Women's National Basketball Association
After graduating from Stanford, Nygaard began her six-year career in the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA).
Nygaard was selected by the New York Liberty in the fourth round (39th overall pick) of the 1998 WNBA Draft.
She missed the 1998 and most of the 1999 seasons due to injury, but joined the starting lineup with the Portland Fire team in 2000 and 2001 and with the Miami Sol team in 2002.
Her best season came with the Sol in 2002, when she averaged 7.9 points and 3.8 rebounds per game.
She has also played for the Cleveland Rockers, the Charlotte Sting, and the Los Angeles Sparks.
During the WNBA off-season, she played in professional basketball leagues in Europe, including Germany (2001), Spain (1999) and Italy (1998).
Before the 2004 WNBA season began, Nygaard signed a free agent contract with the Houston Comets, but was waived by the team during training camp. She signed another contract with the Comets prior to the 2005 season, but decided to announce her retirement instead.
Read more about this topic: Vanessa Nygaard
Famous quotes containing the words women, national, basketball and/or association:
“... if, as women, we accept a philosophy of history that asserts that women are by definition assimilated into the male universal, that we can understand our past through a male lens—if we are unaware that women even have a history—we live our lives similarly unanchored, drifting in response to a veering wind of myth and bias.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“I submit all my plays to the National Theatre for rejection. To assure myself I am seeing clearly.”
—Howard Barker (b. 1946)
“Perhaps basketball and poetry have just a few things in common, but the most important is the possibility of transcendence. The opposite is labor. In writing, every writer knows when he or she is laboring to achieve an effect. You want to get from here to there, but find yourself willing it, forcing it. The equivalent in basketball is aiming your shot, a kind of strained and usually ineffective purposefulness. What you want is to be in some kind of flow, each next moment a discovery.”
—Stephen Dunn (b. 1939)
“A good marriage ... is a sweet association in life: full of constancy, trust, and an infinite number of useful and solid services and mutual obligations.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)