There was a time when WNBA teams would dare Betnijah Laney to shoot fifteen times a game.

Forcing a player who averaged three points per game in her first four years in the WNBA to beat you, rather than the team’s top offensive threats, was an effective game plan. If Laney scored more than her usual three to five points off rebounds and transition buckets, the defense was still doing its job.

“I’ll be the first to say, if you go back and look at a scout, we just helped off of her. It didn’t matter what year it was, we weren’t going to guard her when she didn’t have the ball,” said former Atlanta Dream head coach Nicki Collen. “We were going to go under every screen. She made a couple shots occasionally against us because we played her so soft, and that was the game plan.”

Now, going under a screen on Laney would be considered a defensive breakdown.

Through ten games with the New York Liberty, the 27-year-old is averaging 21 points per game. She has scored 20-plus in nine of those ten games, including a team-leading 23 points in a win over the Mercury on Sunday night. Her performance has made her an early candidate for league MVP.

But Collen wasn’t thinking about Laney as a scorer when the Dream signed her in 2020 before the bubble season, making it her fourth WNBA stop in five seasons. In a year filled with so much uncertainty, the Dream believed Laney would provide steadiness. She had a reputation as someone who seized an opportunity by playing tough, defensive-minded basketball.

“We went and got Betnijah because I thought this is a kid that’s going to come to the bubble and really compete,” said Collen. “It didn’t matter where she played or who we talked to about her, the message was always going to be the same: She is a great teammate, she plays really hard and she’s going to do whatever you ask of her.”

It was during one particular shooting drill in training camp, in which players would end up taking 50 shots, when Collen and her staff began to see Laney in a different light.

She made 44 of her 50 shots.

“It was like, wow, this is a player who isn’t supposed to be able to shoot. Every day she would come in and it was like, there is absolutely no reason why she can’t shoot,” said Collen. “Her shot prep is good, her form is good. I literally said to her, ‘You know the scouting report on you is that you can’t shoot, right?’”

Laney knew. But she also knew that hadn’t always been the case.

Laney was used to scoring at will as a guard at Smyrna High School in Delaware, earning McDonald’s All-American honors as a senior. At Rutgers, Laney was expected to score when the team needed her to, rebound, defend and make the hustle plays. She did her job well, averaging a double-double of 15.8 points, 10.7 rebounds per game her senior season and graduating as one of four Scarlet Knights to accumulate over 1,400 points and 900 rebounds during her career.

The majority of Laney’s points in college came from mid-range shots and looks closer to the basket. She wasn’t considered a threat from deep, shooting just under 29 percent from beyond the arc on limited attempts in her four years.

Drafted into the WNBA in 2015 as a second-round pick, Laney made the transition from power forward back to guard with the Chicago Sky and the expectations from her college days remained.

“I have been in situations where, ‘That’s just not what we need you to do. We need you to play defense and play hard.’ Even though I felt like I was capable of scoring, it was more so me submitting to the role that my coaches felt like was for me on the team,” Laney said.

“I don’t ever want to get outside of what is being asked of me or feel like I am being hard-headed. If the opportunity did come, then I was going to be ready.”

When Collen saw the shots Laney was knocking down in practice last year, she decided to give her that chance. “Let’s change the scouting report,” Collen told Laney. “What I would like to see you do is take the approach that you shoot the basketball when you’re open. Until I tell you not to, I want you to shoot every time you’re open.”

With the green light from her coach, Laney started shooting more, and her confidence grew with each outing. Suddenly, teams had to game-plan around her and were still unable to stop her.

Laney averaged 17.2 points, 4.9 rebounds and four assists per game in the bubble, earned a spot on the All-Defensive First Team and was named the WNBA’s Most Improved Player. She credited Collen with empowering her to unlock a part of her game she always knew she had.

“Her seeing the work that I had put in and seeing my value, it just spoke volumes. It gave me that extra boost, that extra bit of confidence that I needed to just be free,” Laney said. “There are a lot of players that are very talented, very capable, but they just don’t have that freedom to just play their game. I just took it and ran with it.”

Laney’s breakout campaign led New York to seek her out in free agency and sign her to a multi-year deal in February. It took the Connecticut Sun, arguably the top defensive team in the league, to even begin to slow Laney down nine games into the season. She’s currently fourth in the league in scoring, shooting 48.7 percent from the field and 38.1 percent from deep, and sixth in distribution with 5.4 assists per game.

