A member of the U.S. Volleyball and Beach Volleyball National team, Kathryn Plummer is the only player in history to have won FIVB World Championship medals in both beach and indoor. In 2019, Plummer was part of the US national team that won the Pan American Cup in Peru. An alum of Stanford University’s volleyball and beach volleyball teams, Plummer is a three-time NCAA champion and a recipient of the James E. Sullivan Award, which is annually given to the best American amateur athlete. Most recently, she played for the Italian professional volleyball team Saugella Team Monza. 

After graduating from Stanford shortly after winning your third NCAA championship title, you chose to join a professional volleyball team in Italy. What made you decide to play overseas?

For women’s volleyball, there’s not much opportunity to play professionally in the United States as of now. The Italian professional volleyball league is very competitive – I knew I would be surrounded by the best players in the world. I wanted that challenge.

Playing Italy was definitely a challenge. First of all, it’s a challenge in and of itself to be away from home: You’re in a whole different culture, people are speaking a different language. You’re being coached in a different language. Additionally, the process of transitioning from a collegiate athlete to a professional player is quite a process. From finding an agent to finally negotiating a contract there were various steps involved before I finally got to visit the team. Between the NCAA semifinal and the championship during my final season at Stanford, I squeezed meetings with four or five agents in my hotel room all while preparing for the national championship.

With all this said,  I’m glad I got to go to play overseas. I’m young, and I want to learn new things.

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How was your season affected by the pandemic? What are your plans moving forward?

By the end of February, our games started to get postponed, and competing seemed no longer to be an option. At that point, pretty much all we could do was just practice, and I ultimately made the decision to return home in the United States. The league was officially canceled when I arrived back in the U.S.

Hopefully, I will be able to play next season, but with various international tournaments that were originally planned for this summer have been canceled much is up in the air.

Ok. So let’s backtrack a little bit to when you first started playing volleyball. Did you grow up playing both beach and indoor volleyball in high school?

Growing up, I was the “sporty” girl. I played basketball, soccer, softball – everything that you could imagine.

I grew up in Southern California, where men’s volleyball is a big part of the culture. My older brother played volleyball. I was the little sister that wanted to go to everything, all the practices, all the games. In a way, I was kind of forced into watching it. I decided to try it myself and first started playing volleyball when I was 10. I really loved it, and soon began to exclusively dedicate my time to the sport … Although I guess in high school, I was on the track and field team, but it was more of a hobby than anything else.

Were you really tall as a kid or did you hit a growth spurt later on?

Yeah, I was really tall. My parents are 6’8″ and 6’3″, and my brother is 6’7″. We’re a very tall family.

You were recruited by various universities. What made you ultimately decide to go to Stanford?

My recruiting process started pretty early – I got my first offer in the seventh grade. Academics and athletics are most important to me, and Stanford excelled in both.

But the thing that drew me in the most was that when I visited Stanford, I felt that I could be myself. Everyone at Stanford is kind of quirky, and weird – they all have their own little thing that makes them unique. At other schools, I felt like I was trying to put on this facade to fit in with their program, but at Stanford, everyone was different in their own ways – I felt like I could really thrive there.

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Well you definitely did thrive over there! You started your Stanford athlete career by winning a national championship your freshman year. What was that experience like?

I’ve talked about this with my teammates from class many times –  it was kind of a blur. I think we were just immensely joyful.

The other championships that we won together throughout our Stanford experience felt different than our first. Our freshman year was one of just pure happiness because we were giddy freshmen that didn’t really know the gravity of what we had accomplished. We were following a lot of senior leadership.

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What type of expectations did you set for yourselves following such a great first season?

As a team, we talked about trying to not listen to the expectations that other people were putting on us. The next three years, I think we pushed ourselves for a strong season because we knew that we could hold ourselves to high standards, as opposed to pushing ourselves to meet any sort of external pressure cast upon us.

In your second season at Stanford your team’s campaign to the finals was cut short after losing to Florida 3-2 in the NCAA semi-finals. What was that experience like?

Pretty much throughout my entire sophomore season, our team breezed through. We had a tough preseason – we did really well. We had a tough conference – we did really well.

I think by the NCAA championships, we let the expectations that were set upon us starting from our successful 2016 season creep in a little bit. We didn’t feel like we were just playing a volleyball game – we felt the pressure to follow up a championship win from the previous year.

We just weren’t a cohesive group. Both Florida and Stanford played good volleyball, but our competitor was more of a cohesive team than we were.

Following the season, we sat down and really tried to bring together our whole team. We sought to find ways to support every member of our team  – I thought this was really important and allowed us to have a lot of success the next two years.

