It didn't matter how good I was. It was always, 'You're a girl. You can't play with the guys.' It's always been motivation for me.
I've been really vocal about my disappointment about how the WNBA athletes get treated like second-class citizens in relations to the NBA when they're a subsidiary.
I was raised on an estate in an inner city school where people had a go about my size, people saying I am too big to play football - which still happens today - and I used that to inspire me.
There have been players with Indian heritage, but there hasn't been a Native-American professional basketball player who became a regular for all sorts of social and political reasons.
I think it's very easy for people to stereotype athletes, good and bad.
Few would deny that blacks have become very dominant in athletics: football, basketball, track, now dominant in tennis and dominant in golf.
I was embarrassed to be seen in my football tracksuit because they knew I'd been training. I used to cross the road to avoid people. It was really hard. There were so many awkward situations. I just hope young girls now are able to play football and not have to experience what I did.
There's not that many African-American quarterbacks, so we have to do a little bit extra. Because the percentage of us playing this position, which people didn't want us to play... is low, so we do a little extra.
We laud the women's cricket team when they win accolades, but when a regular girl enjoys watching cricket, the men look at her and start testing her knowledge about the sport.
