By R.L. Bynum
Alyssa Ustby’s rookie pro season in Italy began with grocery adventures and ended with a new chapter in a career built on grit, consistent training habits and a willingness to try anything.
Fans marveled at the versatility of the most prolific rebounder in UNC program history, and she showed more of it in the Serie A league, returning to her high school roots as a point guard.
She had a breakout season playing in Rosetto, a small beach town outside of Rome, embracing a role she rarely filled in during her decorated career at Carolina.
“I decided early on that I was going to take on the role of being a point guard, shooting the ball, getting downhill, producing — night in and night out — double-doubles and getting in the 20s consistently every single game,” Ustby said Tuesday in Episode 2 of the “Tar Heel Tribune Podcast.”
“It was a great opportunity for me to grow on the court as well,” Ustby said. “I felt like I really expanded my game as a player, and that was something that’s so exciting as an athlete in any sport, to explore more of yourself.”
The results followed for one of the program’s most decorated players.
Ustby swept Serie A’s top individual honors, earning player of the year, best prospect of the year and guard of the year, while also being named to three all-league teams, including the All-Imports and All-Defensive squads, along with a scoring title. Her team, projected to finish last in the league, ended up fourth.
“I felt like I was able to explore more areas of my game that not necessarily my college game limited, but because in college we recruit very specific pieces to fill certain needs,” she said. “Overseas, every year you’re getting a brand new bunch of girls, and you’re figuring out how the pieces fit.”
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Adjusting to Italy off the court took longer.
Ustby said she arrived without knowing a single word of Italian and leaned on a translator during games, including in huddles when her coach’s instructions came too quickly to process.
“Hearing my coach yell things in timeouts talking in Italian, my eyes were really big because I have no idea what he’s saying,” she said. “We have a translator on our team who will run over to me and quickly translate what’s going on, but sometimes in the 30-second timeout you don’t have enough opportunity to discuss, and so there’s a lot of times where I was left clueless walking back out onto that court.”
Grocery runs that took 30 to 45 minutes in North Carolina became an exercise in patience with Google Translate helping her through every decision.
“It took me an hour and a half to just figure out where I was, what I needed, and what’s the Italian equivalent to the things that I want in America,” she said, describing her first trip to a store in a town with little English spoken.
She has enjoyed the country’s food and culture.
“It’s literally as amazing as we’ve all heard over here in America. ” Just the quality of the food is incredible,” she said. “And obviously the wine that goes with every meal is fantastic.” So, it was really cool to explore my culinary palate as well.”
Balancing that with the demands of a professional season, she said, came down to moderation rather than deprivation.
“Eighty to 90 percent of the time, I’m eating really healthy, high-protein meals, so I’m definitely diving into some homemade tiramisu,” Ustby said of the classic Italian dessert. “It was incredible.”
Fittingly, Ustby’s go-to dish back in Chapel Hill turned out to foreshadow her move overseas.
“Coincidentally, it was a pasta,” she said, laughing. “I think that was a little bit of foreshadowing that I was going to end up in Italy for my first pro season.”
She studied the language for seven to eight months while overseas and still spends about an hour a day studying Italian. Her teammates, she said, were especially eager to teach her Italian curse words, whispering them to her before nudging another teammate to watch her reaction.
“Oh my God, those are the first words that all the girls were trying to teach us, and it was so funny,” said Ustby, who had one American teammate. “They would come over and whisper, ‘Hey, say this word,’ then they would tap their other Italian teammate — listen, listen, listen — and then you’d say the word, and they all start laughing. So, those are some really fun bonding moments, but yeah, I definitely know a good few of those.”
On the plus side, referees only spoke Italian, so she could say whatever she wanted in English without concern that she’d get a technical foul.
“They weren’t really understanding what I was saying, so if I deserved a tech, they wouldn’t have known,” she said.
Ustby will not return to Rosetto next season. Instead, she has signed with the Venezia team in Venice that competes in EuroLeague, the top level of European club competition, a jump that will roughly double her game load from last season.
“I’ll be traveling to multiple different countries to play in this league, and then, at the end of the season, we’ll have our Italian conference championships and also EuroLeague championships,” she said. “It’s an exciting experience, and definitely a big jump up in competition, too.”
She said her long-term goal remains reaching the WNBA, but that she is prepared to keep developing overseas in the meantime. She went to training camp with the Los Angeles Sparks in 2025 but didn’t make the team.
“I want to have a long and healthy basketball career, and so I’m willing to do what it takes, [even if] that means going overseas for eight months away from my family and working on different areas of my game to get better and eventually get back here, so I can stay home and play in front of friends and family,” she said. “I know that I’m in a good space mentally, and I have a lot of people in my support system pushing me in the right direction as well.”
