Maya Moore Irons

Maya Moore Irons is a basketball icon—a two-time NCAA champion, two-time Olympic gold medalist, four-time WNBA champion, and WNBA MVP. After capturing back-to-back undefeated national championships in 2009 and 2010 at the University of Connecticut and captaining the team that set the NCAA record for most games won in a row (90), Maya was the NCAA Academic All-American of the Year and drafted #1 by the Minnesota Lynx in the 2011 WNBA Draft.As 2011 WNBA Rookie of the Year and an All-Star starter, Maya helped her team capture the franchise’s first WNBA Championship only five months after graduating from college. That spring, she added EuroLeague Champion and Spanish League Champion to her resumé, and in the summer of 2012, she captured Olympic gold with Team USA. In 2016, after winning her third WNBA title and being named MVP of the WNBA All-Star Game, Maya became the first pro athlete (man or woman) to ever notch three titles—ROY, All-Star MVP, and League MVP—in only five seasons of play. In 2017, she was again named All-Star MVP and led her Minnesota Lynx team to another WNBA Championship, their fourth in seven years. She followed that in 2018 with her third consecutive All-Star MVP award and shocked the world after that season when she walked away from the game.In February of 2019, Maya revealed that she would miss the upcoming season to focus on family and ministry dreams. Later that year, in a New York Times feature, Maya first went into detail about Jonathan Irons and his wrongful imprisonment. She later opted to miss the 2020 season to continue focusing on Jonathan’s case and was ultimately successful when his conviction was vacated in March 2020, and he walked free that July.Maya has since come to be recognized as one of sport and culture’s most important social justice icons.