In an era when the motto seems to be “the earlier, the better” when it comes to joining a travel team, taking college visits or committing to a program, seeing a player like Lessig emerge for the first time when many of her peers were already committed caught coaches at the annual Run 4 The Roses tournament in Louisville by surprise. Of the many callers wanting to get a word in with Lessig that day, one turned out to be her future coach.
“I was at a dinner in Louisville … with a bunch of my [former] Division III coaching peers who got a chance to watch Washington Premier play early,” current Princeton and former Tufts head coach Carla Berube told The IX Basketball. “They were all like, ‘Oh my gosh, you’ve got to see Sarah Lessig play.’”
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Judging by the perpetual ringing of Lessig’s phone, recruiters and spectators shared the same sentiment. The Seattle native had loosely been on Princeton’s recruiting radar, but Berube admits that it was hard to find time to fly across the country to watch her in person. If it weren’t for the driver of the rental car — Lessig’s AAU coach, Mia Augustavo-Fisher — Lessig might never have been on that trip. And she certainly wouldn’t be in preseason practices now with the 18-time Ivy League champions, who are favored to make it 19 this season.
That trip, and the opportunity it presented, was a long time coming. Lessig had made a name for herself on the courts, diamonds, skateparks and flag football fields of the Pacific Northwest, most notably as a three-year starter in basketball who won a state championship every year with Garfield High School. Now, she was finally being recognized on a national stage.
Lessig grew up in the heart of downtown Seattle, the city acting as her playground. Living without a car and in a small, low-income apartment with her mom, Jill, and brother, Tommy, Lessig spent her childhood navigating the city on buses, scooters and skateboards.
Jill manages the apartment building they call home. The job doesn’t pay much, but it has allowed her to pour everything into raising Sarah and Tommy. As one of many girls redirected to softball as a kid after expressing interest in baseball, Jill was determined to make sure her kids could play whichever sport they loved and that she’d be there for every moment of it.
“Baseball was my first love because it’s kind of like the family sport,” Sarah Lessig told The IX Basketball. “When I was probably 7 years old, I would go to my brother’s Little League practices. My mom was coaching and I would just hang around the team, and I loved it. I loved it a whole bunch. Within a year or two after that, I got on my own Little League team. My mom coached my team all the way until I was 14, right before I started high school.”
Jill’s commitment to investing in her kids’ passions paid off. Not only did Lessig help Garfield High School’s softball team to the state championship game in her senior year, she also was a four-year pitcher for the Bulldogs baseball team, making her the only girl playing the sport in Seattle’s Metro League.
Her accomplishments on the diamond earned her yearly invites to the MLB Elite Development Invitational, a training camp for the top 60 girls baseball players in the country, and the MLB Girls Baseball Breakthrough Series, a collaboration with USA Baseball where she trained alongside former MLB players and members of the U.S. women’s national team.
For Lessig, Bulldog purple was a year-round uniform. At Memorial Stadium, in the shadow of the towering Space Needle, she threw otherworldly passes as quarterback and safety for the Garfield flag football team.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Lessig turned skateboarding from a mode of transportation to something more.
“I used to do local competitions. I had three sponsorships, so that was my life during COVID,” said Lessig, who was featured in a Nike skateboarding promotional video. “I couldn’t do team sports, obviously, because of the lockdown. So I would go out and skate for like eight hours a day, and that was just my favorite thing to do.”
As team sports ramped back up, competitive skateboarding went on the back burner, but exploring her city on wheels still offers a break from her crazy schedule.
“I skate whenever I can with my friends, whether it’s just rolling around the city or something, but I stay away from stairs and rails and all that now,” Lessig said with a laugh.
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Lessig’s background as an elite multisport athlete isn’t just a list of accomplishments. It has shaped the kind of athlete she is today.
“I think you can probably see it in my game,” Lessig said. “I’m not the most polished basketball player for sure, but I think just different kinds of movements come from different sports. For example, with skateboarding, I learned how to fall, so I feel like I know how to take a charge. Or if I get pushed over, I’ll roll, and I won’t get hurt, just after all those falls I’ve taken on concrete.”
