NORFOLK — Old Dominion women’s basketball coach DeLisha Milton-Jones’ list of accolades stretches seemingly for miles.
An All-American in college at the University of Florida, she enjoyed a 17-year career in the WNBA after college, where she played in 499 games — a record at the time of her retirement — and earned two All-Star selections while being part of the Los Angeles Sparks’ back-to-back championships in 2001 and 2002.
While those awards are impressive, Milton-Jones holds her Olympic gold medals as the best achievements in her career.
“It’s the top, it’s the crème de la crème,” Milton-Jones said. “It’s the top because of everything that it represents. You were the best in the world. You can be a world champion in the WNBA, but you’re still on domestic soil. But to take your talents and to go anywhere in this world and play against whatever country’s best, and you can crown yourself the winner, yeah, it’s always gonna be (at the top).”
Milton-Jones has two Olympic gold medals, one from the 2000 Games in Sydney and another from 2008 in Beijing. She remembers the call telling her she was selected for the national team in 2000 like it was yesterday, saying she felt “a plethora of emotions.
“When you know that you’ve been selected, it’s like Fourth of July fireworks, the coldest chills you could get with the biggest goosebumps,” Milton-Jones said. “It’s a plethora of emotions that you go through knowing that you accomplished something.”
The U.S. women’s national team went 8-0 in the 2000 Games, sweeping its way to a gold medal in dominant fashion. Milton-Jones averaged 4.5 points per game and 2.4 rebounds and shot 51.5% from the field.
Milton-Jones said she and her USA teammates embraced the pressure of competing in the Olympics.
“The pressure was a pleasure,” Milton-Jones said. “No. 1, you knew that you were doing it for your country. Then No. 2, you knew that because you’re doing it for your country, you’re going to have an entire country behind you. And then you look at what our country represents, we are forced within the world of sports. So just in the world, period. So there’s a level of respect that comes with having USA across your chest. Other players from other countries were begging us, and trying to pay us, or exchange Cuban cigars, for our shoes, our jerseys or our clothes. So we knew that we were doing something pretty spectacular.”
Her second appearance at the Olympics didn’t come until 2008 after an injury sidelined her from the 2004 Olympics in Athens, Greece. Milton-Jones had already made the team in 2004, but tore her ACL a month out from Olympic competition. Her return for the 2008 Olympics made the gold medal in Beijing that much sweeter.
“That was probably one of the gloomiest moments in my life,” Milton-Jones said of her injury. “You dedicate all those years of service to making the team, you make it, and now you see the team leave without you and you can’t play. So yeah, huge gap. But within that time frame, there was a huge level of commitment to redeeming myself. And it took a lot of work and it took a lot of fight and grit. And I was able to accomplish that by making the team in 2008. So while 2000 is special because it was the first, 2008 was even more special because of the comeback tour.”
The United States was just as dominant in 2008. Led by legend Lisa Leslie, the Americans went 8-0 en route to beating Australia in the gold medal game for the third consecutive Games in a row. Milton-Jones averaged 2.1 points, 1.3 rebounds and shot 55% from the field in Beijing.
Milton-Jones’ history with the U.S. national team runs deeper than those two Olympic games, though. She was a member of 18 different USA basketball teams from 1994 to 2008 whose combined record was 125-10 and has six gold medals and five international tournament titles to her name.
Representing her country on the world stage numerous times meant “everything” to Milton-Jones.
“I said this a long time ago to some reporters, and I hope I’m not sounding disrespectful to our armed men and women who have served our country, but I felt like I was a soldier,” Milton-Jones said. “But my weapon was a basketball and my skillset. So I had that type of mentality when I went on the court. Instead of me having an AK, I had a clean jump shot or some mean elbows or whatever it was I was able to throw to get the job done. So that was the mentality and it was pride behind that. I wanted to make sure that I kept the honor attached to what we were doing and I kept the respect level that we wanted people to have, or even a healthy dose of fear we wanted the world to have when they saw anything USA coming at them.”
Milton-Jones began coaching with USA Basketball in 2019 and has two gold medals as an assistant coach with the U18 team in the 2022 FIBA Americas Women’s Championship and with the U19 team last year in the FIBA Women’s World Cup. Milton-Jones is still climbing the coaching ranks in the USA Basketball organization and has hopes of being named head coach of the national team in the future.
“Where (a play) could be a one-carat diamond on a high school team, it’s going to be a black diamond on the USA team — it’s going to become something priceless,” Milton-Jones said. “As complex as the game can be, they can simplify things because of their talent level and a high level of thinking that they have and it can open up your playbook as a coach.”
Along with her coaching duties for USA Basketball, she is also a member of the USA National Team Committee in charge of selecting athletes and coaches for USA teams competing in the Olympics, World Cup and other competitions. The selection committee made news recently when WNBA rookie Caitlin Clark was left off the team.
“It was hard and it wasn’t something that was fly-by-night and we just did it in one meeting,” Milton-Jones said. “I can’t even — I need to really count how many Zooms we’ve had over the course of four years. It’s been a lot of work. Flying to Colorado and watching the team, going to the Final Four, watching them in their minicamps. Tuning in to collegiate games and watching Caitlin, watching Angel (Reese) and watching everyone. Having meetings about it, talking to coaches, talking to opponents. Just gathering as much data as we could.”
At the end of the day, Milton-Jones is confident in the team she helped put together and believes they’ll bring home the United States’ eighth straight gold medal.
Michael Sauls, (757) 803-5774, michael.sauls@virginiamedia.com
