6-foot-5 Philadelphia native Ashten Prechtel has overcome a lot of things in her career. (And during her chat with Swish Appeal, we had to overcome a power outage, hence the division into two parts.) Despite the gloomy weather, we talked about positive things, like Prechtel winning the 2021 NCAA national championship with Stanford and being selected No. 34 overall in the 2023 WNBA Draft by the Connecticut Sun.
We also discussed more details for her basketball journey so far, including her end goal of appearing in the WNBA. Highlights from the talk include:
On why, despite being one of the tallest players, she always worked on her dribbling and long-distance shooting:
I would say it was mostly from the fact that I didn’t like when coaches would see that I was tall and only let me play the post. So I was kind of like, in a sense, wanted to rebel against that. And so that’s why I started shooting. And then I also had a club coach who wanted us to be able to play all positions, and so he also really helped me work on my dribbling and my shooting and I think that’s where it started.
On why her minutes per game at Stanford were the highest in her freshman year:
I don’t really know. It wasn’t up to me. Obviously if it was, I would play as much as I could. I was really grateful for the opportunity my freshman year to get a lot of minutes just because some of the older players, they were dealing with injuries and stuff like that. And so as freshmen, we got a lot of experience early on and I think that really carried over into my sophomore year. So we ended up winning the national championship and then, after that I mean, it was never up to me, it was just a matter of the coach’s choices. We had 17 people on our roster my junior year. And so there’s a lot more rotations and stuff like that.
A special thank you to Jeanne McNulty-King of 2X Inc. for arranging the interview.