Yet Lessig never imagined that all her early sports experiences would eventually contribute to success in a sport she described as a “playground interest.”
“In elementary school, kind of the same time I started playing baseball, I’d just stick around the playground for hours after school and play, work on my shot, work on my dribbling,” Lessig said. “Recess was very competitive — those games got pretty heated! I didn’t start on a basketball team until I was 12. Middle school basketball was my introduction to playing on an actual team.”
That middle school fed into what many consider a dynasty of Washington high school basketball. In recent years, Garfield girls’ basketball has become a pipeline for Division I talent, headlined by McDonald’s All-American and 2025 second-round WNBA Draft pick Dalayah Daniels. Daniels spent a majority of her college career just a few miles from Garfield at the University of Washington.
During Lessig’s time as a Bulldog, she overlapped with current USC guard Malia Samuels and Oregon guard Katie Fiso, who were ranked No. 1 in Washington in the 2023 and 2024 classes, respectively. That put the Garfield squad on the radars of many of the nation’s top college programs. The four straight 3A state titles helped, too.
“At Garfield, the initial thing was exposure,” Lessig said. “It’s kind of unheard of for coaches to go recruit at a high school game, but with the superstars at Garfield, it was great for me to be seen as an underclassman. … It’s definitely a big deal to be able to go to Garfield with that kind of legacy and the state championships. It’s helpful to get put on the map.”
A young Sarah Lessig poses with University of Washington guard Kelsey Plum at Alaska Airlines Arena in Seattle, Wash. (Photo credit: Jill Lessig)
Like most basketball-playing girls in Seattle in the mid-2010s, Lessig idolized Kelsey Plum. She is proud to say she was in attendance for Plum’s legendary 57-point game in 2017 that earned her the NCAA all-time scoring record. So when the Huskies came calling just two years into Lessig’s organized basketball career, she could hardly believe it.
“My freshman year, I honestly couldn’t believe coaches were looking at me because I was not good,” Lessig said. “But there were a few coaches that saw me and saw my potential, and one of them was UW. That was my dream school at the time.
“My underclassman recruiting experience was mind-blowing. I couldn’t believe that a school was even talking to me. But I thought in my mind, ‘All I need is one chance, one school to believe in me, and I’ll be good.’”
Playing for Garfield got the conversations going, but being a member of a powerhouse high school program isn’t enough to get offers in this era of women’s college basketball. Without playing travel ball, even the most talented players struggle to stay on recruiters’ radars.
That brings us back to that rental car driving through the Midwest in the heat of July and Lessig fielding questions about how it could possibly be her first time on the travel basketball circuit. Coming from a family that couldn’t afford the thousands of dollars in team fees, private workouts and travel expenses that often come with club ball — on top of her year-round sports schedule — travel basketball had always felt out of reach.
But Lessig says the real key to getting on the recruiting map was the kindness and support of just one person.
“I give all of my credit to Mia [Augustavo-Fisher],” Lessig said. “She took me from ground zero to where I am now. She really believed in me. She helped me financially with all the club stuff, which was the reason that I never played because I couldn’t afford it. She gave me a spot on Premier, she would train me, she would get me connections with all these coaches. She’s just a really phenomenal human being. … I definitely credit her for any offers I got.”
The opportunity to play for Washington Premier, founded and led by Augustavo-Fisher, opened a whole new world for Lessig’s recruitment. Augustavo-Fisher is a former collegiate standout with 10 years of professional overseas experience before working under Tara VanDerveer at Stanford. Her wife, Michelle, is another Seattleite-turned-University of Washington product who was an assistant at her alma mater for four seasons. The couple’s connections were huge for Lessig in the recruiting process.
“Between my freshman and sophomore year, I played half a season of club ball, and that’s when coaches really started reaching out,” Lessig said. “I picked up a few offers, and that was just crazy. I had no idea you would get more than one offer; that was foreign to me. The whole talking to coaches and talking about visits was just unbelievable because there hasn’t been anybody in my family to play college sports, so I was new to the whole thing.”
