Exclusive: Whitcomb on an iconic career that almost never happened

• Sami Whitcomb won her first WNBL Championship after the Bendigo Spirit swept the Townsville Fire
• She was named WNBL MVP, Grand Final MVP, earned All-WNBL First Team honours and led the WNBL in scoring
• Whitcomb will play for the Phoenix Mercury in the upcoming WNBA season

For a player that just completed one of the all-time great individual seasons in WNBL history, Sami Whitcomb remains incredibly humble and perhaps it’s that outlook and mindset that has been key to her success.

After winning an Olympic bronze medal last year with the Australian Opals, Whitcomb took on all before her in her first season with the Bendigo Spirit. Cleaning up almost every award possible, she was named WNBL MVP, Grand Final MVP, earned All-WNBL First Team honours, led the league in scoring and most importantly, steered Bendigo to the WNBL Championship.

Whitcomb has and always will be about team success, so it wasn’t so much about finally breaking through for her first WNBL championship as it was about winning with and for her Bendigo teammates.

“The whole season, from the moment I was around everybody, I just really, really wanted it more for them than even myself,” Whitcomb told Basketball.com.au.

“I love the whole group. This season was special no matter what, even if we didn't win, it wouldn't have changed my feelings but it just felt like all of us deserved to win.

“It was really nice to get that satisfaction in the end.”

Whitcomb has been on championship-winning teams all over the globe and when asked what the one thing was that all of those great teams had in common, her answer was simple.

“Great people, it's the people,” she said.

“Throughout my whole life in basketball, I've been on teams that were very, very talented, and I don't want to say that we didn't have good people, but you usually have one or two people that just make it a little bit harder to really prioritise the values of the team.

“Egos are involved, there's other people's individual agendas and goals, so it's not always easy to align. But on all the teams where we've won, I could go down the line and everybody is a good person that cares more about winning, team dynamics and team culture than themselves.”

This Bendigo squad was built to win and with so much experience between the likes of Whitcomb, Marianna Tolo, Kelsey Griffin and Kelly Wilson, you could often see in real time the collective years of knowledge coming to the fore when the Spirit needed it most.

They were never flustered, and that was evident in Game 1 of the Grand Final series against Townsville. Finding themselves trailing in the third quarter, Veronica Burton rose to the occasion, along with Whitcomb and Tolo, to lead Bendigo to a vital 70-60 win.

So, after climbing the mountain and winning it all, has it sunk in for Whitcomb?

“It has in the sense that I just really believed that we were going to do it and it's really satisfying, probably one of the most satisfying seasons I've ever been a part of,” she said.

“We set goals as a team, I set some individually and we showed up every day, put the work in and then were rewarded.”

Now at the peak of her powers and putting together a resume that matches some of the best players to ever lace them up in the WNBL, it’s crazy to think about the journey that Whitcomb has been on to get to this point.

Born and raised in California, Whitcomb graduated from University of Washington in 2010 and after going undrafted, she signed a training camp contract with the Chicago Sky. Waived after three pre-season games, Whitcomb then took a step – which seems incomprehensible looking back – that temporarily ended her playing career.  She took up a video coordinator role with the Huskies.

“The agent that I had, she was probably too big-time for me, she couldn't find me anything overseas, she just kept saying ‘oh, it's tough right now’,” she said.

“She's a great agent, she represented WNBA players, NBA guys, so I probably was just not the type of player that she was used to placing, so there probably wasn't interest for me at that time, from her perspective.

“I didn't know any better, I didn't know I just needed to get maybe a smaller agency. My college offered me a job on the staff as video coordinator and at the time, I really thought I'd want to coach in college when I was done, so it seemed like if I couldn't get a basketball playing job, I needed something, so I accepted that.”

While she wasn’t playing professionally, Whitcomb was competing in men’s leagues, women’s leagues and open gyms at the university, just playing as much basketball as she could.

“That whole year I didn't have anything and then at the end of the year, I quit my job and signed with a smaller German agency and they got me a job in Germany straight away basically and that was that,” Whitcomb said.

