Jaime Jaquez Jr. and Dominique Ruotolo Are Engaged, and Every Flower on That Hillside Was White

They met in New York on draft night in 2023, badly. Three years later he asked her on a California hillside at golden hour, with roses banked along an old stone wall and nothing left in the frame to look at except the two of them.

By Shafonne Myers

NBA guard Jaime Jaquez Jr. is engaged to Dominique Ruotolo, the former USC track and field athlete he met in New York City on the night of the 2023 NBA Draft. He proposed on a California hillside at sunset inside an all-white floral installation, with roses and baby’s breath built into two pedestals and banked along an old stone wall. Her engagement ring is a marquise-cut solitaire on a thin band, with no halo and no side stones. The couple announced the engagement on Instagram.

Jaime tells the story of meeting Domi better than anybody else could, and he has told it out loud. June 2023, Barclays Center, eighteenth pick. The best night of his life was still going and he was out in New York when he walked directly into her. Bumped into her, he said, like straight out of a movie. They talked for a while, he suggested they go get pizza, she said sure, and then the tequila caught up with him in the back of an Uber and the night ended with him begging her to take him home and her asking who exactly he thought he was.

He told all of that on the Straight to Cam podcast in August 2025, which means the version everyone is repeating today came from him.

It is not smooth and nobody staged it, and it is a much better story than the one a publicist would have handed them.

Three years on, he asked her to marry him.

It is worth saying who these two are, because it explains something about the pictures.

Jaime played four seasons at UCLA before Miami took him eighteenth overall in the 2023 NBA Draft, which is the night in question. Domi jumped for USC after transferring in from Oregon. Triple jump, long jump, high jump. She won the Pac-12 triple jump title in 2021 and made All-American in 2022, she took bronze at the USA U20 championships back in 2017, and she still sits sixth on USC’s all-time outdoor triple jump list.

He is a Bruin and she is a Trojan, and yes, that has come up.

Two people whose whole adult lives have been organized around a season, a stopwatch, a draft, a schedule somebody else set. Everything either of them has done got measured and ranked and put on a board. Then there is a hillside where nobody is counting anything, and one of them is down on one knee, and she gets to just stand there and cry about it.

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Late light, high up, dry gold hills rolling out toward a hazy line of water. There is an old stone wall running behind them and dirt under their feet, an olive tree on one side and a single cypress standing up on the other. Somebody built two white pedestals and loaded them with roses and baby’s breath, then banked more of the same low along the wall so the flowers read as one continuous line. White petals thrown across the ground. Candles sitting down in the grass, waiting for the sun to finish dropping.

She is in a white slip dress. He is in a white shirt with the sleeves rolled and pale trousers and sneakers, which is the detail that tells you this was a Tuesday kind of dressed-up and not a black tie one.

There is no color anywhere. Not one blush rose, not one green stem left showing, nothing on either of them. The only thing in the whole scene that breaks white is the landscape itself going gold behind them.

I want to be accurate about something, because a lot of people are going to call this simple today. It is not simple. That is a full floral installation and somebody spent hours building it, and the flower bill on it was not small.

What is simple is the decision underneath it. One color. One texture, more or less. Two people who did not put on a look. When you strip a setup down that far there is nothing left in the picture competing for your attention, so your eye goes exactly where it has nowhere else to go, which is her.

And she is the whole thing. In the wide shot she has both hands over her face and her shoulders are up around her ears while he is still down on one knee holding the box open. In the next frame he has her by the waist and he is kissing her forehead and she is crying into her own hands with the ring already on. Then she is laughing with her hand thrown out to show it, and he is looking at her instead of at the camera.

None of that reads as posed, and the styling is the reason you can tell. Color pulls your eye around a frame. White lets you sit still and watch somebody’s face.

A marquise, set solitaire on a very thin band in a warm metal. Nothing on either side of it and no halo. Long and narrow and set the length of her finger, which is the cut people describe as vintage and mean as confident, and it is having a real moment again after a couple of decades of everything being round.

It matches the rest of the decisions up there. One stone, no ornament, the setting doing as little as possible so the shape can do all of it.

My favorite frame is not the proposal.

It is three little instant photos lying face up in the dirt with the dried petals, taken minutes after, the two of them squinting and grinning in every one and her hand up in the last shot with the ring pointed at the lens. Somebody set them down and left them there and a photographer noticed and shot straight down at them.

All that hillside and all those flowers, and the picture that gets you is three drugstore-format squares in the dirt.

I think a lot about who gets photographed like this.

Not who gets a nice picture taken. Who gets the installation, the golden hour, the film grain, the photographer walking backward through the roses, the full weight of luxury editorial pointed at their face while they cry. That treatment has been handed out narrowly for a long time, and for a long time if you did not fit the picture you had to imagine yourself into it, which is a thing I did in a fitting room years ago and would not wish on anybody.

So we run this one. Not as a novelty and not as a lesson. We run it the way any beautiful proposal gets run, because that is the point.

Congratulations to both of them, and to whoever built that wall of roses, whose name we would very much like to know.

Are Jaime Jaquez Jr. and Dominique Ruotolo engaged?

Yes. The couple announced their engagement on Instagram, sharing photographs from the proposal.

How did Jaime Jaquez Jr. and Dominique Ruotolo meet?

They met in New York City on the night of the 2023 NBA Draft, June 22, 2023, hours after the Miami Heat selected Jaquez eighteenth overall. Jaquez described the meeting on the Straight to Cam podcast in August 2025, saying he bumped into her and that it felt straight out of a movie.

Who is Dominique Ruotolo?

Dominique “Domi” Ruotolo is a former track and field athlete at the University of Southern California, where she competed in the triple jump, long jump, and high jump after transferring from the University of Oregon. She won the Pac-12 triple jump title in 2021, earned All-American honors in 2022, and took bronze at the 2017 USA U20 championships. She ranks sixth on USC’s all-time outdoor triple jump list.

What kind of engagement ring does Dominique Ruotolo have?

A marquise-cut solitaire set on a thin band in a warm-toned metal, with no halo and no side stones. The stone is set lengthwise along the finger.

Where did Jaime Jaquez Jr. propose?

On a hillside in California at sunset, on a stone terrace overlooking dry gold hills. The couple has not publicly named the specific location.

More on the details in this proposal: [white floral installations] / [marquise and elongated cuts] / [what to wear to your own proposal]

Photos courtesy of @dominiqueruotolo and @trippplej.

Shafonne Myers is the founder and editorial curator of Aisle Society, a network of ten wedding publications reaching 2.2 million people. She founded Pretty Pear Bride in 2011 and has been named in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, People, and Business Insider.

Real weddings, planning answers, and the vendors who got it right. From Shafonne, weekly.