When Veronica Burton got the call that the Dallas Wings had waived her in 2024, she was at home in Newton, Massachusetts, with her family. She went back to her room, locked herself in and opened the Bible.
“Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds” — James 1:2. That verse hit hardest. Mentally exhausted and wrestling with self-doubt, Burton eventually walked out of the house and headed to a nearby YMCA to shoot hoops. Her sister Kayla Burton stood on the sideline
and quietly pulled out her phone, capturing a short video of Veronica resting with the ball, staring blankly down the court while people played pickleball behind her.
“I just remember her mentally, emotionally exhausted, trying not to break down, but having a moment like, ‘Is this my life?'” Kayla Burton said. “I recorded it because I wanted her to see it down the road.”
A year later, Veronica Burton was named the WNBA’s Most Improved Player after averaging career highs of 11.9 points, 4.4 rebounds, 6.0 assists and 1.1 steals in 44 games as a regular starter for the Golden State Valkyries, an expansion franchise that made the playoffs in its inaugural 2025 season.
5 a.m. Family Routine
The work ethic that carried Burton through her darkest professional moment was forged long before any WNBA draft call.
Burton comes from one of Northwestern’s most storied athletic families. Her father, Steve Burton, was a former Northwestern quarterback and son of Hall of Fame running back Ron Burton. Her mother, Ginna Burton, was an All-American swimmer for the Wildcats. Her brother, Austin Burton, played college football as a quarterback; her sisters, Kendall Burton and Kayla Burton, both played college basketball.
Growing up surrounded by that athletic environment, Veronica Burton was drawn to basketball through watching her sisters. That meant waking up at 5 a.m., Monday through Saturday, for family workouts. Thanks to Steve’s relationships with local YMCA janitors, the Burtons had access to a basketball court before anyone else arrived. Steve would turn on music from the sideline to cheer others up, Ginna would rebound down the rim, and Veronica had to make a set number of shots before heading to school.
The routine traced back to a lesson Ron passed down to Steve, who carried it into the family’s DNA.
“If you practice when everybody else is practicing, you can stay even,” Steve said, “but if you practice when everybody else is sleeping, you can go by people.”
The early-morning grind sharpened her skills well ahead of schedule. Burton played in a boys’ league in middle school and won MVP. At Newton South High School, she averaged 20 points, 10 rebounds and 5.7 assists per game as a senior in 2017-18. Her coach, Joe Rogers, still remembers one of her games during his first year as a coach, where she dropped 43 points against Cambridge Rindge and Latin on the road.
“She’s someone who was always in the gym before school, who always did the extra work,” Rogers said. “There’s a confidence that is grounded in the work she’s done and the time she’s put in.”
Becoming a Wildcat
credit: NU Athletics
With the family’s deep Northwestern ties, it might have seemed inevitable that Burton would follow in their footsteps. But Northwestern didn’t initially offer her.
“Veronica had to pursue it,” Ginna said of the school that carries her grandfather’s name on its campus, but showed no interest in the family’s youngest daughter until then-head coach Joe McKeown traveled to watch her play at a Boo Williams Summer League tournament in Virginia. At the time, DePaul had already expressed interest.
The family didn’t push her toward Northwestern. But after Ginna took Burton to the campus, her commitment to the school, where the academic advising center was named after her grandfather, became natural.
“It’s not that we wanted her to go there — it was that she wanted to go there, and it became her experience, it became her legacy,” Ginna said.
Once on campus, Burton flourished. She started 31 games as a freshman and led the Big Ten in steals with 81, immediately asserting herself as one of the conference’s premier defenders. She went on to earn Big Ten Defensive Player of the Year honors in each of her final three seasons.
But defense was never the complete picture. Burton steadily elevated her scoring from 8.6 points per game as a freshman to 17.8 as a senior. She guided Northwestern to a WNIT runner-up finish in her first year and a program-best 26-4 record in 2019-20, a season whose postseason was wiped out by the pandemic. As a junior captain, she averaged nearly five more points per game than the previous season and led the nation with 3.84 steals per game, helping the Wildcats reach their eighth and most recent NCAA Tournament appearance.
“Her defense was number one. She always built her confidence from the defensive side of the ball,” Kayla said.
The growth at Northwestern originated from the work ethic Burton honed at home. Even during the COVID-19 quarantine, the gym was Burton’s refuge from the anxiety. Her obsession with extra work outside of team practices became a concern for McKeown, who even had one time kicked her out of the gym at 5 a.m.
Despite the post-college world emphasizing health and load management, she still carries a drive to outwork people
“I think that’s something that’s been instilled in me,” Burton said. “I don’t see that going away, no matter how many years in I am, no matter if I’m starting or not playing. That’s built into who I am and my foundation.”
