As the University of Kentucky class of 2026 spent its first month on campus, Tionna Herron could only watch her college classmates via a Snapchat story.
From Herron’s home in DeSoto, Texas, she watched her fellow UK freshmen having fun at Kentucky Wildcats football games and eating in “The 90,” a campus dining facility.
“There were over 2,000 people in that Snapchat story, and it looked like everybody was having fun on campus,” Herron says. “And I was at home.”
Having to undergo open-heart surgery in August of one’s freshman year of college tends to put a crimp in one’s plans for campus life.
“Tionna Herron” will always be the answer to a University of Kentucky sports trivia question. A 6-foot-4 center off of a powerhouse DeSoto High School team, Herron was the first recruit to commit to UK after Kyra Elzy replaced Matthew Mitchell as Wildcats women’s basketball head coach.
In choosing the Cats, Herron said no to scholarship offers from Arizona, Florida, Florida State, Louisville and Mississippi, among many others.
Yet after she first reported to Lexington this summer for UK’s preseason conditioning, Herron began to experience chest pains.
Those raised concerns because Herron, from the time she was found to have an abnormal heartbeat at age 8, had been under the supervision of a cardiologist. “At that time, her chest pain she was complaining of was thought to be muscular,” says Angel Worlds, Herron’s mother. “At that time, it was ‘Just take Ibuprofen and keep doing your every-five-year checkups.’”
In August of last year, however, Herron underwent a pair of surgeries unrelated to her cardiac care.
Over the course of those operations, doctors detected an abnormality in Herron’s heart they had not before noticed. A CT scan revealed that Herron had a rare congenital heart defect, Anomalous Aortic Origin of a Right Coronary Artery, that is seen in less than 1 percent of people.
In layman’s terms, “Her artery wasn’t where it was supposed to be,” Worlds says.
To determine whether or not Herron would need surgery, doctors performed a series of tests. “And they were all normal,” Worlds says.
That allowed Herron to play her senior season of high school hoops. Though playing on a DeSoto team that featured six other NCAA Division I signees in its class of 2022, Herron managed to make her own mark.
While helping DeSoto to its second straight Texas Class 6A state title, Herron averaged 12 points, eight rebounds and three blocked shots a game.
In back-to-back games last winter in an ESPN-sponsored girls’ basketball showcase in Minnesota, Herron faced the nation’s top-ranked player, 6-foot-7 center Lauren Betts of Colorado’s Grandview High School, and its top-ranked team, Sidwell Friends School from Washington, D.C.
Herron dropped 16 points on Betts, then came back with 19 against Sidwell Friends. Those performances encouraged the idea that Herron might start in her first season playing for Elzy at UK in 2022-23.
