Somewhere in the back of Ryan Day’s mind, there’s an eighth grader who permanently closed the book on his basketball career. And it just so happens to be one of the most coveted linebackers in the 2026 NFL Draft. Day brought it up himself during a recent appearance on This Is Football with Kevin Clark, recalling the moment a kid barely into his teens walked into the Ohio State indoor facility, laced up his sneakers, and casually ended the head coach’s recreational basketball life.

“Well, it started when he [Sonny Styles] was in seventh-eighth grade, because we were recruiting Lorenzo, his older brother, and so they would come in,” Day said. “I remember it was the last time I ever really played basketball, one-on-one. We were indoors here, and we were having an event in July, right before camp started. Lorenzo was here, and so we went into the basketball area, and we were messing around. And I said, ‘Well, come on, little guy, let’s go play one-on-one.’ He took two dribbles and dunked on me.

“That was the last time I played basketball, because the eighth grader just dunked on me. I said, ‘I’m done with this.'”

To understand why getting dunked on by a middle schooler hit Day as hard as it did, you have to go back to Manchester, New Hampshire, and to a man named Stan Spirou. Day’s father-in-law and lifelong father figure, Spirou, spent 33 years as the head men’s basketball coach at Southern New Hampshire University. He won six conference titles and averaged nearly 20 wins a season during his tenure. 

Day grew up in the bleachers watching Spirou’s teams, absorbing the game from the sidelines before he was ever old enough to understand what he was absorbing. 

The competitive streak didn’t come from nowhere. It was built in the bleachers of Southern New Hampshire University, watching Stan Spirou’s Penmen, with two best friends by his side: Jim Statires, whose father was close friends with Spirou, and Matt Dufour, the son of one of Spirou’s own assistants. The three were inseparable almost immediately. Summers meant battles at the local pool. Evenings meant chicken tenders at the Puritan Backroom, the restaurant the Statires family had run for generations, until the boys were old enough to actually work there. And winters? Winters were always for basketball.

“It was on a different level from the very beginning,” Statires recalls. “It was constant.”

And the results backed it up. Together, the three friends won regional Catholic Youth Organization championships in grade school, with the biggest prize coming in their junior year at Manchester Central High School, when they captured a New Hampshire state championship. Day was the star of the group. He also wasn’t limited to basketball. He was the catcher on the baseball team and the quarterback on the football team, which also brought home a state title for Manchester Central. Spirou had handed him the most valuable lesson of all without ever saying a word: that winning is a standard you refuse to drop.

“He was always a leader,” Dufour says. “He’s the person you want taking the last shot. He had the ability to will himself to be good, it seemed. He made everyone feel like they were part of something bigger than ourselves.”

Ryan Day didn’t leave the sport behind when he traded a point guard’s handles for a quarterback’s arm. Day has spoken openly about pulling basketball concepts like spacing, ball movement, and point guard decision-making into his offensive philosophy at Ohio State. 

“You can learn a lot about someone by watching them play basketball,” he’s said.

Which brings everything back to Sonny Styles, the eighth grader who dunked on his head coach and, apparently, robbed Ryan Day of the last shred of basketball confidence he had left.

Ryan Day on Sonny Styles

Styles arrived in Columbus in 2022 after reclassifying from the 2023 class, making him one of the youngest players on the roster at just 17. He came in as a five-star safety recruit, and he came in as a basketball player just as much as a football player. 

At Pickerington Central High School in Ohio, Styles was a dual-sport athlete who helped lead his basketball team to a state championship, which, given the dunking incident, tracks completely.

Day continued, “The thing about Sonny was that Sonny did a lot of things in high school. He’s a really good basketball player. You knew he was a tremendous athlete overall. We all thought that he was going to grow into a linebacker. I don’t know if he always thought that was going to happen. He fought it a little bit early on, but now that he’s down there, the length that he has, the ability to recognize what’s going on up front, his ball skills, and the athleticism that he had in basketball and just being a skill guy most of his entire life allow him to play in space at a high level. You see his range, you see his acceleration.”

Whatever skepticism scouts might have had about Styles’ position fit, he answered it in Indianapolis. At 6 feet 5 and 244 pounds, Styles posted a 43.5-inch vertical jump at the NFL Combine. It is the best ever recorded by a linebacker in NFL history and the highest by an off-ball linebacker since 2003. He paired it with an 11-foot-2 broad jump and a 4.46-second 40-yard dash, tying for the fastest among all linebackers at this year’s Combine. ESPN’s Mel Kiper has him ranked as the No. 7 overall prospect in the entire draft.

The kid who dunked on his coach is now headed to the NFL. And somewhere, Ryan Day is still not playing basketball.