There’s a version of Leah Ford that exists mostly in memory now. A long, lanky teenager out of Keller, Texas, who hadn’t yet built the strength to match her 6-foot-4 frame. She arrived at USC in 2023 carrying that potential, along with an injury that would derail nearly her entire freshman season before it started. In her collegiate debut, a three-set win over Marist, she hit .700 on seven kills. Two matches later, she was done for the year.
Three seasons later Ford has become one of the most complete players in the Big Ten and one of USC’s captains. She currently sits tied for sixth in the conference in blocks (31) and is building towards the most efficient offensive season of her career, hitting .340 through seven matches.
Last season, she led the entire Big Ten in blocks per set (1.35), finished fifth in the conference in hitting percentage (.378), and earned her second consecutive All-Conference Second Team selection. She has never hit worse than .357 for a full season.
Ford is candid about what it took to get here.
“I feel like I came in very vulnerable and just eager to learn, and I was in such a different space,” Ford said. “It took a lot to see the older girls; how they treat their bodies, how they’re in the training room every single day doing everything they can, that was just a goal to get myself on the court.”
Head coach Brad Keller remembers that version of her clearly: a talented but underdeveloped high schooler who battled injuries even before she arrived, then continued to deal with them for a stretch after enrolling.
What’s changed, he says, isn’t just her body.
“She’s no longer a kid. She’s an adult, and she looks like it, acts like it, talks like it, walks like it, plays like it.”
Ford’s block numbers alone have made her a standout: 246 career blocks, a career-high 10 in a single match against Loyola Marymount last season, a season-high eight against Colorado just last week. But the numbers that seem to matter most to her are the ones outside her natural lane. This season she’s already serving aces at a career-high rate with 0.29 per set, nearly triple her previous best despite being just seven matches into the year.
“I don’t like being called just a middle blocker,” Ford said. “I play volleyball for a reason, so I think it’s cool to be able to say I can set, or be able to pass the ball and dig a ball. I take my digging reps in practice just as much as I take my blocking reps and my hitting reps. I take it all.”
It’s not lost on her that middles rarely get the attention outside hitters and opposites do, a byproduct of the position. Ford has taken just 94 attack attempts this season; USC’s leading hitters, London Wijay and Abigail Mullen, have each taken well over twice that many. Fewer swings mean fewer chances to pile up the counting stats that typically drive attention.
“I don’t let it bother me because I love being in the middle and I love to embrace it,” she said. I just want to be an all-around great volleyball player. If Brad needed me to be another position, hey, I’m ready for it.”
Keller sees it the same way from the bench, and jokes that she’s turning into the team’s backup libero.
“My favorite [part of her game] is serving and the fact she’s digging the ball,” he said. “She’s always been a good blocker and attacker, but... I keep joking that she’s our next libero.”
Ford’s game has always spoken clearly. Her voice, by her own admission, is still catching up.
Keller describes her leadership with a line borrowed from Theodore Roosevelt: she talks softly, but carries a big stick. Ford doesn’t push back on the comparison.
“I’m definitely a more quiet person, and I try to lead,” Ford said. “I don’t know if I really lead more with my words. I lead more by example... Brad [Keller] used to call me ‘secret assassin.’ I think I still kind of give that a little bit.”
That style of leadership is beginning to shift, though, by her own design. As a first-time team captain this season, Ford says she’s working to unlearn an instinct that goes back years.
“I feel like I’ve always had an underdog mentality, and I’m trying to break free out of that and really use my voice and become a vocal leader,” she said. “I’m really trying to hone in this year on my vocal leadership, and really letting these girls bounce off of my confidence and my leadership to improve their game as well.”
This season, Ford is putting up the most productive offensive output of her career with a career-high 2.79 points per set while bearing the added weight of team captain, proof, in Keller’s eyes, that added responsibility hasn’t come at the expense of production.
“Being captain of this team and being so dominant at the net, I think that she’s finding herself, and she’s kind of projecting onto others in a good, positive way, and it’s building momentum,” Keller said.
