When junior transfer Mary Ashley Stevenson started hanging out with her new Columbia teammates this summer, she was both the newcomer and the expert. That’s because Stevenson hails from New York City, while eight of her 13 teammates are international players. So they peppered her with questions about the city, which she was more than happy to answer.
Columbia head coach Megan Griffith has had several players from New York state in her 10-plus years at her alma mater. But Stevenson is Griffith’s first-ever recruit from the city and the Lions’ first player from there since 2017 graduate Carolyn Gallagher.
“I’d love to have more city kids … [and Mary Ashley] helps us tremendously,” Griffith told reporters on Thursday. “When you get one, it makes people think. And … I don’t think we just got one. We got a great one.”
Stevenson’s family lives in Manhattan on the Upper West Side, close enough that she can walk home from Columbia if she has enough time on her hands. But her path to becoming a Lion took her to the Midwest and the West Coast before it brought her back home.
As a 6’2 forward, Stevenson was ESPN’s No. 97 recruit in her high school class after averaging more than 24 points and 10 rebounds per game in both her junior and senior seasons. She won state championships in her sophomore, junior and senior seasons and tried out for multiple USA Basketball youth national teams. (She played her sophomore season in South Carolina because of COVID-19 restrictions in New York.)
Griffith recruited Stevenson out of high school, but Stevenson wanted to leave New York and try somewhere new. She chose Purdue, where she became the Big Ten Freshman of the Year in 2023-24 under head coach Katie Gearlds. Playing mostly in the low post, Stevenson started 33 of 34 games that season and averaged 9.7 points and 5.1 rebounds in 27.9 minutes per game.
Despite loving her time at Purdue and meshing well with Gearlds and her staff, Stevenson opted to transfer in 2024 because of what she called “some … program reasons.” When Stanford contacted her, she seized the opportunity to go to “a dream school” of hers.
Stevenson didn’t play as much at Stanford as she had at Purdue, averaging 17.3 minutes per game as a sophomore and 12.1 as a junior. Her role shifted, too, as she learned how to be more of a playmaker. As her minutes and usage dropped, her scoring fell to 4.4 and 2.0 points per game. But her assists per 40 minutes increased, even as she struggled at times with turnovers.
After her junior season ended last spring, Stevenson decided she needed to leave again. She loved her teammates, and the school was a good fit for her — as a communications major, she even got to teach a section of a public speaking class last year. But she wanted to find a program that was a better basketball fit for her.
“When I got in the portal for the second time, it was a hard decision,” Stevenson told The IX Sports in September. “… There’s so much [discussion] about the transfer portal now, and so many kind of controversial opinions and contradicting opinions. But at the end of the day, I’m very thankful for it because I’ve been at three incredible schools, and it’s landed me at Columbia, which I believe I was meant to be here all along.”
Her goals in her third recruiting process were largely the same as when she was being recruited in high school: Go somewhere she’s wanted and needed. This time around, she also wanted to make sure she found a coaching staff she really trusted to finish out her college career with.
“I need you to be direct, and I need you to be honest with me,” Stevenson said she told Griffith — who is known for doing exactly that — during one of their recruiting conversations.
“You don’t have to worry,” Griffith responded.
The trust between Griffith and Stevenson was there in part because they’d already known each other for years. Griffith and her staff had started recruiting Stevenson early in her high school career and got to know her and her parents very well. When she left Purdue, Griffith tried again. The third time was finally the charm.
“I don’t think we changed who we were at all,” Griffith said, thinking back on the three recruiting pitches. “Honestly, it was just more like [we] doubled down on us and told her the door would always be open if this is a place that she wanted to come back home to.”
“That’s pretty special,” Stevenson said. “It’s pretty hard for a staff to recruit somebody for almost eight years and be told no twice. So for them to have stuck by me in that way meant a lot.”