Ustby has stayed connected to the Carolina program this offseason, working camps and spending time with program newcomers, including five-star freshman guard Kate Harpring, whom she said has brought energy to practices.
“They’re super-competitive, and they have a lot of fun; they’re laughing a lot, and those are all good signs of a healthy program and healthy culture,” she said. “I can’t wait to see what they put together for game day.”
She will also host her fifth annual youth girls basketball camp in Durham on Aug. 1, working with players from third through 11th grade, alongside current and former Tar Heels. She also has a camp in Rochester, Minn., on Aug. 8.
Ustby’s Carolina story was one of an underdog who made herself indispensable.
She arrived in Chapel Hill as an unheralded part of a talented five-player freshman class, but quickly earned the trust of Coach Courtney Banghart.
“Courtney Banghart was willing to take a chance on me,” Ustby said. “She made sure to tell me that I wasn’t going to play right away, and that I would have to earn some things, but then I ended up starting by Christmas my freshman year, so that was just more of an opportunity than I could ever ask for.”
Ustby blended perimeter skills with interior toughness, averaging 11.9 points and 8.5 rebounds for her career and finishing with 1,269 rebounds — numbers that only hint at the full package: assists, blocks, steals and a nose for the loose ball.
She remembers practicing the habits that became her trademark.
“To be able to attain the skill of being a consistent rebounder, you have to practice it,” she said, explaining that she showed up to every practice at 110% because she is training habits that show up on game day.
Those habits produced nights that will live in Carolina lore.
Her triple‑double — 16 points, 16 rebounds and 10 assists against No. 25 Syracuse on Jan. 4, 2023 — was the kind of complete performance that made people sit up and take notice. She still remembers when she realized that the first triple-double in program history became possible. Indya Nivar notched the second one last season.
“The first moment that I was aware that I could even be anywhere close was at halftime. One of the assistant coaches came up to me and said, ‘Lis, you have nine assists,’ ” she recalled, and the crowd’s shouts in the third quarter only added to the electricity as she closed the gap.
“In the third quarter, I remember I was one or two points away, and I heard from a bunch of fans in the stands yelling at me that I needed one more point,” Ustby said. “Because I inbound the ball after made baskets, I’m usually standing on the baseline, waiting for the referee to hand me the ball. So, the people that are sitting along the baseline and the seats on the floor, all those people were telling me that I was just one point away, and so that was super-exciting.”
Ustby said it was a product of team chemistry, crediting Maria Gakdeng, whose low‑post scoring helped feed Ustby’s assists on that historic night.
She remembers Carmichael Arena not just as a place to play but as a place to spark the crowd, including when she memorably stood on top of the scorer’s table to celebrate after her final home game — a 22-point show in a 58–47 victory over West Virginia in the second round of the 2025 NCAA tournament.
“It was just always something I wanted to do, and as soon as the game was over, I tapped our assistant coach; I was like, ‘Hey, can I do it? Can I do it?’ ” Ustby said. “It was less of a thing for me to be seen up on the scorer’s table as much as I wanted to excite our crowd and be a part of the atmosphere even more.”
A little more than a year earlier, in the first round of the 2024 NCAA tournament, Ustby delivered one of the best performances of her career against Michigan State, finishing with 16 points and a season-best 17 rebounds in a 59–56 first-round win.
Those types of nights, Ustby said, trace back to a freshman class that reshaped the program. She arrived at Carolina alongside Deja Kelly, Kennedy Todd-Williams, Anya Poole and Ally Zelaya.
“We had a great freshman class, and that’s a big class coming into a new program, and that’s enough people to change the culture and trajectory of a program,” Ustby said. “I think something unique about our group is that we all got along; we were friends off the court, and that made our job easier on the court.”
Ustby said it was a little overwhelming to realize that she was the only member of that class to stay for five seasons, with Kelly heading to Oregon, Todd-Williams to Ole Miss, Poole to Clemson and Zelaya to UNCW.
“These are people that I imagined spending the rest of my life with and have them always right by my side,” Ustby said. “But that’s just a part of life, and you move on. Every different phase, you’re going to have different people that are really close to you in proximity, and those are going to be some of your closest friends.”
Neither Ustby nor Todd-Williams arrived at Carolina as top 100 recruits, a fact she said has shaped how she has approached every stage of her career since then.
“I think every opportunity that I’ve been given so far in my career, even if it’s just a sliver of an opportunity, I’ve taken it, I’ve run with it, and I’ve really shown how I can add value to a team,” she said. “I’m still just eagerly waiting for my opportunity in the WNBA to do that, and I know that will come eventually. I’m going to trust the process.”
That opportunity figures to come. And she figures to prove any doubters wrong, just as she has many times before.
Photo courtesy of the ACC
