Napheesa Collier
American basketball player (born 1996)
Napheesa Collier ( nə-FEE-sə KOL-yər; born September 23, 1996), nicknamed "Phee", is an American professional basketball player for the Minnesota Lynx of the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA) and for the Lunar Owls of Unrivaled. Collier is also a founder of the Unrivaled basketball league along with Breanna Stewart. After playing college basketball for the UConn Huskies, Collier was drafted by the Lynx with the 6th overall pick in the 2019 WNBA draft. She has won two Olympic gold medals playing on the United States women's national basketball team in the Tokyo 2020 and the Paris 2024 games. She is also a vice president on the Women's National Basketball Players Association executive committee.
Early life
When Collier wanted to play basketball, the only Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) team in Jefferson City would not let her try out because they were told the team was full, so her parents started a new team, the Lady Warriors, and recruited girls from other nearby towns. The Lady Warriors went on to compete in the national AAU tournament. The team that originally denied Collier a chance to try out later offered her a spot, but she remained with the Lady Warriors.
Collier met fellow basketball player Maya Moore, who is also from Jefferson City, Missouri, and watched Moore play at the University of Connecticut and later for the Minnesota Lynx. After the Lynx retired Moore's jersey on August 24, 2024, Cheryl Reeve said, "The impact of Maya Moore is that Napheesa Collier got to dream of one day being like Maya Moore."
In her freshman year, Collier played for Jefferson City High School in Jefferson City, Missouri, where she averaged 17.9 points and 9.8 rebounds.
“Napheesa Collier” enters the record as american basketball player (born 1996). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Napheesa, Collier and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q23882821. VIAF identifies the subject as 6186163211515207580004. The Library of Congress control number is n2021050630. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1996, 2019, 2020 and 2024.
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This entry incorporates text from “Napheesa Collier” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.