Courtney Vandersloot

Courtney Vandersloot (born February 8, 1989) is an American and Hungarian basketball point guard for the New York Liberty of the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA) and for Fenerbahçe in the EuroLeague Women.

Graves would finally get to see Vandersloot at length in her junior year, on the day before the 2006 Washington Class 4A state tournament.

He offered her a scholarship after seeing her practice, even though he did not stay for the tournament.

That season, she had averaged more than 18 points and 7 assists as she led Kentwood to its first state tournament appearance; they would lose in the second round of the tournament to Spokane's University High, led by future Tennessee star Angie Bjorklund.

After that season, Vandersloot was asked by many people if she would consider Washington or another Pac-10 school, but decided against it after a Pac-10 assistant told Hennig she was too small.

She would eventually sign with Gonzaga in November 2006, during her senior year at Kentwood; she noted in 2011, "I wasn't really being highly recruited and I just didn't want to go through the stressful recruiting process, so I committed early to Gonzaga."

Vandersloot took her game to another level as a senior, averaging 26 points, 7 assists, 5 rebounds, and 5 steals while leading Kentwood to a third-place finish in the state tournament; their only loss was in the state semifinals.

She scored 113 points in the tournament, one shy of the state record for a girls' tournament, and was named MVP.

Vandersloot was also consensus first-team all-state, and was named the state's player of the year by the Seattle Times.

Vandersloot was rated as the No. 64 national prospect, and No. 35 among guards, by Scout.com.

By her own admission, Vandersloot came to Gonzaga as a shy freshman.

During that first season, Graves suggested that she call the school's greatest point guard in history for advice—Hall of Famer John Stockton.

Vandersloot would recall that it "took me a couple of weeks to build up," and when she finally called Stockton for the first time, she hoped that she would reach his voice mail so she wouldn't have to talk.

Vandersloot eventually worked with Stockton throughout her Gonzaga career.

As a freshman in 2007–08, she was the West Coast Conference newcomer of the year and named to the 10-member All-WCC first team after averaging 10.3 points, 5.7 assists, and 1.9 steals per game entering the WCC tournament, finishing in the top five in the WCC in the latter two categories while the Zags went 13–1 in conference play and earned the tournament's top seed.

However, the Bulldogs lost in the WCC final to San Diego and ultimately missed out on the NCAA Tournament, playing instead in the WNIT.

They defeated UC Davis in the first round before falling to Colorado in the second round.

In her 2008–09 sophomore season, she set a school record in assists with 239; at the end of the regular season, her average of 7.3 per game led the conference, and she was also third in the conference in scoring at 16.4 per game.

Vandersloot won the first of what would be three WCC Player of the Year awards.

The Bulldogs went on to win the WCC tournament, with Vandersloot named tournament MVP.

In the NCAA tournament, the Zags defeated Xavier for the program's first NCAA Tournament win before narrowly losing in the second round to Pitt.

As a junior in 2009–10, Vandersloot led Division I in assists, averaging 9.4 per game, while leading the Zags to an unbeaten record in conference play.

Drafted by the Chicago Sky with the third pick in the 2011 WNBA draft, she was selected as an All-Star and named to the All-Rookie Team in her rookie year.

Born in the Seattle suburb of Kent, Washington to parents who both worked for Boeing, Vandersloot grew up in a neighborhood with many children her age, and said in a 2011 interview that "all we did was play sports, all sports."

Her father built a sports court with a basketball goal behind the family house, but she almost never played there, choosing instead to play at a hoop in front of a neighbor's house where she could easily be seen by other children in the neighborhood.

She regularly played against boys.

During the third grade, she wrote a school paper about her dreams of one day playing in the WNBA.

While Vandersloot regularly played basketball and many other sports as a child—she was also on a fast-pitch softball team that was runner-up in a Washington state tournament at age 11— her favorite sport was soccer; she had a poster of Mia Hamm on her bedroom wall.

She did not concentrate on basketball until high school:

"I grew up wanting to go to North Carolina because of Mia Hamm. Once I got into high school and basketball started interfering with club soccer I found I dreaded going to soccer practice. I was having so much fun developing my game. I just fell in love with it."

Vandersloot became a basketball star at Kentwood High School in her hometown.

Her coach, Keith Hennig, a former player at Central Washington University who is 6 inches taller than Vandersloot, regularly played one-on-one against her either before or after the team's practice.

He would later say, "I did not take it easy on her at all. I was more physical than anything she's ever been used to. At times, I wasn't too nice. I would ride her and foul her. I'd put my hand in her face and she would whine and complain about fouls. I'd say, 'There's no fouls out here.' " She eventually reached the point where she regularly beat her coach off the dribble.

A pivotal moment in her life came during the summer before her sophomore year, when she went with a friend to the Gonzaga University girls' basketball camp.

She would say about the trip in 2011, "I just fell in love with this place. I felt so comfortable here."

The Gonzaga women's basketball staff was equally enthusiastic about her, except for head coach Kelly Graves, who had little opportunity to see her during the camp.

She led the WNBA in assists in 2014 and for five consecutive seasons during 2017–2021, and holds the all-time WNBA records for most assists in a season (300), highest assists-per-game in a season (9.1), and highest career assists-per-game (6.2).

During her college career at Gonzaga University, she was the only women's player in West Coast Conference history to be named the conference's player of the year three times, and also the only player to be named MVP of the WCC women's tournament three times.

In her final season at Gonzaga, she won the Frances Pomeroy Naismith Award as the top NCAA Division I women's player no taller than 5'8" (1.73 m) and the prestigious Nancy Lieberman Award as the top player at her position in Division I women's basketball. Vandersloot is also the first Division I player, male or female, to have accumulated 2,000 points and 1,000 assists in a career.

She was named an All-Star again in 2019, 2021 and 2023, and led the Sky to their first WNBA Championship in 2021.