Those numbers might baffle anyone who watched her play in Chicago, Connecticut and Indiana, or who looks at her career stats prior to 2020. But Laney has always been working in the background, preparing for this moment.

“It’s all about game simulation for me,” Laney said. “I don’t go out and just work on random things. When I am in the gym and looking for particular shots, I ask myself, ‘Are these shots that I know that I will take in a game?’”

At this point, Laney has very few holes in her game. She can score at all three levels — in the paint, in the mid-range and from beyond the arc. She is active off the ball and understands spacing exceptionally well. She can initiate the offense and open up the floor for her teammates with great court vision and decision-making ability. With one of the best mid-range pull-ups in the league, Laney can create for herself off the dribble or penetrate and kick it out to an open teammate.

Laney credits her mother Yolanda Laney — an All-American point guard for coach C. Vivian Stringer at Cheyney State in the early 1980s — for her development as a mid-range scorer.

“She said everybody wants to shoot 3s, everybody wants to get to the basket, but there aren’t a lot of players that have that mid-range go-to,” Laney said. “And that’s what it was for me, that’s where I was comfortable. It wasn’t too far out — it was close enough where I could be consistent.”

Laney uses her experience as a post player in college to her advantage, working to get even smaller defenders switched to her and exploiting the mismatch. With her size and strength, she can post defenders up or back them down and finish close to the rim.

What a clinic by @BetnijahLaney! Huge game and final basket 🤩#SeafoamSZN

Presented by @WithingsEN | #WithingsCommunity pic.twitter.com/Xg9Sb5Wype

— New York Liberty (@nyliberty) June 14, 2021

Defensively, Laney prides herself on game-planning and analyzing opponents. She studies habits and can tell you what almost every team is going to do.

“When we are playing teams, I am watching their last couple of games to try and see their tendencies if we haven’t played them yet,” she said. “Or if we have, what did they do last time that worked for them and how can I be better about that the next go around?”

So, what is the WNBA’s scouting report on Betnijah Laney now? You have to get in her space and make things difficult for her on the catch. You need five players communicating about where she is at all times. You can’t let her cut across your face with easy lines to the basket. You have to contest all of her shots and put someone on her who can size her up on the glass.

And, of course, there’s no more going under screens when Laney has the ball.

“I am a lot more comfortable and a lot more confident in what it is that I am doing,” Laney said. “Coming in, I was nervous, not really sure of what it was I was supposed to be doing. And now I know for sure. The experience and work that I have put in has gotten me to where I am at now.”

After an illustrious career for both club and country, Gotham FC and U.S. Women’s National Team defender Kelley O’Hara announced today via Kelley on the Street that she will be retiring from professional soccer at the end of this year, making the 2024 NWSL season her last.

"I have always said I would play under two conditions: that I still love playing soccer, and if my body would let me do it the way I wanted to," O’Hara told Just Women’s Sports in the lead-up to her retirement announcement. "I realized a while back that I was always going to love it, so it was the physical piece that was going to be the deciding factor."

The 35-year-old will retire as a two-time World Cup champion, an Olympic gold medalist, and at least a two-time NWSL champion, depending on where Gotham finishes this season. Her legacy as a player is hard to fully encapsulate, and will forever run through some of the biggest snapshots in USWNT and NWSL history. 

In 2012, O’Hara played every minute of the USWNT’s Olympic gold medal run, after having recently converted into a defender. Her soaring goal off the bench in the 2015 World Cup semifinal is the stuff of legend. And her return from lingering injury to play in every knockout match of the national team’s 2019 World Cup win cemented a storybook international career. 

It was O’Hara who scored the overtime goal in 2021 to earn the Washington Spirit their first-ever NWSL championship, and O’Hara who returned to help see Gotham earn a title in 2023 after years spent in the trenches with the club’s previous iteration, Sky Blue. Her 15-year career spanned two professional women’s soccer leagues in the U.S. (she earned her first professional title in 2010 with WPS’s FC Gold Pride), as well as sweeping changes to the sport both on and off the pitch.

On the field, O’Hara has always been known for a motor that never quits, making the right flank her domain in attacking possession and defensive transition. In recent years, she’s also been celebrated for a competitive fire that raises the level of her teammates, whether she’s in the starting XI or supporting from the bench.

But injuries take a toll, a reality not always seen by the fans watching from home. "I've never taken anything for granted, and I feel like I've never coasted either," O’Hara said of her late-career success in the NWSL despite battling injuries. "I've always been like, 'I gotta put my best foot forward every single day I step on this field' — which is honestly probably half the reason why I'm having to retire now as opposed to getting a couple more years out of it. I've just grinded hard."

