1981 -

Lauren Jackson, widely considered to be Australia’s greatest female basketball player of all time, has led the nation’s team, the Opals, to three silver medals at successive Olympic Games in Sydney (2000), Athens (2004) and Beijing (2008). On each occasion the gold-medal team has been the United States. Jackson also led the Opals to wins against New Zealand’s “Tall Ferns” in the final of the 2006 Commonwealth Games and against Russia for the 2006 world championship.

Both her parents, Gary and Maree, represented Australia in basketball, and Lauren took to the game at the age of four. A teenage prodigy at Murray High School, Albury, she moved to the Australian Institute of Sport in Canberra as a teenager. She first played for the Opals in 1997 at the age of 16, and led the AIS team --- composed of the country’s best 16-to-18-year-old players --- to a premiership in the WNBL national professional league. She later joined Canberra’s other team, the Capitals, and led them to four titles.

When she went into America’s WNBA draft in 2001, she was an automatic first choice for Seattle Storm. At 196cm, Jackson is very effective in defence, combining her height with a good shooting percentage. In 2007 she received the Defensive Player of the Year award. She has twice (in 2003 and 2007) been named as winner of the WNBA’s Most Valuable Player award. In 2004, her Seattle Storm team won the WNBA championship. She signed a lucrative contract to play for a Russian team before the 2005 WNBA season began.       

Harry Gordon, AOC Historian