remember. Too young, indeed, to remember the tension that built and collapsed all at once, the moment her father was fired by USC in a parking lot at Los Angeles International Airport.

Lane Kiffin, with tongue planted in cheek, has publicly embraced the tarmac story in the decade since. But he and Layla always protected their kids from it.

Presley remembers only the good, Layla reflected, all her happiness once contained in that toothy smile. She remembers their family friends, back on USC’s staff. She remembers the grandeur of the bowl games.

In high school, becoming a prominent player for Mater Dei girls volleyball her senior year, she aimed to find a collegiate experience where athletics “overpowers everything else,” as Presley said. So when USC women’s volleyball first gave her a call, amid her junior-year recruitment at Mater Dei, there was no other option.

“It was like a done deal,” Presley said, “that like — nothing could’ve gotten in the way.”

Nothing, indeed. Not even the past. The Mater Dei senior put pen to paper in an unofficial signing-day ceremony in November, cementing a preferred walk-on spot to a women’s volleyball program at the same school that so unceremoniously fired her father, who offered nothing but support on social media.

More than a decade had passed, and he’d moved on to success at Florida Atlantic, and moved on to success at Ole Miss, and just moved on. And in March, Lane tweeted a picture of Presley on her unofficial visit to USC, recreating that end-zone photo from when she was little. Beaming, ear to ear, as a Trojan once again.

“I don’t think it’s something where it’s like, I’m really going against him and to what happened with him,” Presley told the Southern California News Group in November, speaking on her father. “Like, he’s definitely, like, he posts about it. He’s very publicly supportive. So I think that also helps, too.”

“I’ve never really thought about, like — yes, the last name’s there,” she continued. “But I think it’s also just a different thing, with a different sport. Like, starting my own name instead of following his path.”

Make no mistake — to the family, that fall day in 2013 hurt. Kiffin entered an unfavorable situation at USC in 2010, a collegiate-football dynasty slapped with scholarship restrictions in the wake of the NCAA’s crackdown. Still, it was a dream, as Layla described, inheriting the infrastructure left by beloved former boss Pete Carroll. And then he was left behind, four years in, by the team bus.

“With all the sanctions and probations, and everything that he had to get through to try and be successful as they needed him to be, and to happen the way it — it was completely heartbreaking,” Layla reflected of Kiffin’s firing.

But the circumstances of this Kiffin Succession hardly crossed her daughter’s mind in committing to USC, Layla reflected. Presley received interest from smaller Division I programs that would’ve given her a full ride to play volleyball in a “heartbeat,” as Mater Dei coach Dan O’Dell put it.

After a club tournament in Long Beach her junior year, though, USC head coach Brad Keller called to express interest, and Presley would’ve rather taken her chances at USC as a walk-on than play elsewhere.

“I mean, he’s obviously really proud of me, like, I’m proud of what he’s doing, so,” Presley said of her father. “I think, in a way, we went our separate ways, but not in any intention to diss on each other or anything like that.”

A decade ago, after Kiffin was fired, could Layla ever have imagined they’d have a kid playing a sport for USC?

“Absolutely not,” Layla chuckled. “No.” But there they were, on that campus visit in March, riding in a golf cart around the campus that their daughter had always called home. It was strange to them. USC looked plenty different, from what the Kiffins remembered.

But the John McKay Center was still there, the football building Kiffin once dubbed a “huge advantage” for recruiting upon its inauguration in 2012. They drove past the facility, and Keller — the Trojans’ women’s volleyball coach who can deadpan toe-to-toe with the best of them — spoke up, as Layla recounted.

“Oh,” Keller said. “There’s Lincoln Riley’s office.” “Oh, yeah,” Kiffin cracked, sarcastic. “Thanks.”