Danielle “Dani” Carnegie wasn’t supposed to be a basketball player.
Carnegie’s athletic fate had been predetermined during her youth, and it included a future on the soccer pitch. The Carnegie family even made a calculated move from New York to Conyers to give Carnegie better soccer opportunities and exposure.
But about the time that Carnegie began middle school, a basketball found its way into her hands. And a couple of years later, the Carnegies had a decision to make as to which sport the emerging star should focus all her energy on.
“It was emotional for me and my family, but they supported me whichever decision I made,” Carnegie looked back on those discussions. “It hit home for a lot of us.”
Sticking with basketball appears to have been the right call for Carnegie, Georgia Tech’s 5-foot-9 star guard who leads the undefeated and 13th-ranked Yellow Jackets into action at 7 p.m. Thursday against Virginia Tech at McCamish Pavilion.
Carnegie, 19, has been named the ACC’s rookie of the week five times already. She leads Tech in scoring at 16 points per game, 3-point shots made (45) and 3-point shooting (42.1%) and her three 3′s per game ranks 10th nationally and second among ACC players.
Not bad for someone who picked up the game only half a dozen years ago.
“She’s a walking bucket,” Tech coach Nell Fortner told RamblinWreck.com in December. “She can get a shot off whenever she wants it, and that comes in really handy whenever you need some points on the board.”
Carnegie was born in New York and spent most of her childhood in Mount Vernon, New York, where she learned the game of soccer from her father Norton Carnegie, a native of Jamaica. When Dani Carnegie moved with her family to Georgia at the age of 12, she had every intent on furthering her soccer game with organizations like the Olympic Development Program and the Gwinnett Soccer Academy.
A couple of Carnegie’s siblings, however, played basketball in a church league. Carnegie began to join in, just for fun, she said, not really thinking anything serious about a potential future on the hardwood.
Soon enough, though, people were starting to notice the Carnegie kid’s basketball game was legit.
“I didn’t take it seriously until about the 11th grade, I’d say,” Carnegie confided. “That’s when I started trying to win everything and trying to win certain things. I didn’t care about the personal accolades at the end of the day, but for my team, I wanted to win games for them.”
Notoriety came quickly for Carnegie as she burst onto the scene for Rockdale County High School. Twice she was a first-team all-state selection in GHSA’s Class 6A and scored 20 points per game as a junior in leading Rockdale County to the state semifinals in 2023.
Carnegie then transferred to Grayson High School for her senior season and became one of the state’s top prep recruits in the class of 2024. A senior season that included a quadruple-double, Miss Georgia Basketball, Georgia of the Player of the Year and Georgia Gatorade Player of the Year awards also was full of recruiting attention.
That was attention that Carnegie didn’t necessarily enjoy.
“In the beginning it was overwhelming,” she said.
But Carnegie was meticulous in surveying her choices of college programs to play for, watching how the coaching staffs interacted with the current rosters, the style of play each team implemented and how she could fit into the respective systems. She eventually chose Tech over Alabama, Baylor, Florida State, Louisville and Kentucky, explaining how the loyalty the Jackets showed her along the way stood out above the rest.
Since arriving on campus, Carnegie has been nothing short of steady, scoring in double figures in all but two games this season. She goes into Thursday’s matchup with the Hokies fresh off a career-high 28 points against Syracuse and has dropped at least 20 points in three consecutive outings.
At her current scoring pace, Carnegie will sniff 500 points for the season. Only three freshmen in Tech history have scored 500 points in their first season in white and gold.
“Dani comes with a basketball acumen that — I haven’t seen it in a while,” Fortner said. “She just has it. It just reeks from her. She understands the game, she understands how to get her shot. She just has an understanding of the game that’s really fun to coach and is fun to watch.”
Carnegie has begun her time at Tech as a business administration major and said she is considering an avenue in civil engineering as well. She hasn’t given much thought to what life after basketball might look like, mostly because she’s focused on her Tech career and a possible future in professional basketball.
Tech is off to its best start in program history and best ACC start (3-0) since the 2010-11 season. The Jackets are one of only five teams nationally — and the lone ACC squad — without a loss on its resume at this point.
And a big reason for those facts is because of the play of Carnegie, Tech’s top scorer who believes she plays on one of the top teams in the country.
“We can be the best team in the nation, but we have to prove it every day to people,” she said. “One thing we do is stay together, fight for each other every day.”
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