After the “Wubble” season triumphantly concluded in mid-October, with zero positive Covid-19 cases and a 68% increase in viewership, a large portion of the W’s players began their annual voyage to leagues across the globe, where they earn the bulk of their annual basketball income.

Surprisingly, the ongoing pandemic had little effect on the total number of athletes who went overseas this “off season.” Both this year and the one before, roughly 90 WNBA players took their skills abroad. It appears the substantial income (relatively speaking) and valuable court time were too important to pass up. As the WNBA’s reigning points leader, Arike Ogunbowale, explained to Breanna Stewart on a recent pod episode of Stewie’s World, “I’m still young and I need to make money and there’s a lot of money overseas for me.”

 

STEWART AND OGUNBOWALE: WNBA STARS GETTING BUCKETS IN RUSSIA

Both Stewart and Ogunbowale are playing in Russia this winter. While Stewie feels much the same way as her counterpart, she also emphasizes the need to get minutes on the court since her 2019 Achilles rupture.

“For me it’s like, coming back from an injury, I can’t imagine not playing basketball just by choice,” she tells her listeners. “I want to be able to play as much as possible. In the situation where in our country so many people are unemployed, if we have a job, we need to take that job and go and do what we need to do.”

Someone may want to tell Stewie her “recovery” appears well behind her given the outstanding season she had in Bradenton, Florida. She placed fourth in the league in scoring, fifth overall in blocks, and won her second WNBA Championship in three years with the Seattle Storm.

Unfortunately for Stewart, and all her colleagues abroad this year, the risk of Covid-19 is very real. Stewie tested positive within a week of arriving in Russia despite strict travel precautions and safety measures from her UMMC Ekateringburg team. Luckily, she had no symptoms and was able to return to play after a thorough quarantine period. Alongside the contagion risk is a wide disparity in players’ confidence in their team’s testing protocol.

“It’s pretty much up in the air for us to be honest. There was like weeks and weeks I went without getting tested and another week I got tested like three times,” Ogunbowale laments to Stewie.

No one can guard Arike. It's really like that. @Arike_O

(via @EuroLeagueWomen) pic.twitter.com/GYRdcsD734

— WSLAM (@wslam) January 19, 2021

.@33katielou was ???? ????ℕ ???????????????????? ???? today!

29 pts, 5 reb, 6-8 3PT@CBAvenida

???????????????????? ????????! ⤵️ pic.twitter.com/icwuIChj2J

— Dallas Wings (@DallasWings) January 19, 2021

LIZ CAMBAGE LOOKS READY FOR HER WNBA COMEBACK

Hopping down to the southern hemisphere, Australian-born Elizabeth Cambage spent 2020 putting on a clinic in the Australian Women’s National Basketball League after receiving a medical exemption for the WNBA 2020 bubble season. Cambage and her Melbourne-based Southside Fliers won the league championship in mid-December on the shoulders of the 3x WNBA All-Star’s 23.5 PPG and 8.7 rebounds per game.

The Las Vegas Aces 6’8” center is one of a handful of Australians in the WNBA. Alongside last year’s league MVP, A’ja Wilson, Cambage looks ready to help lead the Aces to another Finals run in 2021.

6ft 8in point guard coming through! ????@ecambage has moves ???? pic.twitter.com/10SFR36t0q

— Southside Flyers (@SouthsideFlyers) December 2, 2020

Fellow Aussie and Seattle Storm back-up guard Sami Whitcomb left the Wubble prior to the Finals in order to make it home to her wife in time for the birth of their first child. A week or so later, she watched from her hotel room as her teammates beat Cambage’s Aces in three straight to win their fourth WNBA Championship, tying them with the Minnesota Lynx and the legendary Houston Comets for most all-time league titles.

 

SOME WNBA PLAYERS TOOK THE OFFSEASON OFF

Whitcomb, who usually plays the off-season either in Europe or Australia, is taking a break this year to be with her new family of three. She isn’t the only veteran player sitting this international season out.

While the total number of players abroad held steady, there are several athletes who went overseas last year but decided against it this season. Among them are DeWonna Bonner, Jewell Loyd, Sydney Weise, Teira McCowan, Ariel Atkins, and Bria Hartley, to name a few.

 

AND SOME COULD STILL HEAD ABROAD

If you’re a Minnesota Lynx fan, keep your nose to the grindstone to hear whether 2020 Rookie of the Year Crystal Dangerfield and 2019 Rookie of the Year (and co-host of a gem of a podcast) Napheesa Collier head overseas later this winter or spring.

There are also mumblings that number one overall 2020 draft pick, Sabrina Ionescu, is considering going abroad soon to get some playing time. Ionescu missed most of her rookie season after severely spraining her ankle in just her third professional game. The injury robbed us all of the dream of what Ionescu’s rookie WNBA season could have been, especially after she dropped 33 points in her second game. It was also salt in the wound of 2020 after the pandemic first robbed us of watching Ionescu and her Oregon Ducks compete for a NCAA Championship.

Then there’s a long list of vets who have closed the book on their year-round playing days: Diana Taurasi, Sue Bird, Candace Parker, Nneka and Chiney Ogwumike, Elene Della Donne, Sylvia Fowles, Skylar Diggins-Smith, etc. But the one vet we’d love to hear any and all whispers about getting back to the court? The one and only Maya Moore.

If 2021 is going to redeem the dumpster fire that was 2020, re-gifting the world the honor of watching Moore do her magic on the hardwood would be a fantastic start.

That may just be a pipe dream, the result of too many hours in quarantine. But while the pandemic has turned normal life upside down for most Americans, the year-round grind of the WNBA’s biggest stars remains a constant. And though we love catching highlights on Twitter, we can’t wait to see them all stateside for this next WNBA season.

Seven-time Olympic gold medalist Katie Ledecky will receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, at a White House ceremony this 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. 

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.

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.