Locked On Women’s Basketball: Kia Nurse makes Athletes Unlimited debut

Nurse and Leite first discussed how Nurse is using Athletes Unlimited as an opportunity to shake up her off-season training regimen. Nurse has typically split her off-season time between work as an on-air broadcaster and independent training:

“We had talked … with my agent and some of the trainers that I work with back home every year, we go back into the off-season and we say, what worked and what didn’t work?” Nurse said. “One of those things … was we want to find a way for me to play five-on-five in the off-season that doesn’t take away from my ability to continue to do the broadcast stuff. And so when we looked around at the different leagues that were created, obviously Athletes Unlimited has been around for four years now, and it’s had a really successful four year run so far. And I’ve always watched from afar, and I’ve had teammates that have played in it. I’ve been able to see it on social media, and I’ve been able to watch some of the games as well. And so for me, I thought it was a great opportunity to come in.”

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Nurse also spoke about how joining Athletes Unlimited has helped her mental approach to the game after dealing with multiple injuries over the last couple years:

“I’m pretty open about it now, but I’ve had a tough couple years with basketball, coming back from the ACL and the injury,” she explained. “And so I really just wanted to be able to play five-on-five in the off-season, but enjoy it too, and find the joy and the excitement in basketball and the things that I really, truly love. And I knew for a fact that AU is like a very family-like atmosphere. It’s a very different and unique setup, in the sense that it’s all player led and player run. And so the scoring system is different. There’s a leaderboard, you know, one person wins the league. There’s 40 players. Your teams change every week. And so I love that it’s a different format. I love there’s a different concept to it, and that everything that you do in the game matters because of the leaderboard, but you still have to play the game the right way in order for you to actually kind of climb that, right? So it’s a challenge, it’s exciting, it’s a great family atmosphere. And for this first little bit that we’ve gotten here and gotten together, it’s been really fun to be around.”

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Tune in to hear more from Nurse about here experience with Athletes Unlimited so far, what she’s looking forward to as the league tips off later this week, and more. Make sure to subscribe to the Locked On Women’s Basketball podcast to keep learning about the WNBA, women’s college basketball, basketball history and much more!