Recently, O’Hara has been sidelined at Gotham with ankle and knee injuries, and the situation motivated her to really prioritize listening to her body. "To get injured and come back, and get injured and come back, and just keep doing it, it really takes a toll on you.

"People don't see the doubt that's associated with injury,” she continued. "As athletes we feel a certain way, we perform a certain way, our body feels a certain way, we're very in tune with our bodies. And there's always so much doubt surrounding injury. It’s like, 'Can I feel the way I felt before?' The reality is sometimes you don't."

O’Hara didn’t arrive at the decision to move on from her playing career lightly. But once she began seriously considering making 2024 her final year during the last NWSL offseason, it felt right. "Once I was like, 'Alright, you know what, this will be my last year,' I have had a lot of peace with it," she said. "Truly the only thing I felt was gratitude for everything that my career has been, all the things I've been able to do and the people I've been able to do it with."

She said she’ll miss daily interactions with her teammates and all the amazing memories they’ve created, though she feels lucky to have formed relationships that go beyond sharing a locker room. "You're basically getting to hang out and just shoot the shit with your best friends every day," she reflected. "Which is so unheard of, and I just feel very lucky to do it for so long."

The Stanford graduate also mentioned that the NWSL’s suspension of regular season play in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic made her realize how much playing allowed her the space to simply be creative every day. The tactical elements of soccer provided O’Hara an outlet for problem solving and made use of her naturally competitive edge.

She’s now gearing up to channel her on-field intensity into her post-playing career full time, which is a new chapter she’s excited to begin. "I don't know if the world's ready for it, like the fact that I'm not going to be putting all of my energy into football all the time," she said with a laugh. 

O’Hara said she would like to stay connected to the game in some fashion, whether it be as an owner, coach, or member of a front office. She’s also interested in the growing media space surrounding women’s sports, having provided on-camera analysis for broadcasters like CBS Sports in addition to starting a production company with her fiancée.

"I just feel like I have a lot of passions, and things that excite me," she says. "And I do want to stay as close as I can to the game, because I feel a responsibility — and I'm not sure in what capacity — to continue to grow it."

A sense of responsibility to grow the game has been a consistent refrain for the USWNT and NWSL players of O’Hara’s era, who ushered in a new age of equal pay for the national team and collectively bargained protections for those in the league. The landscape for new players looks different than it did 14 years ago, in large part due to this pivotal generation.

"I feel an immense sense of pride around that, because I don't know if any of us knew that was gonna happen," she said. "We kind of, as things unfolded, took the next step towards changing what women's football looks like in this country and around the world.

"I'm really grateful to have been part of this era with the players that I was [with], not backing down and pushing and knowing that was the right thing to do."

Whatever the future holds, O’Hara is going ahead full throttle. It’s a piece of advice she’d also give to the next generation of professionals looking to make their own impact.

"Whatever you do in life, do it because you love it, and the chips will fall in place," she said. "If you love something, you're willing to do what it takes. You're willing to make the sacrifices, you're willing to handle the roller coaster.

"To me, it's simple. Don't do it for any other reason but that, and I think you'll be alright."

The Phoenix Mercury center spoke with Robin Roberts about her 10-month incarceration, reflecting on her poor living conditions and shaky mental state ahead of her May 7th memoir.

"The mattress had a huge blood stain on it. I had no soap, no toilet paper," Griner told the ABC News anchor in last night’s 20/20 special. "That was the moment where I just felt less than a human." 

She also detailed some of her lowest moments during that time, saying with tears in her eyes that she went so far as to consider taking her own life on more than one occasion. However, the thought of Russian officials not releasing her body back to her family made her reconsider.

"I just didn't think I could get through what I needed to get through," said Griner.

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In February 2022, Griner was arrested and charged with drug possession and smuggling by a Russian court after Sheremetyevo International Airport police found vape cartridges containing hashish oil in her luggage. The cartridges were prescribed by Griner’s doctor for chronic pain back in Arizona, where medical marijuana is legal. In the interview, the two-time Olympic gold medalist said she had a "mental lapse" while packing, and never intended to bring the cannabis products with her when she returned to play for UMMC Ekaterinburg.

"It's just so easy to have a mental lapse," Griner said. "Granted, my mental lapse was on a more grand scale. But it doesn't take away from how that can happen." 

