'Twig' to towering talent: Prep legend Ashlyn Koupal's journey to Nebraska women's basketball

Even the parts of South Dakota that are just a few miles north of the Nebraska border.

Up there, middle schoolers can compete in high school sports. So here’s Ashlyn Koupal — second-oldest of six kids, daughter of two coaches, niece of a state legend, team manager of the Wagner High School girls basketball team since she was 5 years old — running down from a high school volleyball practice to a high school JV basketball game coached by her mom, Tera.

It’s halftime. Wagner’s down by a lot. Maybe 15, in Tera’s recollection.

Cut to the phone booth scene.

“She looked at me and said, ‘Mom, you want me to get my uniform on?’” Tera said.

Mom sure did. Wagner won. 

And Ashlyn, the crown jewel of Nebraska’s nationally-ranked 2026 recruiting class, built the resume of a prep legend that put her atop prospect lists and had college coaches — sometimes five per day — bending Ashlyn’s ear for hours on end.

After a long, winding road of recruitment that included key advice from a college superstar, a phone call with a coaching legend and a rivalry-altering commitment that almost — but didn’t — happen, Ashlyn picked Nebraska.

“It’s the right fit for me,” she said.

Ashlyn and her parents — dad Michael is the Wagner High School girls basketball coach, while Tera assists — loved NU coach Amy Williams, herself a South Dakota native.

“She’s Midwest,” Michael said. “There’s a big difference between Midwest, southeast, northeast. She’s just an at-home person. She cares about not just what’s going to benefit her, but what benefits the kids.”

Williams and the Koupals noticed Ashlyn’s quick bond with Husker point guard Britt Prince, a former five-star recruit who, like Ashlyn, played for a parent.

“I definitely see the similarities in our personalities,” Ashlyn said.

Both dominated their competition. Ashlyn was McDonald’s and Jordan Brand All-American. No. 10 player in the nation. Twice the Gatorade state player of the year. Averaged 28 points, 14.6 rebounds, 4.1 assists, 4.0 blocks and 2.7 steals as a senior. She finished with 2,610 career points and 1,210 career rebounds and won a record six state high jump titles — that vertical jump should help in a Big Ten full of elite posts.

Ashlyn’s been the youngest, newest kid on the low block before, battling girls old enough to vote.

“A beanpole,” Michael said of Ashlyn in middle school.

“A twig,” Ashlyn said. She played with a former babysitter. “I had no business being out there.”

But she did. You can’t teach the height Ashlyn had, Michael said, and all those years at the end of the bench, as team manager, meant she soaked up the game into every pore, the way younger brother Riggs is doing now.

Ashlyn's a "solid combination" of her parents, Tera said. 

"She has her dad’s competitiveness," she said. "Mike doesn’t even lose at a board game — if he’s not going to win at it, he’s probably not going to be doing it with you. And as far as being quick-witted and one-liners, she probably has a lot of me and my side of the family."

Now 6-foot-3, Ashlyn initially honed her game against older sister Macy — when the two would “spat,” Tera said, they might chuck balls at each other — and later against brother Michael (known as "Cruise"), who is two years younger than Ashlyn. Younger siblings Riggs, Dash and Elsie round out the Koupal clan. 

Ashlyn built her perimeter shot — 46.4% from 3 as a senior — on daily workouts with mom in the gym at Wagner High, where Tera is a business teacher.

Michael teaches fourth grade at the Wagner Community School. It’s all one K-12 building in a town of 1,500 that serves as headquarters for the Yankton Sioux Tribe. Before Ashlyn graduated, she could walk from her end of the school down to the grade school and help as a classroom assistant.

“I’ve loved it to be honest,” Ashlyn said of life in Wagner. The Koupal (pronounced KO-pull) family lives on a farm outside of town, just miles from the Missouri River. “And I think it’s just very eye-opening to see how easy I really had it compared to what other people are going through in my grade or in my town.”

Small-town sports kids live a life full of bus rides; Wagner had its share of three-hour round trips. And Ashlyn saw every junk defense you could imagine — diamond-and-one, triangle-and-two — to slow her down. Michael would start games having to see which dish from the kitchen sink an opponent used first, adjust and potentially prepare for more defenses.

“She’s so sick of that,” Michael said of Ashlyn. “She’s going to be happy to get the heck out of here and just play basketball.”

Ashlyn got some of that in AAU ball. She picked the region’s premier team, All Iowa Attack. Caitlin Clark’s AAU team. Coach Dickson Jensen helped Ashlyn begin to navigate the attention she’d receive.

The Koupal name was already known in South Dakota.

Mandy, Michael’s sister and Ashlyn’s aunt, is part of the South Dakota High School Basketball Hall of Fame. She was a college star, beginning her career at South Dakota State before transferring to rival USD, where she was Division II player of the year in 2003 and 2004. During a one-week, two-win span vs. UNO in 2004, Mandy had 34 points and 19 rebounds, then 26 points and 15 rebounds.

“She paved the way for me a bit,” said Ashlyn, who, had she wanted, could’ve gone anywhere in her home state.

