Elena Delle Donne

Elena Delle Donne (born September 5, 1989) is an American professional basketball player for the Washington Mystics of the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA). Delle Donne played college basketball for the Delaware Blue Hens from 2009 to 2013. She was drafted by the Chicago Sky with the second overall pick of the 2013 WNBA draft, and led the Sky to the 2014 WNBA Finals, where they were defeated by the Phoenix Mercury. Delle Donne was traded to the Washington Mystics in 2017 and led them to their first WNBA championship in 2019. Delle Donne has won two WNBA Most Valuable Player Awards (2015, 2019), been selected to six All-Star teams, and was the first WNBA player to join the 50–40–90 club. She was named to The W25, the league's list of the top 25 players of its first 25 years, in 2021. Delle Donne inherited her 6'5" (1.96 m) height from both her parents—her father, who played college golf, is 6'6" (1.98 m), and her mother is 6'2" (1.88 m). Her childhood was marked by a struggle to come to terms with her unusual height. According to a 2016 ESPN story, her first memory was going on a shopping trip when she was three years old and hearing other shoppers tell her mother that an 8-year-old should not be using a pacifier. In third grade, her class was assigned to measure themselves using lengths of paper; she was "humiliated" when her paper extended well beyond those of her classmates. Within two years of that incident, a doctor wanted to start her on injections to stunt her growth; her mother refused. By the time she was in eighth grade, she was already 6'0" (1.83 m). Additionally, according to the same ESPN piece Delle Donne had to come to terms with having "a body that could do a great many things that the body of her older sister, Lizzie, couldn't." Lizzie was born deaf and blind, is unable to speak, and also has cerebral palsy and autism. In another 2016 ESPN story, Delle Donne credits her mother with helping her accept her height: