Three days before her 29th birthday, Jackie Young made history. Young is the first basketball player to win a high school state championship, NCAA championship, WNBA championship, Olympic 3×3 gold medal, Olympic 5×5 gold medal, and FIBA Women’s Basketball World Cup gold; six championships across six basketball stages.
On Sept. 13, in Berlin, Germany, the Princeton, Indiana, native scored 18 points, snatched six rebounds and dished five assists as Team USA defeated France 97–79 to win the 2026 FIBA Women’s Basketball World Cup. Young was named the TCL Player of the Game and selected for the tournament’s All-Star Five.
But Young’s significance did not begin in Berlin. It began long before the world knew her name.
Before the Olympic gold medals. Before the WNBA championships. Before the No. 1 overall draft selection. Before becoming Miss Basketball. There was a girl in Princeton, Indiana. And she could play.
Young led Princeton Community High School to the 2015 IHSAA Class 3A state championship. She finished her high school career with 3,268 points, the most in Indiana boys’ or girls’ basketball history, surpassing Damon Bailey’s 26-year-old record.
Bailey’s name had lived inside the state’s basketball consciousness for more than two decades. Young did not simply enter that record book. She changed who occupies its center, but she didn’t stop there.
As a student-athlete at Notre Dame, Young helped win the 2018 NCAA Division I national championship. She became the 2019 ACC Tournament MVP before entering the WNBA draft, where she was selected No. 1 by the Las Vegas Aces (LVA).
With Las Vegas, she has won WNBA championships in 2022, 2023, and 2025.
She won Olympic gold in Tokyo in 2020 in 3×3 basketball and again in Paris in 2024 in 5×5 basketball. And in the FIBA World Cup, Young was the only American to score in double figures in every game of Team USA’s six-game championship run. She was named Player of the Game against Italy, then again in the gold-medal game against France. Her final tournament numbers: 12.3 points, 3.7 rebounds, and 3.2 assists per game.
What Indiana gives its own
Beyond the statistics, Young’s relationship with Indiana, and the way Indiana receives her, adds another layer to the story.
Eleven years after a girl from Princeton rewrote Indiana’s basketball record book, she returned to Indiana as something else entirely: a three-time WNBA champion.
In August, with LVA playing the Indiana Fever at Gainbridge Fieldhouse, Young engineered a comeback when LVA trailed Indiana by 20 points. She finished with 22 points, nine assists, and at one point scored 15 consecutive points for the Aces — a franchise record.
When asked how she has mentally evolved into this level of player, she said, “Just stay patient; when defenses double team/hedge, stay patient, make the right read and adjust when necessary…”
Young added, “I’ve worked hard to get to this point; I take pride in playing the game the right way.”
Yet the most revealing moment of that night had nothing to do with basketball. It exposed the tension between what Young represents to Indiana and the limits of what athletes should be expected to absorb from the people watching them.
During the game, a fan directed comments toward Young that crossed a line. When asked about the incident afterward, Young asked the fans to remember one thing: “At the end of the day, we’re human, too.”
She said she did not want fans to be removed. She wanted people to remember why they came.
“Let’s just show up, have fun,” Young said, “and not take it too far.”
The incident matters because Young was not simply returning to the state that produced her. She was returning as one of Indiana basketball’s most accomplished players and asking Indiana fans to remember the person beneath the resume.
Indiana remains home.
After the Fever game, Young talked about having family in the stands.
“I just have my family here to support,” she said. “It’s very special.”
Young has spent nearly three decades learning how to read the floor. Indiana gave her the first court. Princeton gave her the first record. Notre Dame gave her a national championship. Las Vegas gave her a professional stage. The Olympics gave her an international audience. Berlin gave her another gold.
Perhaps Indiana has the responsibility to make room for women’s basketball not as a companion story to Indiana basketball, but as part of the state’s basketball story itself.
Records are not merely numbers. They are declarations about who belongs in history.
Contact Health and Environmental Reporter LaTasha Boyd Jones at tashaj@indyrecorder.com or on social media @iamtashajones.
LaTASHA BOYD JONES
Tasha Jones is a poet, writer, researcher, and educator whose work explores language as a tool for liberation and resistance. She hosts In the Beginning: The Spoken Word Podcast, the #1 spoken word podcast on Apple and Spotify. Tasha is also the Poems & Parables Literary Journal editor and is currently writing Pyramids. Plantations. Projects. Penitentiaries. You can follow her on social media: @iamtashajones, @itbspokenwordpod, and @poemsandparables.
