Lauren Jackson
From Hoopedia
Lauren Elizabeth Jackson (born May 11, 1981 in Albury, New South Wales, Australia) is an Australian professional basketball player. She is a forward/center with the Seattle Storm of the WNBA, and the Opals, the Australian national team, and until 2006 with the Canberra Capitals of the Australian WNBL. She has won national championships in both the U.S. and Australia, and a world championship as well. She is universally considered to be the best Australian female basketball player of all time, and one of the best players in the world. In 2003 and 2007 she was named WNBA MVP.
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Early Career
Both Lauren Jackson's parents, Gary and Maree, represented Australia at basketball, and she took up the game at age four. A teenage prodigy at Murray High School, Albury, she moved to the Australian Institute of Sport in Canberra as a teenager. She played for the Australian women's team, the Opals, in 1997 as a 16-year-old. She led the Australian Institute of Sport team, made up of the country's best 16 to 18 year-old players, to a premiership in the WNBL Women's National Basketball League, the Australian women's professional league, in 1998-1999 - an unprecedented achievement for a youth team. Ineligible to continue with the AIS team, she joined the other Canberra-based team, the Canberra Capitals, and led them to four titles in 1999-2000, 2001-02, 2002-03 and 2005-2006.
International Career
In the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, Australia, Jackson registered 20 points and 13 rebounds for Australia in a loss to the United States in the gold-medal game. The silver medal was Australian basketball's first in international competition.
In the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, Greece, The Opals went on to repeat as silver medalists, losing again to the United States in the Olympic final.
In the 2006 Commonwealth Games in Melbourne, Australia, the Opals defeated New Zealand's Tall Ferns in the final, and earned the gold medal.
In the 2006 FIBA World Championship for Women in Brazil, the Opals defeated Russia to win the gold medal. Jackson captained the team and finished the tournament as the overall top scorer with a 21.3 ppg average over eight games.
WNBA
When Jackson declared for the WNBA Draft in 2001, she was an automatic first selection to the Seattle Storm, where she has played since.
The 196 centimeter (6'5") Jackson is very effective in offense, combining her height with a good shooting percentage - even from three-point range (she led the WNBA in three-point percentage in 2004), athletic ability, and not least a little bit of "mongrel" (mental toughness and aggressiveness) to deal with the highly physical defensive tactics usually laid on to stop her. Earlier in her career, her defense was perhaps the weaker aspect of her game, but these days that area has also improved, making her a leading defensive rebounder and shot-blocker in the WNBA. In 2003, despite the fact that the Seattle Storm did not make the playoffs, she was voted as the WNBA's Most Valuable Player that season.
In 2004, her Seattle Storm team won the WNBA Championship by defeating the Connecticut Sun, two games to one. Jackson will continue to play in the WNBA during the Northern Hemisphere summer; in April 2006, she signed a three-year contract to stay with the Storm.
In June 2006 Jackson was named to the WNBA All-Decade Team, as part of the celebration of the WNBA's 10th Anniversary. The team is comprised of the ten best and most influential players from its first ten years of play.
On July 24, 2007 Jackson scored 47 points against the Washington Mystics in a 97-96 overtime loss, tying the single-game WNBA scoring record set by Diana Taurasi in a triple-overtime game on August 10, 2006.
2005 Injury
In October 2005, having returned to Australia to play in the 2005-06 WNBL season, Jackson aggravated an old stress fracture injury in her left leg, was not expected to play again in the WNBL season. She recovered more quickly than expected, returning to star for Canberra in the WNBL finals series, being named finals MVP in Canberra's 05-06 title, and to lead the Opals in the Commonwealth Games.
South Korea
Jackson decided to leave Australia after the 2005-06 season. While she had huge offers from clubs in Russia—she was reportedly paid over AUD 200,000 ($175,000) to play a few games with a Russian club before the 2005 WNBA season—she opted instead to sign a three-year deal with Seoul-based Samsung Bichumi in South Korea's Women's Korean Basketball League (WKBL). Although she would not earn as much money in Korea as she could in Russia, her salary will still be higher than what she could earn in Australia. More importantly, Korea's season runs only from mid-December through early March, about half the length of the European season, and clubs in the league only play two matches a week. She indicated that Korea's shorter season played the main role in her decision to sign there, noting that it would likely prolong her career.
In 2007 Jackson broke the WKBL record for most individual points in a game, scoring 56 for her Samsung Bichumi in a 96-76 win over the Kumho Redwings. She also won the Korean league's All-Star game MVP award in 2007. Jackson won the WKBL scoring title with a record-breaking average of 30.2 points per game.
Off the Court
In 2006 Jackson won the Maher Medal as Australia’s Female International Player of the Year. It marked the fifth time she has won the award in the last eight years.
Jackson posed nude in an Australian magazine, Black+White, that featured Olympic athletes who were set to compete in Athens in the 2004 Summer Olympics. The expensively-printed magazine/book has been produced for the last three Olympic Games, and by the 2004 edition was considered relatively uncontroversial in Australia with its "artistic" approach to nude photography and its equal coverage of male and female athletes. Jackson also posed for the 2005 edition of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. After Jackson's pro basketball career she hopes to be involved with a women's refuge and help victims of rape and domestic violence.
