Becoming Aneesah Morrow: How the undersized LSU star became an all-time great rebounder

LSU forward Aneesah Morrow (24) warms up before the SEC matchup against Texas A&M on Sunday, January 26, 2025 at the PMAC in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Facebook Twitter WhatsApp SMS Email Print Copy article link Save Long before Aneesah Morrow became one of the best rebounders in college basketball history, her career was at a crossroads. This was when the future LSU star was in high school, not long after she suffered one of her three major knee injuries.

Morrow — along with her father, Ed, and mother, Nafeesah — sat down with the orthopedic surgeon in charge of her recovery. “He says," Ed said, “ 'What is your goal here? Do you want her to be functional or competitive?’ " They stopped and considered the question. Morrow had her dad’s lower-body strength and explosion.



She had her mom’s length and agility. Her brother — a basketball star nicknamed “On Your Head Ed” for the threat he posed above the rim — showed her how to crash the glass and finish. Her family’s competitive spirit nurtured her desire to hunt rebounds, her height and injuries be damned.

“We said competitive,” Ed said. Morrow has been more than competitive ever since. Those knees have carried her through a four-year Division I career, bending and firing as she has tallied the second-most double-doubles in NCAA history and climbed the all-time rebounding leaderboard.

Morrow can crack the top 10 as soon as Thursday, when the No. 7 LSU women host No. 13 Oklahoma at 6 p.

m. on ESPN2. Nose for the ball The thing about Morrow is that she shouldn’t be here.

Only 6-foot-1? How can someone that size have more career rebounds than all but two women who’ve ever played at the NCAA Division I level? That rarefied air should be reserved for those who stand tall enough to reach it. Eight players have scored more than 2,500 points and grabbed at least 1,500 rebounds in their career. All are 6-3 or taller, except for two: Morrow and a Missouri Valley Conference Hall of Famer named Wanda Ford .

When Ford played at Drake from 1983-86, she was listed at 6 foot. That measurement, in her estimation, might have been a tad generous. Today, she says she’s actually closer to 5-11.

That, of course, would make Ford an inch or two shorter than Morrow, the LSU star with a similar game. “She's in excellent shape, and she’s a fighter,” Ford said of Morrow, “and to me, it seems like she enjoys playing basketball. She enjoys rebounding.

” At Drake, Ford pulled down 1,815 rebounds — still enough for her to sit comfortably in the No. 2 spot on the all-time leaderboard. Morrow (1,538 rebounds) likely won’t catch her, but if she keeps cleaning the glass at this rate, then all she’ll need is a handful of postseason games to finish her career with the third-most boards in Division I history.

That means Morrow soon could be inked into the record book right underneath Ford, whose climb started in the housing projects of Cleveland. When she was 7 years old, Ford started shooting basketballs into a shopping cart. She eventually became skilled enough to play real games with boys who wouldn’t pass her the ball.

So, she said, she’d just have to go get it herself — an experience that taught her what it takes to be a good rebounder. Skill, athleticism and desire are all needed. Above all, Ford believes, there is something else that can’t be taught, developed or cultivated — a knack for sniffing out rebounds before they even bounce off of the rim.

“A lot of people don't understand that they're just blessed to be rebounders,” Ford said. “It's a blessing from God, being basketball players and also having a knack for where the ball's gonna come off, if it's gonna come off the right side or the left side. It's just being blessed to be a rebounder.

” Competitive family Ed Morrow is tall with a thin, gray beard, dark-rimmed glasses and a low, gruff voice. If you ask him about the time he spent as a defensive lineman on his Nebraska football teams in the 1990s, he’ll tell you he was actually more of an outside linebacker — with the right blend of speed, strength and agility to pressure quarterbacks and drop back into coverage. His wife, Nafeesah, is a teacher and a coach.

During a three-year career with the Nebraska women’s basketball program, she scored more than 1,000 points and grabbed more than 500 rebounds. The two athletes married and had five kids. Their fourth — Aneesah — is the only one who was born in the city where they chose to plant their family’s roots.

“That's one of the reasons we moved to Chicago,” Ed said, “because it was much more competitive, and (there were) more opportunities for scholarships.” The Morrows are a competitive bunch. Three of the five kids have played Division I college basketball.

One was on scholarship at Marquette . Another began her career at a community college, then transferred to DePaul so she could play with her younger sister, Aneesah. They all starred at Simeon Career Academy, a Chicago school known for its basketball teams.

Derrick Rose and Jabari Parker went there. But Simeon can’t claim another player quite like Aneesah, now the most accomplished college basketball star the school has ever produced — on either the men’s side or the women’s. “She's like the queen of Simeon at this point,” said Kendall Moore, the school’s athletic director.

“It's kind of hard to live in the shadow of boys basketball at Simeon because of how great the story is, but what Aneesah has done is rejuvenated our women's program and all of our sports.” That includes volleyball, a sport Aneesah played in high school — reluctantly — at the behest of her mother. “She ended up actually being great at it,” Nafeesah said.

Volleyball and rebounding, she pointed out, require many of the same skills. Volleyball players have to position themselves for blocks and spikes, then explode up and above the net. They must also read the ball’s trajectory, anticipating where and how it might arc into play.

As the game speeds up, so too must their reaction times. The best players will be a step or two ahead of the others. Sound familiar? “All of that cross training plays a big role in that, I strongly believe,” Nafeesah said.

“Because without it, she would only know one dynamic. And so, with volleyball, it brings that extra dynamic, that extra entity you need for timing. “And rebounding is all about timing.

” LSU forward Aneesah Morrow (24) is honored for reaching the 1,500 career rebound plateau before the game against Texas A&M on Sunday, Jan. 26, 2025 at the Pete Maravich Assembly Center. Art of rebounding Like Ford, a young Aneesah Morrow struggled to get the ball.

She also found a similar solution — with an assist from her mother. “I want to be this type of player,” Morrow remembers saying, “but I can't get the ball. I'm not able to.

She said, ‘Well, I know a way you can, and it's to rebound the ball. If you rebound the ball and run the floor, you can get the ball, and you can score baskets.’ ” Now, Morrow does her work early, stationing herself to grab rebounds before shots even go up.

She also keeps her feet moving. If she stops, she said, then someone can move her off her spot and earn inside position. She also knows her LSU teammates and the trajectories their shots tend to take.

It’s more of an art than a science. But how is Morrow so good at it? She’s never the game’s tallest player, but she’s always its best rebounder. Some have her athleticism; others have her frame.

There are other players who, like her, are genetically predisposed to excelling on the glass, some even more so than she is. What’s the separator? It’s likely more abstract and less quantifiable, something Morrow had to choose back in high school. "It's more being hungry, being competitive,” she said.

“My family's always been competitive.”.