She was later sentenced to nine years behind bars after her Russian attorneys advised her to plead guilty the following July. Griner was then sent to a remote penal colony where she was forced to spend her days cutting cloth to make military uniforms. From there, it only got worse.

"Honestly, it just had to happen," she said when asked about her decision to cut off her signature long locks. "We had spiders above my bed making nests.

"My dreads started to freeze," she added. "They would just stay wet and cold and I was getting sick. You've gotta do what you've gotta do to survive."

Shortly after Griner’s initial arrest, the U.S. State Department classified her case as wrongfully detained, escalating its urgency within the government and calling even more attention to the situation. On December 8th, she was freed in a prisoner exchange negotiated by the Biden administration.

While she told Roberts she was "thrilled" when she got the news, she was also very upset about having to leave fellow wrongful detainee Paul Whelan behind. She also continues to carry guilt about her arrest, saying "At the end of the day, it's my fault. And I let everybody down."

Griner’s memoir, Coming Home, hits shelves on May 7th.

"Coming Home begins in a land where my roots developed and is the diary of my heartaches and regrets," Griner told ABC News in an exclusive statement. "But, ultimately, the book is also a story of how my family, my faith, and the support of millions who rallied for my rescue helped me endure a nightmare."

Longtime USWNT fixture Carli Lloyd took to Instagram Wednesday morning to announce that she’s pregnant with her first child. 

"Baby Hollins coming in October 2024!" she wrote. The caption framed a collaged image of baby clothes, an ultrasound photo, and syringes indicating what she described as a "rollercoaster" fertility journey.

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In a Women’s Health story published in tandem with Lloyd’s post, the Fox Sports analyst and correspondent opened up about her struggles with infertility and the lengthy IVF treatments she kept hidden from the public eye.

"Soccer taught me how to work hard, persevere, be resilient, and never give up. I would do whatever it took to prepare, and usually when I prepared, I got results," Lloyd told Women’s Health’s Amanda Lucci. "But I found out that I didn’t know much about this world. I was very naive to think that we wouldn’t have any issues getting pregnant. And so it began."

Lloyd went on to discuss her road to pregnancy in great detail, sharing the highs and lows of the process and expressing gratitude for the care and support her family and medical team provided along the way. She rounded out the piece with a nod toward others navigating the same challenges, encouraging people to share their own pregnancy journeys, painful as they may be.

"My story is currently a happy one, but I know there are other women who are facing challenges in their pregnancy journey. I see you and I understand your pain," she said. "My hope is that more and more women will speak up about this topic, because their stories helped me. I also wish for more resources, funding, and education around fertility treatments. There is much to be done, and I hope I can play a role in helping."

The 41-year-old New Jersey native retired from professional soccer in 2021, closing out her decorated career with 316 international appearances, the second-most in USWNT history, in addition to 134 international goals. A legend on the field, Lloyd walked away from the game with two World Cups, two Olympic gold medals, and two FIFA Player of the Year awards.

On Tuesday, FIFPRO announced the launch of Project ACL, a three-year research initiative designed to address a steep uptick in ACL injuries across women's professional football.

Project ACL is a joint venture between FIFPRO, England’s Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA), Nike, and Leeds Beckett University. While the central case study will focus on England’s top-flight Women's Super League, the findings will be distributed around the world.

ACL tears are between two- and six-times more likely to occur in women footballers than men, according to The Guardian. And with both domestic and international programming on the rise for the women’s game, we’ve seen some of the sport's biggest names moved to the season-ending injury list with ACL-related knocks.

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Soccer superstars like Vivianne Miedema, Beth Mead, Catarina Macario, Marta, and England captain Leah Williamson have all struggled with their ACLs in recent years, though all have since returned to the field. In January, Chelsea and Australia forward Sam Kerr was herself sidelined with the injury, kicking off a year of similar cases across women’s professional leagues. And just yesterday, the Spirit announced defender Anna Heilferty would miss the rest of the NWSL season with a torn ACL. The news comes less than two weeks after Bay FC captain Alex Loera went down with the same injury. 

Project ACL will closely study players in the WSL, monitoring travel, training, and recovery practices to look for trends that could be used to prevent the injury in the future. Availability of sports science and medical resources within individual clubs will be taken into account throughout the process.

ACL injuries in women's football have long outpaced the same injury in the men's game, but resources for specialized prevention and treatment still lag behind. Investment in achieving a deeper, more specialized understanding of the problem should hopefully alleviate the issue both on and off the field.