Women In Sports: Elizabeth Olatayo Williams

Ugo Chinedu

3 years ago

British-born Nigerian-American basketball star, Elizabeth Olatayo Williams, is currently in camp with the Nigerian national women’s basketball team, D’Tigress, and has been outstanding just like the rest of the squad. Born on June 23rd, 1993, in Colchester, Essex, England, Olatayo played college basketball for Duke University in the United States.

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During the last year of her four seasons stint at Duke, she averaged 14.5 points, 9.0 rebounds, and 2.5 assists per game, leaving her assist average as the highest of any basketball centre in the Atlantic Coast Conference women’s basketball league. Olatayo also holds the record for the ninth highest blocks in NCAA history with a total of 426 blocks. During the 2015 Draft of the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA), Olatayo was selected as the 4^th overall pick by the Connecticut Sun. After one year with the Sun, she joined the Atlanta Dream in 2016.

Off the court, Olatayo’s activism would come into play after she spearheaded a campaign that forced co-owner of the Atlanta Dream, Senator Kelly Loeffler, to retract her comments about the Black Lives Matter movement and was instrumental in a campaign alongside other Atlanta Dream players to elect Loeffler’s opponent, Raphael Warnock, as the winner of the 2020-2021 special election for Senator of Georgia.

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At the international level, Olatayo made history as one of the players to be invited to the first-ever USA U16 basketball team for the first FIBA Americas U16 Championship For Women which was held in Mexico, Mexico City, in August 2009. She was named the MVP of the tournament as the team won gold. Olatayo and the US U17 basketball team would win gold in the 2010 FIBA U17 World Championship in France, a competition she finished as the leading scorer with an average of 13.5 points per game. Her success in the youth ranks would continue during the U19 World Championship in Chile, 2011, as the US team won gold. Elizabeth Olatayo Williams has switched allegiance to feature for Nigeria and is hopeful of a place in coach Otis Hugely’s Olympic squad this year. Source Wikipedia Featured Image Source: Alchetron

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