Courtney Vandersloot

Courtney Vandersloot (born February 8, 1989) is an American professional basketball player for the Chicago Sky of the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA). She is a five-time WNBA All-Star and two-time WNBA champion. She has also played for UMMC Ekaterinburg in the Russian Premier League, Mist BC in Unrivaled, and teams in several other professional leagues. She is regarded as one of the greatest WNBA point guards of all time.

Vandersloot played college basketball for the Gonzaga Bulldogs, holding numerous records and becoming the first player to have her number retired by the program. She was the only West Coast Conference women's player to be named Player of the Year and tournament MVP three times. In her final season, she led the Bulldogs to their first-ever Elite Eight appearance, and won the Frances Pomeroy Naismith Award and Nancy Lieberman Award. She is the first Division I player to record 2,000 points and 1,000 assists in a career.

She was drafted by the Sky with the third pick in the 2011 WNBA draft. She was named an All-Star and to the All-Rookie Team in her rookie year, and was named an All-Star again in 2019, 2021, 2022, and 2023. She led the Sky to their first WNBA championship in 2021. In 2023, she signed with the New York Liberty and helped the team win their first championship in 2024. In 2025, she returned to the Sky.

Playing the point guard position, Vandersloot ranks second in WNBA regular-season total assists (behind Sue Bird) and first in total playoff assists. She led the WNBA in assists in 2014, 2017–2021, and 2023. She holds the all-time WNBA records for assists-per-game in a season (10.0) and a career (6.6). She also holds several Sky franchise records, including the most games played, most points scored, most assists, and most steals.

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.