Photography by Mary Mathis/The Players’ Tribune
Napheesa Collier - The Players' Tribune portraits
Minnesota Lynx forward Napheesa Collier
As a child, Napheesa Collier knew two very different worlds—within her own family. Her father came from war-torn Sierra Leone, her mother from the tiny Missouri town of Eugene. Both helped shape her into a humble hoops star.
A standout at Incarnate Word Academy, Collier went on to play for the University of Connecticut and then the Minnesota Lynx, being named the WNBA Rookie of the Year in 2019. Now she’s aiming for the Olympics, representing the U.S. in three-on-three basketball.
Collier is known for her serene demeanor, both on and off the court. “My parents always taught me to be really humble,” she says, “especially with people off the court, to treat people the right way.”
Her family is a source of deep pride. Her grandfather Gershon Collier was a high-profile lawyer who helped negotiate Sierra Leone’s independence from Britain in 1961, then became the country’s ambassador to both the United Nations and the United States before serving as Sierra Leone’s chief justice. On the wall of her childhood home: a photo of her grandfather meeting with President John F. Kennedy in the Oval Office.
Collier never got to meet her grandfather—he died before she was born—but she remembers feeling proud as a young girl when she learned about his life, even if she didn’t fully understand his role in history at the time. “My dad would tell stories about growing up and what his dad did and things like that, but as a kid, it just seems normal, like, ‘Oh cool, Grandpa did this,’” she recalls. “You don’t realize until you get older that, wow, it was really amazing what he did.”
Her father came to America in the 1990s amid civil war in his homeland. He met her mother while both were working at a nursing home in Jefferson City one summer. Collier laughs as she describes the differences between the two sides of the family. Her dad’s community of Sierra Leonean Americans is known for gatherings that are “super loud,” she says, “music booming, food everywhere, just like a party all the time.” Her mom’s family, she says, is “a little quieter. We play cards and stuff; they live on a farm, and it’s just so different. It’s funny.”
A tall kid, she began playing basketball in Jefferson City before moving with her family to St. Louis when she was a sophomore in high school. Her strategy on the court—showing no emotion—stems from advice given to her by her father.
“One thing that my dad always said was that you want to try to get a reaction out of the people you’re playing against, like, you want them to get frustrated. So if I’m trying to do that to them, why would I show them when I’m frustrated? I don’t want them to know that they’re getting to me,” she says. “That’s kind of where my mindset came from. I have been doing that for such a long time because, you know, you love doing that, you love getting the other team riled up.”
Photo courtesy of Incarnate Word Academy
Collier returned to speak at Incarnate word academy when her jersey was retired, on December 3, 2018.
Dan Rolfes, her high school coach at Incarnate Word, knows her game face well. “She always did have that kind of stoic look when she played,” he says. “When she makes a great move or does something spectacular on the court, she’s not the type that’s gonna pound her chest or throw her fist in the air. Typically, she’s gonna give credit to someone else.”
He laughs as he recalls how she used to quietly sit and read a book before games. “She’s an avid reader,” he says. “I would go in the locker room before the game, and she would be reading a murder mystery novel. When other people are listening to their headphones, getting pumped up, she’s reading a book. But that’s just her personality; I never ever felt there was one game where she slacked off or didn’t give 100 percent effort. When the game starts, she’s all in.”
The school won the state championship in its division all three years that Collier played for the team. She was such a gracious star, Rolfes says, that opponents would ask to take a photo with her after the game. “Players on the other team or parents or even other coaches would ask to get their picture taken with Napheesa. She’s such a good person that even when people were losing to her, they had so much respect for her.”
He remembers the words of her parents when she first came to the school as a sophomore. “They’re the reason she is the way she is. They’re very humble,” he says. “When they moved from Jeff City to St. Louis, they were trying to find schools, and when they decided to come to Incarnate, her dad, Gamal, said, ‘We don’t anticipate her starting or having a big role her sophomore year.’ They weren’t coming and demanding anything. They said, ‘We hope she earns time.’”
Indeed, she did. Her jersey—number 24—would become the first to be retired at the school.
But after ruling the courts in high school, she struggled to find her footing when she arrived at the University of Connecticut in 2015. The school’s powerhouse team holds 11 national titles to date. As a freshman, “you have a huge spotlight on you,” she recalls. “Everything is at a different level. You come in knowing that it’s gonna be hard because, yeah, I’m in college, it’s gonna be harder—people are faster, bigger, stronger—but you have no idea how hard it is until you actually get there. It’s the mental side of it that’s the hardest. You have to be completely locked in for two to three hours every day with a new system, a new team, a new everything.”
Heading into her sophomore year, she turned a corner. “I just had to flip a switch in my mind,” she says, noting that she felt disappointed in her performance as a freshman. “I just made a decision that I never wanted to feel that way again, so I put in a bunch of work in the off season and I came back ready. It was kind of like that mental flip, saying, ‘I’m not gonna allow myself to be this way anymore.’”