So how did someone, who literally ended her playing career at 22-years-old become a leader of the Opals, a two-time WNBA Champion and a star of the WNBL? It’s all about hard work.

“I have a lot of those sliding door, fork in the road moments where it's like, if I hadn't done this or if this had happened instead, even just coming to Australia,” she said.

“It's easy for me now to look back and say this to young kids and people that are in the throes of uncertainty with their career, but it's not that things happen for a reason, as in you don't have any control, but it's that if you're willing to work really hard, things do happen for a reason, opportunities do present.

“It's about staying ready, accepting them when they do come but understanding that just because they don't come when you think they're going to, or they're not the opportunities that you thought they were going to be, doesn't mean they're not incredible opportunities. It doesn't mean you're not going to get to where you're trying to get to still.”

One of those opportunities was to play for the Rockingham Flames in the SBL (State Basketball League, now NBL1 West) in 2013. The decision to pack her bags and head to Australia wasn’t just a career-changing move but a life-changing one.

She would go onto win three consecutive SBL league MVP’s in Western Australia, which led her to the Perth Lynx and also where she would meet her wife, Kate.

Whitcomb’s journey – in basketball and life – has been nothing short of inspiring and the winding road she took to finally earn her WNBA break is just that. Seven years after being waived by Chicago, she got a call from her agent.

“When my agent called me, I remember we were traveling back from Adelaide and he said ‘the (Seattle) Storm want to sign you to a training camp contract’, and I was absolutely shook,” Whitcomb said.

“A big part of why I wanted to play WNBL was because I knew the credibility of the league and the players that played there, so it wasn't that I didn't think I was sort of going in that direction, but I didn’t think (the WNBA) was close still. I thought I had more that I probably needed to do.”

Since breaking through in 2017, Whitcomb has solidified her place in the WNBA as one of the best long-range shooters in the league.

She’ll be looking to impact winning on a revamped Phoenix Mercury squad this year, who added two superstars in Satou Sabally and Alyssa Thomas, while legends Diana Taurasi (retired) and Brittney Griner (Atlanta Dream) have departed.

Whitcomb will be surrounded by superstar talent and will be able to fill a scoring void for the Mercury as they look to climb back up the standings. It’s an opportunity she can’t wait to get stuck into.

“I'm really, really excited about it,” she said.

“Just from my free agency calls, that was who I really hoped to land with, but obviously you just never know what's going to happen in terms of who else they sign.

“I was really thrilled that it worked out and that they were as interested in me as I was them.”

Having experienced the highs and lows of professional sport, Whitcomb knows a thing or two about staying cool in high pressure situations. Her ability to perform when her team needed her most was there for the world to see at the 2024 Paris Olympics, when she was one of the Opals’ most consistent players, leading the team in scoring (13 points per game) and assists (5.3 per game) as Australia returned to the Olympic podium for the first time since 2012.

When asked how she was able to channel all of that pressure, Whitcomb just wanted to be there for her teammates.

“I don't know really other than you put in all the work and you hope obviously in the moment that you can be good enough to perform,” she said.

“So much of that tournament for me was about wanting to give to my teammates, I wanted to be great for them.

“It was a lot less about me and what I was doing, which I think took the pressure off performing, so to speak. I just wanted to be the hardest worker, be a great teammate and obviously make some shots if I got some.”

To be able to bounce back from that tournament-opening loss to Nigeria, which would’ve crushed most team’s mental state, is a credit to the foundation and culture of the Opals program. Winning bronze the way the Opals did was one of the great Australian sporting stories last year and for Whitcomb, she was just proud to be a part of it.

“I can't really put it into words but it was incredible,” she said.

“I don't know if I'll ever be prouder, as proud as I am of this WNBL championship and what we did, I don't think I'll ever be prouder of a group than I was in that Olympic campaign.”

Having achieved so much but with so much still left to give, I get the feeling Sami Whitcomb and her winning ways will continue to torch opponents across the globe.