You won three national championships during your time at Stanford. Is there one that is most memorable?

I definitely think my senior season was the most special. All of the seasons were really awesome, but senior year was most memorable because it was the last time I was in a Stanford uniform, the last where my parents watched me play in college and the last I was going to get to play together with my teammates. It was a very bittersweet, happy yet sad moment. My teammates and I were crying because we were happy that we won the championship, but also sad because we knew it was over. Our whole four years – and everything we built in those times was over.

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Why do you think your class on the team has been so successful as a unit? 

We were best friends off the court too, which is nice, but that is by no means necessary to have a successful team. I think we embraced different leadership roles on our team. As for myself, I tried to lead by example – I tried to figure out how to score. Other people had different types of leadership styles: For example, Morgan Hentz was a leader that kept everyone accountable; She made sure that everyone was doing their job. Jenna Gray was the goofy one that lightened the mood when it was too tense. Audriana Fitzmorris was the very intellectual, analytical one. Everyone came together to form a very cohesive group. We worked really hard to figure out ways to support and communicate if people were struggling. There were many tough conversations in the process, but I think it came together at the end.

What was your academic experience like at Stanford? Stanford is a very academically competitive institution as it is athletically – was anything particularly challenging? 

I studied Human Biology. My sophomore year was tough, because I was taking the core classes for my major which was hard.

But after that, I really liked my courses,  because I could take the classes that were very applicable to my interests. I’m very interested in how the body works in exercise and sports. I took a bunch of anatomy and human performance classes, which was really cool. As an athlete, I started to understand my own body better at the biological and molecular level.

You also played on the Beach Volleyball team as a freshman and sophomore at Stanford. How did you balance playing two sports?

It was tough to play competitively for two seasons in one academic year, but it was also nice to be able to get a little breath of something fresh. It was really tough in the winter quarters, because I was practicing for both indoor and beach.

I eventually made the decision that I wanted to start my professional career in indoor and maybe transition to beach later on in my career, because beach is a lot more forgiving to your body when you’re older. So, following my sophomore year I solely focused on playing for the indoor team.

What are your future goals for the sport? 

Since I was little, it has been my dream to go to the Olympics. I’m going to be playing professionally at least until 2024. There’s a lot of things that will unfold up until that point, but I want to try to make the Olympic team. Then we’ll see what I want to do, but that’s way far away. There’s always a professional career in beach volleyball –  you can get paid for that, which is nice. I also just might have a normal job and work in an office. Who knows?

Seven-time Olympic gold medalist Katie Ledecky received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, at a White House ceremony on Friday afternoon. 

The Team USA standout is the most decorated women’s swimmer in the sport’s history. In addition to her seven Olympic golds, she’s also won a total of 21 gold medals at the World Championships, the most of any swimmer regardless of gender. 

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The esteemed award recognizes those who have "made exemplary contributions to the prosperity, values, or security of the United States, world peace, or other significant societal, public or private endeavors," according to a White House press briefing. 

Ledecky is one of 19 medal recipients chosen by the Biden administration this year. She joins a class that spans the worlds of politics, sports, film, human rights, religion, and science. Her fellow 2024 awardees include Everything Everywhere All at Once actress Michelle Yeoh, pioneering Hispanic astronaut Dr. Ellen Ochoa, and former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, plus posthumous winners Jim Thorpe, the first Native American to win an Olympic gold medal for the US, and assassinated civil rights leader Medgar Evers. 

"I'm surrounded by so many extraordinary people in so many different fields," Ledecky told Just Women's Sports on Friday. "I feel like I've made a lot of friends today among that group, and their families and their friends."

Olympic gymnast Simone Biles and USWNT legend Megan Rapinoe were among 2022’s class of Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients. Biles and Rapinoe were the fifth and sixth women athletes to be given the honor, making Ledecky the seventh.

Ledecky said she was surprised to learn how recent it has been that athletes in women's sports have been considered for the honor. Billie Jean King was the first to receive the award in 2009. "That kind of blew my mind that it was that recent," she said.

"There are so many great female athletes that I've looked up to for so many years," she continued. "And I know we're just going to keep pushing ahead, and doing our best to continue to get a seat at every table."

Like Biles, Ledecky receives the Medal of Freedom while she's still actively competing in her sport, a fact not lost on the 27-year-old. "My goals in the pool are to continue to push forward and swim good times, hopefully win some more medals. And then secondly to continue to do good things out of the pool, whether that's inspiring young kids to learn how to swim, get into the sport, set big goals in whatever pursuits they're interested in."

"I've recognized I've had a long career now, and it's important to reflect every now and then. But at the same time, I'm still competing and still working hard into the future."

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.