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Despite playing three seasons of college basketball already, Stevenson comes into Columbia as a junior. She changed her major to history, and she’ll specialize in East Asian history, which she got an early preview of during the team’s summer trip to Japan. The Lions are planning on her playing two more seasons to complete her college eligibility.
Now playing for her fifth program across high school and college, adapting to a new team hasn’t fazed Stevenson. She knows the rhythms of college basketball, even though the specific styles differ from team to team. Though the Ivy League doesn’t have summer workouts, she got to know several of her teammates who were interning or working in New York over the summer, and the foreign tour gave them extra practices together.
What has stood out to Stevenson about Columbia is the culture that Griffith built and her players have sustained. With no revenue-sharing in the Ivy League and few transfers coming in and out, the program leans on four-year players who buy into and reinforce Columbia’s “EDGE”: energy, discipline, grit and excellence.
“This consistency in culture [is something] that I have never seen at another program — any program that I’ve visited and any program that I’ve played for,” Stevenson said. “… What’s really cool is it’s not coming from the coaches. I mean, they talk about it … but from the moment I stepped on campus, the whole EDGE and culture message came from the girls first, and that’s something that I think is really special.”
Stevenson said it feels like there’s a “bubble” around the Ivy League, separating it from other conferences in an ever-changing women’s basketball landscape. Now inside that bubble for the first time, she’s fit right in.
“It genuinely feels like MA’s been here for years,” senior guard Fliss Henderson told reporters at Ivy League media day on Oct. 8. “… She’s already such a big culture driver and kind of just immediately bought into everything we do here, zero questions asked.”
Multiple times already in the preseason, Griffith has compared Stevenson to former Lion Cecelia Collins for how smooth her transition has been. Collins, arguably Columbia’s most successful transfer under Griffith, played two seasons at Bucknell before joining the Lions in 2023.
“As soon as we started playing, you saw the wheels turning,” Griffith said about Stevenson. “You saw her trying to figure things out really quickly. She’s really, really smart and just wants to learn and get better, which Cece was exactly the same way. No ego. …
“And then they both just have a really even keel about them that I love. They’re not too high, they’re not too low. [You] just know what you can get from them every day.”
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On the court, Stevenson seemingly slots in perfectly after forwards Perri Page and Susie Rafiu graduated last spring. They were Columbia’s second- and third-leading scorers last season, trailing only guard Riley Weiss, the Ivy League Player of the Year who returns this year as a senior. Page was also named Ivy League Defensive Player of the Year and first-team All-Ivy last season.
Griffith sees Stevenson as a potential hybrid of Page and Rafiu, and as a bonus, she’s an inch taller than Rafiu and three taller than Page. The goal is to combine Stevenson’s low-post game from Purdue with the playmaking she learned at Stanford.
“I think she’s a great scorer, and she just hasn’t really done that outside of her time at Purdue,” Griffith said. “And that was a lot of cleanup buckets, putbacks. I don’t think she’s gotten to showcase her full scoring abilities. … I think we’re going to see a really dynamic inside-out threat, but also a great rebounder [and] a decision-maker for us. We’re gonna use her in a lot of ways.”
“I want to come in and I want to dominate,” Stevenson said. “I think I have a great opportunity, especially playing alongside Riley. … She’s going to be killing it on the perimeter, and I think it provides a great opportunity for me to kill it on the inside.”
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In addition, Stevenson is hungry to make the NCAA Tournament for the first time in her career. To do that, she’ll have to go through one of her former teams, as Columbia will face Stanford in Hawaii on Nov. 27. Seeing the Cardinal on the schedule surprised her, she said, but she feels like she has a lot to prove this season, and that game would be a great time to do it.
She’ll also get plenty of chances to prove herself at home in Levien Gymnasium this season. She joked with the Columbia coaching staff in the fall that she might need her own supporters section, with how many people in her life have told her they’re buying season tickets.
So after crisscrossing the country to start her college career, Stevenson is home now to put it all together. Every home game will be a homecoming — and an opportunity to stake her claim as one of her city’s best players.
