It All Started Here: Jackie Young

With her Olympic gold medal claimed last month as a member of Team USA women’s basketball, Jackie Young added another bullet point to a competitive resume that truly epitomizes one of the most popular descriptive titles in sports commentary: “a proven winner at every level.”

As soon as the final buzzer sounded on Team USA’s thrilling 67-66 victory over France, Young had won the ultimate 5-on-5 team prize at every stop on her basketball journey – a high school state championship, a collegiate national championship, a WNBA title, and now, Olympic gold – a remarkable feat for an athlete still a few weeks shy of her 27th birthday.

Young’s first step on her winning journey came in her hometown of Princeton, Indiana, where she led Princeton Community High School to the 2015 Indiana High School Athletic Association Class 3A state championship. Behind career averages of 30.8 points, 10.3 rebounds, 5.5 assists and 3.5 steals per game, Young piloted Princeton to a dominant 97-9 record over four years that included a 53-game winning streak between her junior and senior seasons.

Young set the state’s single-season scoring record as a junior during the Tigers’ march to the state championship, pouring in a state-record 36 points in the title game to finish with 1,003. In doing so, she became just the fifth player of either sex in state history to reach quadruple digits in a single campaign.

She took things a step further as a senior, using 20 30-point games and 10 40-point outings to maintain a 34.9 points-per-game scoring average over 28 contests. By season’s end, not only had Young garnered McDonald’s All-American recognition and won Indiana Miss Basketball, but her 3,268 career points had overtaken National High School Hall of Fame inductee Damon Bailey as the state’s all-time leading scorer for boys and girls.

Ranked as a top-10 prep player by nearly every recruiting outlet, Young accepted a scholarship offer to play collegiately at the University of Notre Dame and landed on the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) All-Freshman Team after an impressive debut season.

The following year, she averaged 14.5 points per game for the Fighting Irish and teamed with fellow double-digit scorers Arike Ogunbowale, Jessica Shepard and Marina Mabrey to key Notre Dame’s second national championship in program history and first since 2001. Young posted arguably her best performance in an Irish uniform in that year’s national semifinal game against the University of Connecticut, piling up a career-high 32 points and collecting 11 rebounds for a double- double.

The 2018-19 season, her final Notre Dame campaign, was highlighted by a Second Team All-ACC distinction, a third-team all-America nod from the Associated Press and an ACC Tournament MVP honor, which ultimately led to her first overall selection in the 2019 WNBA Draft by the Las Vegas Aces.

She then validated her lofty Draft status by earning a spot on the WNBA All-Rookie Team, thanks in large part to her 153 assists and 2.89 assist- to-turnover ratio, which ranked eighth and sixth, respectively, across the league.

Young took additional steps in her development over the next two seasons before enjoying a true “breakout” in 2022. Her points-per-game average shot up to 15.9 from 12.4 in 2021, as she helped power the Aces to their first of back-to-back WNBA championships while garnering the league’s Most Valuable Player award and her first All-Star honor.

The 2023 season was a mirror image in many ways, as Young once again made the All-Star team while averaging 17.5 points per game during another championship run for the Aces. However, this time, her improved numbers – which included a .523 field goal percentage and a .449 clip from three-point range – resulted in a Second Team All-WNBA nod and a ninth-place finish in the league MVP voting.

Young is on pace for an even better year in 2024, having claimed her third straight All-Star nomination on the strength of an 18.5 points-per-game average through 23 games.

While her gold medal from the Paris Games is her first for the 5-on-5 basketball event at the Olympics, it is not the first time that she has stood atop the podium. At the 2020 Summer Games in Tokyo, Young teamed with fellow WNBA players Stefanie Dolson, Allisha Gray and Kelsey Plum to win the women’s 3-on-3 basketball tournament for Team USA.