In her junior year, the team lost a heartbreaker to the University of Notre Dame in the national semifinals, a moment that Collier counts as a learning experience. She was guarding a player who fired off a last-second buzzer beater, she says, describing the loss as “pretty gut-wrenching.” But after giving herself time for “a little pity party,” she moved forward. “You have to get ready for the next year. You just have to learn from it. I’ll never guard a ball that way again at the end of a quarter or the end of a game or a last-shot situation,” she says. “I just have to take what happened and use it for the future. I might get beat another way, but I’m never getting beat that way again!”
By the time she graduated from UConn, in 2019, she had racked up more than 2,400 points, making her the third-highest career scorer at the school, and had earned a slew of titles and honors, including twice being named the American Athletic Conference Player of the Year.
That spring, she became the sixth overall draft pick in the WNBA. At first, joining the Minnesota Lynx reminded her of her first year in college: a new level with new pressures. But this time, the 6-foot-1 forward fended off feelings of uncertainty quickly.
“I found myself struggling again in the preseason; it felt like my freshman year a little bit, and I was just, like, ‘No, I’m not doing this again,’” she says.
Indeed, she excelled in her first game. After that, she says, “everything was good. I again flipped that mental switch where I was, like, I’m not gonna allow myself to go back into those old habits and how I felt my freshman year. Then the rest of the year was great. Rookie of the Year was what I set for myself coming into the league. It felt amazing to win that.”
Her Olympic bid is in a sport that will make its debut at the Games next summer, three-on-three basketball, in which teams of three compete on a half-court with one basket. “It’s super-fun to watch,” she says. “The shot clock is 12 seconds, so there’s a shot going up at least every 12 seconds. It’s really fast paced. You have to be in really good shape.” She has made the U.S. Olympic qualifying team and is now set to compete with global teams to earn a spot at the Games in Tokyo, which have been delayed to next July amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
Collier was in China in January, preparing to play for a professional team there for the winter season, when news of the virus began to spread. The season was canceled, and Collier returned to the U.S., hunkering down with her fiancé, Alex Bazzell, a trainer for NBA and WNBA players, and her mini goldendoodle at home in St. Charles. To stay in shape, she worked out at a church gym.
At the time of this interview, she was preparing to start the WNBA season, with all 12 teams gathering at IMG Academy, a boarding school and sports training center in Bradenton, Florida, to play the entire season, no fans in attendance. Collier says she was tested for the virus every day for two weeks upon arriving in Florida and that the testing would continue regularly during the season.
Despite the challenges presented by the virus, “I was really excited to get back on the court,” she says. “I knew that they were going to take every precaution to make it safe.” She adds that the idea of playing without fans in the stands is “definitely weird.”
Recently she teamed up with the 2018 WNBA Rookie of the Year, A’ja Wilson of the Las Vegas Aces, to launch a podcast, Tea With A & Phee, to talk about the unusual season and their personal lives and careers as young athletes in the WNBA. Collier, who turned 24 in September, promises in the podcast to deliver “piping-hot tea.”
Passionate about combating racial injustice, she recalls a defining moment during her senior year of high school, when Michael Brown was shot and killed in nearby Ferguson. “Up until that point, social justice things weren’t really something that, honestly, I paid super-close attention to, and so to have that happen so close to home—our school was shut down a little bit because of the protests—it was just really eye-opening,” Collier says. “To have it happen to a child, someone so close to my age, so close to my school, it really hit home.”
Though she says she herself didn’t experience discrimination growing up in a mixed-race family, her father did. “If we would go to stores and he was dressed down, he would notice people following us more than if he was in his suit for work,” she says. One time, she notes, “he was dressed down, he went to a car dealership; they wouldn’t let him buy the car, even though he had a check for it.”
She says she didn’t notice the discrimination against her dad when she was a young girl, noting that she was a typical “oblivious” kid. Her parents told her about it later, when she was older. “My parents did a good job of discussing those things with us,” she says, describing how her parents gave her and her two siblings a more general understanding of racial issues when they were younger and a more personal understanding as they grew older.
One day, Collier hopes to visit her father’s homeland of Sierra Leone and deepen her connection to her family history. She and her dad had been making plans to do so before the pandemic.
Collier says she’s heartened by the global protests against racial injustice following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis this past spring: “It’s really encouraging to see people so outraged, forcing change. Things don’t usually change out of the goodness of people’s hearts. People have to get mad.”
At the start of the basketball season this year, the WNBA announced that it would dedicate the season to social justice and Black Lives Matter, kicking off competition in late July with players wearing special uniforms bearing the name of Breonna Taylor, who was shot and killed by police in her Louisville, Kentucky, home. At press time in late August, the WNBA postponed several games as part of the protests of the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin, which left him paralyzed.
“We all know that it’s time for change to happen,” Collier says. “You have to be aware of what’s going on in the world. To see not just America, but really the whole world, come together for the same cause, it’s a testament to how overdue it is.”
Writer Abigail Pesta is an award-winning investigative journalist and the author of The Girls: An All-American Town, a Predatory Doctor, and the Untold Story of the Gymnasts Who Brought Him Down.
