00:04Playing like a girl on my turf means going out there, being fearless, being
00:07confident, and doing something that I love every single day. My name is Kia
00:13Nurse. I'm a guard for the New York Liberty and we are in New York City. I
00:20started playing basketball when I was four just because I wanted to be like my
00:23big sister. She was nine years older than me and she was successful in
00:27everything that she did and to me that was like Michael Jordan. One of the most
00:36memorable moments of my career was when I was six and I was allowed to finally
00:40shoot on the 10-foot rims and one day I was allowed to go play with the older
00:44kids and I was just this little six-year-old running around. I'm pretty
00:46sure I shot with my eyes closed and airballed but once I got it to the rim
00:50even if it was like the bottom of the rim I was pretty happy.
00:58Essentially play like a girl was something that I heard a lot as a kid.
01:01It was used kind of to say that you were inferior to the others who were in front
01:04of you. The one thing I would say that I do better like a girl is run. I think you
01:08can put anybody beside me and I could probably beat them baseline to baseline.
01:12The advice I would give my 14-year-old self is to stop selling yourself short.
01:20I never thought I would go to UConn. I never thought I'd play on a national team. I never
01:23thought I'd win a national championship. I just wanted to get to the tournament.
01:27To be in the WNBA now, to have gone to an Olympics by the age of 20, to have done
01:33all
01:33of those things that I always thought I never would have done. I would have said when
01:36you're 14, stop selling yourself short. You've got a chance, kid.
01:47When I came into the system, not a lot of people knew who I was. I wasn't ranked with
01:51the ESPN top 100 girls. I wasn't somebody that people had seen play numerous times at
01:56AAU tournaments. So I came in with a clean slate and I got to show everybody in America
02:00what Canadian basketball was all about.
02:04To make it to this point so far, to make it from Canada without going to a prep school,
02:09which is kind of being myself and trying each and every way and each and every day to try
02:12and be the best player and person I could be, was something that I'm very proud of.
02:26So the fight for equal pay, essentially, I think it gets skewed in the media. It gets skewed
02:32when it gets put on the social media because people think they want the exact same money
02:35as the men and that's not what we're asking for. We're just asking to have an opportunity
02:39to allow ourselves to create enough of a living and an income here where maybe we don't have
02:44to go overseas all year. I think for us, we put our heart and soul into this game. We love
02:50it with everything that we can and we do everything and every day to make ourselves better athletes,
02:54better people, to be engaged in our community. And it's not that we want millions and millions
02:59of dollars right off the bat. We just want a little bit of equal pay.
