May 20, 2025
Locked On Women’s Basketball: Lisa Leslie and Shattering the Glass brought us to this WNBA moment
By The Next
A look at the history of the game
On the latest episode of Locked On Women’s Basketball, host Howard Megdal is joined by Hall of Famer Lisa Leslie and historians Pamela Grundy and Susan Shackelford.
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Grundy and Shackelford discussed their newly-revised book, Shattering the Glass, that examines the growth of women’s basketball.
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“We saw these cultural shifts in how the women were seeing themselves,” Shackelford said of writing an updated version of the book. “It was interesting that it tied to the current history because when the sexuality issue came up, well, it tied into the gay marriage movement, and these women step forward, some of them and became leaders there. Then we had the Black Lives Matter movement, again, leadership. And it’s tied to this cultural piece.
“Back in the 30s, and we have a chapter in Shattering the Glass on this, Black women were playing the game very robustly in what today we would call HBCUs. They were playing an excellent game, and a big piece of it was they really needed to be leaders in their community. They needed to be tough and determined, and basketball brought that out.”
Later, Leslie joined the show to talk about how the game has evolved to feature more 3-point shooting, something she began to popularize during her career as a center.
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“Listen, I scored 101 points in high school, so I was a scorer. I could score from anywhere, and I love putting the ball in the basket,” Leslie said. “But I also understood that my money was in the paint. That’s what the team needed. Obviously, me at 6’5 playing center, I [tried] to start out being aggressive and really working inside out versus outside in, which I still always encourage bigs to do, even if they can’t shoot the three ball, because sometimes people just really fall in love with the jump shot or a 3-point shot too early to me, and then they never really recover from that.”
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