But her recruiting expanded quickly beyond the borders. She got scholarship offers from all over and, before June 1 of her junior year, she got to control which coaches she called.

As a high school freshman, Michael said, Ashlyn came quite close to committing to Creighton. The Bluejays at the time were coming off an Elite Eight appearance and featured Emma Ronsiek, the Sioux Falls O’Gorman grad who’d become exactly the player Ashlyn wanted to be — a stretch forward who could shoot and post up with equal skill.

“They pretty much well had the hook in her mouth,” Michael said, “but Dad broke the line, unfortunately.”

Why? It wasn’t the CU coaches or players. Michael just wanted Ashlyn to be patient. And, in a NIL era — that now includes revenue sharing — to not “sell herself short.”

Ashlyn liked the recruiting process back then, at first. Once coaches could contact her, excitement waned.

“It felt like that’s what I was doing all the time, being on the phone with coaches,” Ashlyn said. “It kind of got to be a lot.”

Jensen, the All Iowa Attack coach, helped, and the Koupal family took plenty of visits. Ashlyn and her Red Raider teammates were there in 2024 Nebraska beat Iowa and held Clark scoreless in the fourth quarter. Wagner’s whole team, in fact, rushed the Pinnacle Bank Arena floor.

“Nebraska was in my top group, but I didn’t know if I was going to go there yet, so that was a really cool experience,” Ashlyn said of the court storm. “I think we all kind of wanted to. Me and my friend asked if we should and then everyone else followed.”

Other schools rose to the top, too. Michigan State’s coaching staff impressed Michael and Ashlyn. And TCU, in an act of generosity — that doubled as a shrewd recruiting tool — commissioned All-American Hailey Van Lith to answer any question Michael and Ashlyn had about the sport, picking a school, anything.

One tip: Take note of which coaches call you — is it an assistant or the head coach? It’s an assistant’s job to call you, Van Lith told them, while a head coach contact means more. The kinds of questions they ask, too, informs the kind of coaches they’ll be.

So Ashlyn listened for questions that went beyond the court. She had one call from UConn’s Geno Auriemma — that she didn’t tell her parents about right away. It went no further.

She whittled the list to five — Nebraska, MSU, TCU, Duke and Kansas. The family didn’t exactly pick an agent. An agency, CSG Athletes, pursued Ashlyn as its first women’s basketball client. Ashlyn joined a roster of college football and NFL players — headlined by Baker Mayfield — as athletes repped by the faith-based CSG.

Conversations about money were “tough” for Ashlyn, Michael said.

“She did not want to talk about money, which is great,” Michael said. “Whoever was going to get her, she was not going to be there for the money, no matter how much she got.”

Michael said Ashlyn was pretty settled on Huskers well before her August 2025 official visit, but that’s when she told Williams with a “Tonight Show” bit where she had the coach wear headphones while Ashlyn mouthed the words “What is my jersey number?”

It’ll be 24. Same as high school.

“A moment I’ll never forget,” Ashlyn said of the commitment reveal. “The team ran over and gave me a hug, and Coach Amy was there covering her face. She didn’t really know what to do for a bit. It was a really emotional moment. I was crying.”

For her part, Williams said she’s never coached anyone quite like Koupal. The size and skillset — a 6-3 player capable of volume 3s — offers a unique dynamic.

“She expects to come in and find a way to contribute right away and we have those same expectations for her,” Williams said in May. “And really, all of our freshmen, we want to be able to come in and make an impact, but I think that she’s somebody, offensively-skilled-wise, she’s going to be exciting and a little more ready.”

She joins a program that welcomes back Natalie Potts off of a two-year ACL recovery. In Potts’ absence, Amiah Hargrove developed into a more consistent scorer. Koupal is taller than both but a team that has those three, arrayed around the perimeter, will be challenging to defend. Potts shoots the 3 at a 33% career clip. Hargrove is at 44.1% on limited volume. Koupal could be more efficient than both at a greater volume.

“You might have a girl to stop one of them, you might have the pieces to stop two, but if all three of them are on the court, good luck —you’re not going to do it,” Michael said. “I’m only a high school coach talking but I can already see the writing on the wall.”

Michael and Tera think Ashlyn’s ready to fly the coop. And she’ll benefit from the kind of strength training she didn’t get in Wagner. Teachers and coaches, the Koupals are working through when and how they get to games.

Of her final five, NU was closest, a four-hour drive. It’s possible that Ashlyn’s lifelong sense of community — in a big family, at a gym where she can get up 300 shots because Mom and Dad have the keys, in a diverse small town that shows up in force at state tournament games and Tera has her own kitchen shop and granola store, yes, on Main Street — nudged the five-star toward Nebraska.

America’s a big country, and there are all kinds of parts of it. The Koupals, like Williams, are Midwest. Ashlyn liked it when Nebraska coaches asked her about her friends, her town, her weekend. And like a lot of Midwesterners, she can be reserved until she finds her people. And then?

“She’s a party looking for a place to happen,” Tera said. “If there is laughter happening, she is going to gravitate to that.”