Off the Bench: Sarah Lessig of Princeton women’s basketball

Next, we get to know Sarah Lessig ’29, a rising Princeton women’s basketball sophomore from Seattle. A probable anthropology major and also a member of the Tigers softball team, Lessig is a study in fluidity — flowing seamlessly across sports, music, film — and West Coast to East Coast:

“I don’t know how to read music, so I just play by ear.”

This casual, improbable versatility is almost all you need to know to understand Sarah Lessig. Except that there is so much more.

Lessig fully occupies the rarified air of college basketball. She just happens to also pull off a range of other impressive things — without ego, and in places you wouldn’t expect. In addition to a bright future as a rising sophomore on the Princeton women’s basketball team that recruited her, she was a also a key outfielder for the Tigers’ Ivy League champion softball team. She was a walk-on.

She also skateboards, has real Olympic hopes in the nascent sport of flag football; and when she said “play by ear,” she meant on guitar, piano and harmonica.

Lessig was born into a tight-knit family, including her mom and her older brother. More accurately, she was born into a family and the community of her downtown Seattle low-income housing project: single parents, elderly, young people working in restaurants, baristas, warehouse workers, and homeless people she greets on a daily basis. Her mom has managed the building they also live in for 20 years.

“It’s very different than Princeton,” Lessig noted.

When Lessig packed up for the East Coast, she brought with her an uncommon capacity to connect with diverse people and a free-flowing curiosity.

Curiosity and a bit of circumstance taught her to play a small keyboard in her apartment, trying to emulate her mom’s skill as a pianist. She played baseball because she had to tag along while her mom coached her brother’s little league team.

While many young athletes are specializing in one sport in elementary school, Lessig was never under any pressure to do so. For her, the rotation was essential to development in each sport.

“Doing something different fueled my love for the thing I was spending time away from,” Lessig said. “I looked forward to the baseball season while I was playing basketball, and vice versa. I prioritized one thing at a time. At basketball practice, I only think about basketball. At softball, only softball.”

Lessig knows she would burn out if she didn’t mix it up. Like the best athletes, she has cultivated resilience. When organized sports shut down during COVID, she spent hours teaching herself skateboarding tricks on stairs.

“It’s super-artistic and expressive,” she said.

Unlike many of her peers who are now playing Division I hoops, Lessig did not have early access to club sports or trainers.

“I was always doing it for myself,” she remembered. “My mom never made me play a sport. I didn’t have any coaches that were on me about anything. I was practicing for the love of the game and, doing it because I enjoyed it.”

What she may have lacked in resources, Lessig made up for in self-awareness.

“I was checking myself every time I went out on a court,” Lessig recalled, “to make sure that I still wanted to do it.”

Once she had committed to play basketball at Princeton, Lessig also remembers making a commitment to herself about softball.

“I made a promise to myself that it wouldn’t be the last time I step on a softball field in uniform,” Lessig recounted.

Lessig arrived at Princeton with realistic expectations after only a few years of competitive basketball. She embraced being a learner, using every practice as an opportunity to absorb the game. She measured her freshman season by growth, perspective and gratitude.

“My actual basketball knowledge was relatively limited,” Lessig said. “I put full trust in my coaches. I expected a huge learning curve, which is exactly what I got. I felt grateful every single day. I was getting reps and exposure to talent.”

It would be hard to imagine a better attitude to have on your bench.

But this is a series about what happens off the bench.

In Lessig’s case, what has happened was winning the support of the basketball program, with a strong vote of confidence from her strength and conditioning coach, to join the softball team. Lessig appeared in 14 games as a pinch runner, scoring seven runs and stealing a base in 2026.

Just as significantly, Lessig entered Princeton undecided about a major, but finds herself increasingly drawn to anthropology, especially at its intersection with filmmaking.

“I went into my Anthropology and Film class every single day excited to learn and left more confused than I came in — which was amazing,” Lessig said. “It felt like a brain teaser every day.”

Very much like an anthropologist, Lessig loves to explore ambiguity, and how “there are all these ways of thinking about people and the way they interact with each other that are beneath the surface.” She recognizes that “trying to understand the neighborhood that [she] grew up in is a big part of what I love thinking about.”

For the moment, Lessig is very much enjoying trying to figure out what makes her classmates and teammates click, too.

“Everybody on this campus has a reason to be here — a really, really cool reason,” Lessig said. “I still look around and wonder what somebody wrote about in their Princeton essay.”

Lessig is in no rush. After Princeton, she is considering maybe working in baseball, with her film and anthropology knowledge. Without parental pressure to do anything but be happy, she knows she wants to impact the community she was brought up in. Recognizing that at some point she will hang up her cleats (and her high-tops and skateboard too, presumably), she wants to be ready to be a “person outside of sports.”