"When I grow up,
I want to change
the world."
That's what I told my first grade teacher. I was six years old. I didn't know how. I just knew I was supposed to.
I was ten years old, at a free throw contest I only entered so my friend wouldn't be the only girl there. I was terrible. Made one out of twelve attempts.
My dad pulled me outside during the break and showed me how to hold my hands, where to plant my feet. I went back in and started making them.
Three months later I was named Most Improved Player in a league of all boys. Three months after that I was at my fifth grade graduation telling 500 people I was going to play basketball at UCLA.
In November 2006 I walked into the locker room inside Pauley Pavilion and found my nameplate. Williams. I pulled the jersey over my head and stood there for a moment.
I played Division I basketball at UCLA and later at San Diego State. Then I became a mom and a little boy would be by my side for the rest of my life.
Then I became a coach. I won championships. I was named Coach of the Year twice. I became one of only three women in NCAA Division I men's basketball history to hold a coaching role.
Coaching wasn't something I stumbled into. It was the natural extension of everything I'd been receiving my whole life. Every coach who pushed me, every voice that believed in me before I believed in myself, every hard lesson that landed at exactly the right time.
I took all of it and walked into gyms and built something real. High school programs. College staffs. The NBA combine floor. WNBA front offices. Nike grassroots courts where the next generation of women in the game is being shaped right now.
Where are you going?
I was 36 years old when I sat in my childhood bedroom in my parents' house in San Diego, staring at a Venn diagram in my journal with my name circled in the center. Branching out in every direction were the things I knew I was capable of. None of them connected yet.
A week earlier I was walking in circles with my coach. He asked me a question I couldn't answer. Where are you going? I looked down at my feet. I don't know, I said.
I couldn't believe I said that. Because I had always known. My whole life, I had always known where I was going. But I had spent so many years being the person other people called when they needed something built, something fixed, something saved... that I had forgotten to listen to the voice inside me that had been right about everything from the beginning.
She's the one who said UCLA when no one else believed it. She's the one who negotiated with Michael Jordan at 13 years old and walked away with six pairs of unreleased Air Jordans. She's the one who sat on the grass and finally stopped talking long enough to hear what she already knew.
She's the reason this platform exists.
I have a quote that sits in my office: Every girl should know her voice can change the world.
You can put it on my tombstone. I'm here to make room for her.
I build what comes next for girls and women in sport. As Nike's Girls Basketball Consultant I help shape the pathway and pipeline for the next generation of women in the game. I identify talent, build systems, shape culture, and create the pathways that keep girls in the game and move women into the rooms where decisions get made.
Coach Her Right is the curriculum I built for coaches who want to do better by the girls they lead.
HER Story is the documentary series that gave girls' voices a stage.
Your Inner Coach: When You're Finally Ready to Listen is the book I was always supposed to write. The one that tells the full story. The one that might be yours too. It comes out in 2026.
You probably already know some of this. You found this page because something resonated. Maybe it was the work. Maybe it was the mission. Maybe it was something you recognized in yourself.
That recognition is worth paying attention to.
Your inner coach has been talking to you. This is just what it sounds like when someone else finally listened to theirs.
Making room
for her.
Starting with you.
Wherever you are in this work — coaching girls, leading women, or finding your own way — there's a place for you here.