Every morning, before the film sessions and the shootarounds and the relentless grind of a WNBA season, Veronica Burton finds a coffee shop. In a video diary she\u2019s been filming for Andscape this season, she described her routine: Bluestone Lane in San Francisco\u2019s Financial District, a vanilla latte, her devotional, some quiet.<\/p>\n
\u201cI have a plan in my head, I have times in my head, and if everything doesn\u2019t go according to my time, it stresses me out,\u201d the Golden State Valkyries guard said. \u201cSo for me, the mornings are in my control.\u201d<\/p>\n
For a player who has spent most of her professional life navigating things very much out of her control, the ritual matters.<\/p>\n
Burton, 26, is in the middle of one of the WNBA\u2019s better stories right now. The Valkyries sit second in the league. She\u2019s averaging 11.9 points, 5.5 assists, 3.4 rebounds and 1.3 steals per game in 2026, building on a 2025 season that made her the WNBA\u2019s Most Improved Player. She\u2019s the engine of an expansion franchise that, in just its second year, looks like a legitimate title contender. And she identifies herself in her Instagram bio with a single word: servant.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen it comes down to it, basketball is talked about a lot in my life, family is talked about in my life, and school,\u201d Burton has said. \u201cBut at the end of the day, the thing that I want to talk about most, the thing that is most important to me, is my faith.\u201d<\/p>\n
Burton grew up in Newton, Massachusetts, in a non-denominational Christian household where Scripture and prayer were part of the rhythm of life. But faith for her wasn\u2019t fully her own until college. At Northwestern, she started reading the Bible for herself \u2014 not just absorbing what she\u2019d grown up with, but actually grappling with it.<\/p>\n
\u201cI realized that the more I centered my life around faith and my relationship with the Lord, the more steady I found myself and the more at peace I found myself,\u201d she said on the Sports Spectrum Podcast. \u201cThat\u2019s where I saw a shift in who I was and what I really prioritized.\u201d<\/p>\n
The faith she found at Northwestern didn\u2019t insulate her from what came next.<\/p>\n
Dallas selected Burton seventh overall in the 2022 WNBA Draft as a defensive specialist. Two seasons later, after averaging 2.5 points a game across 76 appearances, the Wings waived her just before the 2024 season. Her father, Steve, walked into her room shortly after and found her reading her Bible.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m struggling because I don\u2019t know where He wants me,\u201d she told him, \u201cbut my faith in God is getting stronger.\u201d<\/p>\n
She signed with the Connecticut Sun for the rest of that season, made the playoffs and spent the following offseason playing in Australia. She worked on her shooting, put in extra time in the weight room and arrived at Golden State\u2019s training camp with something she\u2019d been trying to find since being drafted: genuine confidence.<\/p>\n
The Valkyries selected her third in the expansion draft. She started all 44 games in their inaugural 2025 season. She scored 30 points in a single game \u2014 the first player in Valkyries history to do so \u2014 joining Napheesa Collier and Sabrina Ionescu as the only players ever to record 30 points, seven rebounds and seven assists while shooting 75% from the field. She won Most Improved Player. She gave thanks to God after Golden State\u2019s first-ever win.<\/p>\n
She has said the biggest change this season isn\u2019t showing up in the box score. It\u2019s what she stopped trying to carry.<\/p>\n
\u201cI won\u2019t get anywhere if I try and do it on my own \u2014 in basketball, in my life and my spiritual life, like, in everything,\u201d Burton said. \u201cI can\u2019t do it alone without God, but I also can\u2019t do it alone without the people around me.\u201d<\/p>\n
For Burton, peace isn\u2019t contentment \u2014 it\u2019s something she actively prays for, a kind of groundedness she has to choose when a career can flip on any given night.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think peace is one of the greatest gifts that I could ever ask for,\u201d she said. \u201cIt can\u2019t be circumstance-based and it can\u2019t be circumstantial, because there\u2019s so much that\u2019s not in my control, and that can be terrifying and exhausting. So, peace is something I pray for every single day, numerous times a day, because the Lord knows I need it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Most athletes\u2019 faith shows up in post-game interviews \u2014 a quick \u201cI want to thank God\u201d before moving on to the pick-and-roll. Burton\u2019s runs quieter than that. It\u2019s in the morning routine she guards. It\u2019s in the Instagram bio. It\u2019s in how she describes being waived: not as something she overcame, but as something that clarified who she was when the basketball identity got stripped away.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf I could talk to the 2024 version of myself that had just gotten waived,\u201d she\u2019s said, \u201cI would tell myself that everything\u2019s going to be OK, and that I am so much more than what an organization, what a coach, what social media, what anyone else says about me.\u201d<\/p>\n
Burton hasn\u2019t made an All-Star game yet. She\u2019s still proving things. But watching her this season \u2014 steady, confident, playing like someone who knows exactly who she is when the ball isn\u2019t in her hands \u2014 she seems less like a player chasing something and more like one who has already found it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Every morning, before the film sessions and the shootarounds and the relentless grind of a WNBA season, Veronica…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":794294,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[73],"tags":[99,434],"class_list":["post-794293","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wnba","tag-sports","tag-wnba"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/794293","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=794293"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/794293\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/794294"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=794293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=794293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=794293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}