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Reflecting on her recruiting process as a low-income student, Lessig offered advice for the many other young players who may be in a similar situation.
“Just try to be as well-rounded as you can in every aspect, whether that’s playing multiple sports, getting good grades, or even just being a good person [and] a good teammate,” she said. “Those things will make you stand out just as much as having the skill on a basketball court or having the exposure. … It’s very possible to do without club sports and without spending that extra money. Just work with what you have, focus on getting better and enjoy the game.”
By the time she reached Chicago for the 2024 Nike Tournament of Champions, wrapping up her first full season of travel ball, Lessig’s conversations with coaches had shifted from casual interest to full-on recruiting pitches. Coaches fully saw her for her multitalented skill set — which also includes playing piano and guitar.
“When some of the schools started to get really serious, they would start putting softball into the equation,” Lessig said. “Through basketball, I would get an offer from a school, and then they would learn more about me [and] figure out what I value. Then they would reach out to the softball coach and then say, ‘Hey, you could play softball here, too, if you want.’ That thought was really enticing.”
During her senior year at Garfield, Lessig earned Metro League MVP honors for basketball and was nominated alongside WNBA star Nneka Ogwumike and gymnast Jordan Chiles for the Seattle Sports Commission’s Women’s Sports Star of the Year award.
By the time Lessig finished high school, she hadn’t just amassed over 30 Division I basketball and softball offers. She had also earned an offer to play for Ottawa University’s five-time consecutive national championship flag football team, led by USA Football national team assistant coach and women’s flag football legend Liz Sowers. Lessig visited the campus in the small town of Ottawa, Kansas, describing it as a “really cool experience that came out of nowhere.”
Princeton first-year Sarah Lessig rises up for a layup in a preseason practice at Jadwin Gymnasium in Princeton, N.J., on Sept. 25, 2025. (Photo credit: Princeton Athletics on X)
Among all of her opportunities, though, one program stood out. Lessig’s immediate connection with the all-women staff and the players she would soon call teammates — combined with the prospect of an Ivy League education following her straight-A, valedictorian performance at Garfield — made Princeton feel like the perfect fit. Given her close bond with her mom and brother, the Ivy League’s rule against summer workouts, allowing for quality time with family, was the icing on the cake.
At 6’2, Lessig is tied for the tallest player on Princeton’s roster, giving the Tigers more size and versatility. Now having coached Lessig for just two months, Berube recalled what first caught her attention and prompted her to call Lessig just over a year ago after seeing her in Louisville.
“What an incredible athlete,” Berube said. “She can do so much defensively. She was a great shot blocker. She was rebounding on both ends of the floor, ran the floor like a gazelle. She had a good skill set offensively, and definitely we knew there’s a high ceiling here.”
What Berube didn’t see while watching her during travel ball, however, was the work ethic behind Lessig’s craft.
“They’re in the gym a lot,” Berube said of Lessig and fellow first-year Grace O’Sullivan. “They’re asking a lot of questions, they’re watching film, they’re doing extra work because they’re just really driven young women. Sarah’s just like that. She wants to be great at everything she does, and she’s going to work really hard to do that. … She just brings so much to our program and to our lives.”
Lessig couldn’t be joining the Ivy League at a better time. The conference received three bids to the 2025 NCAA Tournament and had five WNBA draft picks over the last two drafts, solidifying itself as a prime destination for top talent. Lessig joins seven Washingtonians in the conference, including two of her best friends, Columbia sophomore Mia Broom and Cornell first-year Willa Chinn. It’s a comforting connection as she prepares to play her college career far from home.
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From the concrete jungle of downtown Seattle to the ivy-covered buildings of Princeton, Lessig’s path has been shaped by her dedication and support system.
“I would say I’m most proud of overcoming the obstacles that come with growing up in a low-income family,” Lessig said. “Club sports were never an option until it was literally handed to me later in high school. …
“It’s just kind of a weird route that I took to get to be a college athlete. I think that’s something I pride myself on. It’s been a great experience, and I’ve learned so much and met so many cool people along the way.”