When she left Evanston for the 2022 WNBA Draft, Burton had become one of the program’s greats. The Wildcats still play a clip of WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert calling her name at the draft during home-game promotional videos.
But what Burton values most from those years isn’t any of that.
“I really don’t remember the basketball accomplishments at Northwestern more than the relationships I built there,” Burton said. “That is the most important thing I took from Northwestern, and it’s the most important thing I’ll continue to take from my entire WNBA career.”
The Long Way Back
A prolific college career and a top-10 draft selection should have translated into a smooth professional transition. However, such a dream start didn’t happen for Burton.
Drafted seventh overall by the Dallas Wings in 2022, Burton averaged just 2.5 points and 2.1 assists per game across 76 regular-season games in her first two seasons. On a team built around scorers, she wasn’t a rotation priority. Before the 2024 season, she was cut.
When she heard the news at home, she processed the upset emotion with the Bible in a locked room. Steve then knocked on her door. The conversation was brief but impactful.
“Dad, I don’t have a team,” Burton said.
“Don’t worry, Veronica, you will get a team,” Steve responded.
“What should I do?”
“Let’s go back to the gym. Let’s start shooting.”
So that’s what Burton did. She described the weeks that followed as a “back-and-forth battle” — struggling between maintaining the energy to chase what came next or walking away entirely. She leaned on her faith and fell back into the childhood routine.
Around that time, Steve shared a story with her. Drew Hanlen, the trainer known for working with Boston Celtics star Jayson Tatum, was running a clinic in Boston when a kid named Charlie asked how to build confidence. Hanlen told Charlie to tie his shoes. He did it without hesitation.
“If you do something every day, you don’t have a confidence problem,” Steve recalled Hanlen telling Charlie. “That’s what I shared with Veronica. If you shoot every day, you’re not gonna have a confidence problem.”
Days later, she signed with the Connecticut Sun and finished the rest of the 2024 season, then took her game overseas to Australia’s Women’s National Basketball League (WNBL). Playing for the Bendigo Spirit, she averaged 15.1 points, 5.8 rebounds and 4.7 assists per game and won a league championship. More than the numbers, she rebuilt her offensive aggression, sharpened her shooting and most importantly, her confidence.
“(The overseas experience) was huge to me,” Burton said. “I found myself playing a lot and forcing myself to be more aggressive on the offensive end, which was a goal of mine, and increasing my shooting percentages was a big goal of mine in the offseason.”
Breakout with the Valkyries and Beyond
While Burton was playing in Australia, the WNBA announced its expansion in late 2024: the Valkyries would join the league for the 2025 season. Burton, unprotected by the Sun, was allocated to the new franchise.
A newly built team with no established identity, stocked with players who felt overlooked elsewhere but were hungry to prove themselves. For Burton, it was the perfect place.
“(The team) gave all these players the opportunity to showcase what they feel like they haven’t had the opportunity to show,” said ClutchPoints Valkyries beat reporter Kenzo Fukuda. “I think Veronica is one of those players who proved a lot of teams made a mistake about what they thought of her.”
With teammate Kayla Thornton sidelined by a season-ending injury, Burton was handed more responsibility than she’d ever had in the WNBA. The ball was in her hands. The offense ran through her. She delivered career highs across each category of the statsheet, becoming the first player in WNBA history to increase her averages by at least five points, two rebounds and two assists in a single season.
“Her offense took a leap in the second half of the season, where she started to get downhill more,” Fukuda said. “Her handle got a little tighter. (But) It’s more that she got the opportunity to have the ball in her hands and showcase what she’s been capable of.”
As much as any statistic, what stood out most was a personality shift. Under Valkyries head coach Natalie Nakase, who’s known for her energetic coaching style and closeness with players, Burton grew into a vocal leader, something that hadn’t come naturally to her..
“We had a foundation of trust where I could go to her and she could come to me,” Burton said of Nakase. “She understood how I could impact the game. It wasn’t just about a box score.”
Since her breakout season, Burton’s offseason has been filled with opportunities. She was invited to USA Basketball training camp twice, competed in the FIBA 3×3 AmeriCup in Mexico and the 3×3 Champions Cup in Thailand, and joined the Unrivaled league, a women’s 3×3 league founded in 2023 in the United States that allowed WNBA players to play in the offseason.
Now six games into the 2026 WNBA season, Burton has averaged 14.3 points, 2.8 rebounds, 6.3 assists and 1.0 steals per game, building on everything she established in her first year with Golden State.
Burton noted that despite how quickly everything in her career seemed to happen, all of these opportunities were a result of a long process. “People say, in a year, how all of that changed,” Burton said. “But I think it really was a long process for me, and it’s still a process for me. It doesn’t happen if you don’t keep showing up day by day.”
