Sun Devil, WNBA star aims to increase access to health care

By the time Elizabeth Williams was ready to start thinking about grad school, she was already a seasoned WNBA player. But having grown up in a family of medical professionals, she felt a calling to follow in their footsteps. 

While serving as a player representative for the WNBA’s Player Association (WNBPA), her efforts included helping to educate players on COVID-19 during the pandemic — an experience she found deeply rewarding.

“I think that experience really started to open my eyes to how you can have an impact in the health space without being directly in it,” she said.

Knowing that the WNBA and WNBPA would cover the cost of an advanced degree, she decided to take advantage of the educational opportunity and pursue a degree that suited all of her interests and experiences. Yet, she also needed a degree option with the flexibility to accommodate her basketball, travel and personal schedule.

With that in mind, Williams enrolled in ASU Online’s Master of Science in global health through the School of Human Evolution and Social Change. The program, from which she will graduate this December, is centered around cultural anthropology and evolutionary medicine to address health in a variety of ways.

“With my experiences of playing overseas and my experiences in advocacy, global health became a nice combination,” Williams said.

With two parents in the health care field — one a medical doctor and one a registered nurse — it wouldn’t have been a surprise for Williams to follow in their footsteps. But when she turned out to be talented on the basketball court, those footsteps took a slightly different path.

Initially, Williams wasn’t very familiar with the game of basketball. Born in England to Nigerian parents, she grew up playing soccer, a sport that is much more common in parts of the world outside of the U.S. But after moving to Virginia Beach in the late 90s, and as Williams began to grow — both in age and in height — a friend of her father, a fellow gastroenterologist, took note and suggested they trade the soccer ball for a basketball.

Williams quickly caught onto the sport and fell in love with the game. While in high school, a mentor — who had previously played professionally in the WNBA — took notice of Williams’ skills and encouraged her to advance her game and her education by playing at the collegiate level.

Heavily recruited by universities across the country coming out of high school, Williams decided to head to Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, so she could stay closer to home. While at Duke, Williams took premed classes while majoring in psychology as she wanted a degree that could help her follow in her parents’ footsteps. During her time there, she participated in a special program called CAPE — the Collegiate Athlete Premedical Experience — which gave female student-athletes and Baldwin Scholars the opportunity to directly engage with the medical field.

Williams entered the 2015 WNBA Draft and was selected fourth overall by the Connecticut Sun. After her rookie season with the Sun, she spent the offseason playing internationally in Turkey. Later, she would also play during the WNBA offseason for other international teams in China and Russia. The experience brought to life how people around the world live and their different cultures — including the similarities and the differences.

Back in the WNBA, Williams was traded to the Atlanta Dream, where she was not only succeeding on the court but she also found great pride in taking on a leading advocacy role by becoming a player representative as part of the WNBA’s Player Association (WNBPA).

“I was in Atlanta for six seasons, and that’s when I started to figure out what was important to me outside of basketball and how I could have an impact,” she said.

In her role as a player representative, one of two assigned to each team, Williams would help to relay information throughout the union, discuss issues such as the player experience and health and safety.

When COVID-19 brought the world to a standstill, including professional sports, Williams used her position with the WNBPA to take on an active role in not only helping to determine what the WNBA’s COVID bubble, nicknamed the “Wubble,” looked like to help players to continue to have a season, but with health and safety in mind.

Williams also took it upon herself with her position on the executive committee to connect with health care professionals to learn more about the virus. Calls were organized with public health experts, physicians and other health professionals to help the players feel informed. Williams worked to gather information on how to help keep players safe and worked with players to help them understand not only the virus but also educate them about the vaccine.

Thanks to the efforts of Williams and her colleagues, the WNBA vaccinated 99% of players in the league.

Williams didn’t stop with her fellow players. She also found herself working off the court, and specifically on Instagram, helping connect her community of followers to people in the medical field. In her series of Instagram Lives that she called “E Talks with Docs,” Williams brought a variety of medical professionals – from family medicine to nutritionists to sports medicine — onto her platform to not only share their knowledge but also to make them accessible to the audience.

Through ASU Online’s Master of Science in global health, Williams has been able to combine the worlds of the classroom and the court by interviewing a teammate in Turkey, as well as the team physician, to talk about the differences they experience in terms of health care for a class project where she also examined how Turkey’s hospital systems were able to manage a significant influx of patients who were refugees from Syria.

And with the online nature of the program, Williams was able to continue courses even while playing overseas.

“I had never taken (a course) online, so that was an adjustment, but because it’s online, if I’m in Turkey, I can still turn in papers or chat with my professors,” Williams said. “So I really like the flexibility that ASU Online offers.”

While back at her current home in Chicago, Williams completed an internship this summer by working with a doctor from her current team, the Chicago Sky. Ensuring that learning doesn’t just come from textbooks and lectures, students in the Master of Science in global health program are required to complete an internship as part of their curriculum.

As Williams wraps up her master’s program and makes her way toward graduating in December, her commitment to her education, as well as the subject matter, has made an impression on her professors.

“Elizabeth is an analytical thinker who seamlessly integrates information introduced in the classroom with a unique voice that she has used to advocate for equity in her professional spaces, such as with the WNBPA,” said Roseanne Schuster, an assistant research scientist in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change who oversees the MS in global health program.

So, what will a professional basketball player do with a master’s degree in global health? This likely isn't the final play in her book.

“I do want to go to med school, but I think I want to go into it with a more holistic understanding of health and understanding the advocacy of health and how that can make a bigger impact than just medicine,” Williams said.

“At the end of the day, I feel strongly that we need more Black physicians and more people of color in the health field. The numbers don’t lie about the outcomes for poor people or people of color, and how that is transformed when people are cared for by people who look like them.”