There’s also a replica of the wedding band worn by her grandmother, Theresa Jones. The real deal hangs on a silver chain around Rikki’s neck.
Her left leg is lettered with “Warrior,” a nod to her dad.
Above one ankle, she’s added her parents’ birthdays.
On one shoulder is a purple ribbon to signify the fight against lupus, which her mom battles as did her late grandmother.
Her right arm bears the lengthy poem she penned for her grandmother after her death. And the length of her right forearm is covered by three flowers that represent her grandmother, mother and her.
Asked about her favorite tat, she raised the bottom of her shirt a few inches to reveal her first inkwork. It’s just three words: “The Golden Child.”
“It was her eighth-grade graduation present,” her mom said.
Rikki has an older sister and three older brothers, so you wondered if she really was The Golden Child.
“When you consider everything that’s happened, yes she is,” said Brittney, who was quick to note she wasn’t referring to everything her daughter did on the basketball court at Ohio State before arriving at UD last spring via the transfer portal.
She was with the Buckeyes five years — one of them a redshirt season as she recovered from shoulder surgery — and played in 117 games and started 39 of them.
During her OSU career, she had several memorable games: 23 points and seven steals against Michigan; 17 points on 5-for-7 three-point shooting versus Illinois; 10 rebounds against Louisviulle and nine against Penn State.
She helped the team to an Elite Eight appearance her redshirt junior season and won honorable mention All-Big Ten recognition.
Off the court she was even more impressive. Four years in a row she was named Academic All-Big Ten and she’s already gotten her undergrad and master’s degrees from OSU.
“I’m proud of all that,” Brittney said. “But the big reason she’s The Golden Child is because she’s been through a lot. Right from the start, she had it tough.
“She was a premature baby. I had her at 29 ½ to 30 weeks. She weighed like 2 pounds 13 ounces and was in the hospital for five weeks.”
She had strong athletic genes and by age three had started playing basketball. Her grandfather is in the Crispus Attucks Hall of Fame and was a hoops player in college. She had several uncles who starred, as well. And her dad played college football at Morris Brown College in Atlanta.
“Rikki played basketball with all boys until she got to sixth grade,” her mom said. “She had to stop playing with her boys’ AAU team when she got protested before a tournament game.
“The parents of the other team protested a girl playing with the boys. They’d seen how she’d done the boys the week before and kept stealing the ball. She was one of the best players on her team and those parents didn’t want her to play.”
“They got her sidelined and that devasted her.”
She soon was starring on her junior high teams, but tore her right ACL as an eighth grader. She went onto become a five-star recruit at North Central High in Indianapolis — ESPN HoopGurlz rated her the No. 29 recruit in the class of 2019 — and she committed to Ohio State as a junior.
A week later she tore her ACL again and this time surgeons took part of her patellar tendon from her left knee to repair it.
She worried OSU would see her as damaged goods and back off her scholarship, but she said OSU coach Kevin McGuff and his assistants remained committed and called her every week to see how she was doing.
She redshirted that first 2019-20 season at OSU after she tore her labrum and needed surgery.
“In the last 10 years I’ve had seven or eight surgeries,” she said, “But I’ve rebuilt myself each time.”
And that explained two more of her tats.
Her right arm is inked with “Only the strong survive”.
And her lower left leg sports, what she called the smile of “The Joker.”
“No matter what’s happening inside,” she said “I’m always trying to smile on the outside.”
‘It’s all about family to me’
Her mom said she went into labor with Rikki on June 30th, 2000: “That was my mom’s birthday, and I had my daughter a day later on July 1st.
“When Rikki was a little girl, she called me ‘Mommy,’ and my mom, ‘Mama”. It was until later she started calling her Grandma.
“The two of them had a special connection. They kind of looked like each other and with their birthdays back to back, they called themselves twins.”
Rikki said her grandmother was “my best friend.
“We’d celebrate our birthdays together. When she first got lupus and was living with us for a while, we’d sometimes be up until two or three in the morning just talking and laughing and she’d tell me stories.”
Because of failing health, she said her grandmother saw just one of her games her freshman season:
“But when I’d get home she was sitting there wearing the basketball pin with my picture on it. And she be wearing her hat and our team shirt, and we’d talk all about the game.”
After her grandmother died in 2016, she wrote a poem and had it inked onto her right arm.
She said her grandmother’s wedding band is her prized possession: “It’s one of the only things I have of her. I don’t leave home without it.”
And yet, it’s been difficult to hold onto sometimes:
“It’s been snatched off a couple of times at practice and the managers had to go searching around the floor for it because it rolled off the chain.”
The biggest scare came when she was at OSU and thought she’d lost the ring and chain.
“That was really devastating,” she said.
Her mom remembers Rikki was ‘just so, so, so hurt.”
Finally, to ease the pain, Rikki said she got a likeness of the ring tattooed on her leg: “That way I’d at least have the memory of the ring with me every day.
“Then one day my mom found it. I remember her calling me at practice to tell me. I didn’t believe it, so I had her text me a picture to be sure.”
As Brittney remembered “When she put it back on, there was a gleam in her eye.”
Rikki agreed: “It’s all about family to me.”
Credit: AP
Credit: AP
‘Bigger than basketball with us’
Rikki said she and UD women’s coach Tamika Willians-Jeter “have been talking since I was 15.”
Tamika was a Penn State assistant coach then and Rikki was one of the best recruits in the nation.
She chose Ohio State instead, but by the time she got to Columbus, Tamika was a Buckeyes’ assistant.
“My freshman year I was injured so I just stuck with her and we got really close,” she said. “She was my favorite coach, and she taught me a lot.
“When she left (to coach Wittenberg for a season before coming to UD) we never broke that relationship. Every holiday or any time something big happened in basketball, we’d talk.
“She’d call my mom from time to time just to check in and we’d hear from her on the holidays. She’d wish us Merry Christmas.
“It was bigger than basketball with us.”
After making 19 starts in both the 2021-22 and 2022-23 seasons for the Buckeyes, Rikki came off the bench in 31 games last season and averaged 4.4 points and 1.7 rebounds.
The season prior, she led the team in assists, was third in rebounding and averaged 6.5 ppg
Although she talked about ‘the drama” that surrounded the Buckeyes last season, she said “I’m not mad about any of it. It was hard for me, but the people they started over me deserved it just as much.”
When she entered the transfer portal, she had several offers and visited Purdue and Xavier before choosing UD.
“I just felt I could trust everything Tamika told me,” she said. “I felt UD would be a good place for me.”
Her mom agreed: “I think it will be a great place for Rikki to just be Rikki. She can be a good leader and she has lots of experience.”
Over the years she’s been on the court with some of the college game’s best players, many of them now in the WNBA.
She stole the ball from Iowa’s Caitlin Clark last year in Ohio State’s upset win.
“But Caitlin scored on me, too,” she laughed. “She’s a great player.”
She said the same about Angel Reese, whom she played against when the 6-foot-3 LSU star was at Maryland.
That savvy and skill and experience are something the Flyers — who have gone 19-40 the past two seasons — have been sorely missing.
She thinks she can provide some of that and that’s why she’s set aside a portion of her upper arm that will remain un-inked until after the season.
She wants to add some UD tats that will reflect the team’s success.
The Golden Child is hoping for a golden season.
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