, there’s a lot to like about this commitment…