If Ford’s game was rebuilt in the weight room, her identity at USC was built somewhere else entirely. In rehab, alongside the only senior on this year’s roster, fellow team captain Adonia Faumuina.
Ford arrived at USC the year after Faumuina, and the two were pushed together almost immediately by circumstance: both were sidelined by significant injuries early in their careers, and both spent long stretches rehabbing side by side.
“It forced us to spend a lot of time together,” Faumuina said, “but also I think we just instantly clicked.” She and Ford have lived together for three years at USC, though the closeness started even earlier. As a freshman, Ford says she was practically at Faumuina’s place every day.
Keller sees the friendship as a study in contrasts that somehow work in sync. He describes Faumuina as the team’s “Mama Hen” and Ford as the counterbalance who reels the room back in.
“Adonia’s the one that’s dancing, and then you start dancing,” Keller said. “And Leah is like, no, no, no, no, get over here, don’t do that, come here.”
Faumuina agrees, mostly.
“It can switch off at moments,” she said. “We both get like hella crazy at some moments. But I think we just bounce off of each other so well. If I’m down, she’s reeling me back in, or reeling others in.”
Behind the numbers and the captaincy, Faumuina describes Ford as something closer to a counselor than a middle blocker.
“Behind the scenes, she is the therapist for all of us,” Faumuina said. “She has a great relationship with literally everybody on the team. Everybody can come and talk to her because she’s such a safe space, especially for me. I literally don’t know what I would do without her.”
That instinct isn’t incidental. Ford is majoring in psychology, and says the two paths, on and off the court, have started to inform each other.
“I could see myself getting into sports psych, being through all the injury I’ve gone through, and seeing other people’s experiences,” she said. “I’m definitely a listening ear for people.”
Her competitive streak has its own roots. Ford’s father, Kirk Sr., was an All-Southwestern Conference basketball forward and team captain at Houston in the mid-1990s before playing professionally in Brazil and Europe. Growing up watching him coach her older brother, Kirk Jr. in football, gave Ford an early blueprint for what elite competitiveness looked like and someone to measure herself against.
“That’s what made me who I am today — my father, and watching him coach my brother,” Ford said. “I always wanted to beat my brother in these certain things, and it gave me that mentality of being an athlete and always wanting to be the best.”
Faumuina puts Ford’s talent in blunter terms than Ford ever would herself.
“She’s literally one of the best middles in the country,” Faumuina said. “She’s not gonna say it because she’s so humble and comes from such a humble family. But she puts it out on the floor every single time.”
When asked what Ford means to her beyond volleyball, Faumuina didn’t hesitate.
“She’s not my best friend. She’s my sister,” Faumuina said.
Faith runs underneath all of it, both say, through journaling and praying separately before matches, then together as a team.
“Having the faith in God while we’re playing, in everything that we do, that just helps us,” Faumuina said.
“Faith is definitely our main source of our friendship,” Ford said.
For a player with 304 career kills and a perfect 2026 reception percentage at this point in the season, Ford’s list of goals reads less like a redshirt junior polishing a résumé and more like someone chasing a ceiling she hasn’t found yet.
“I’m shooting for the stars,” she said. “I want to be first team All-American... go pro, and maybe the Olympics. You never know.”
More immediately, she’s chasing consistency in the moments that decide matches.
“I want to be able to clinch those points, those scrappy plays, the bang-to-bang plays where I can just put the ball away,” Ford said. “Also my serving, it’s gotten better this year, but I definitely want to create some records for myself.”
Three seasons ago, Ford played two matches before her body shut the door on the rest of her freshman year. This season, she’s a captain, a two-time All-Conference honoree, and — by her coach’s estimation — still not finished climbing.
“She’s just a complete volleyball player right now,” Keller said. “It’s her time, and she’s jumping on it, and she’s making it hers.”
Edited by JohVonne Roberts