Louisville Legend Angel McCoughtry Unveiling New Court in Shively Park
LOUISVILLE, Ky. - Angel McCoughtry is giving back to the community that helped her launch a Hall of Fame-caliber playing career.
The former UofL women's basketball All-American is leaving a permanent mark on the city by partnering with Adidas and Project Backboard to renovate a basketball court in Louisville's Shively Park.
The court is named "Reaching for the Stars", which is named after her single that she released last month. It depicts McCoughtry in a vibrant array colors painted onto the blacktop, with "Reaching for the Stars" written in her handwriting along the baselines.
"Louisville is a place I was able to 'Reach for the Stars'," McCoughtry told Louisville Report. "With the help of Adidas, we want to show you that you can too."
Project Backboard is a non-profit organization founded in 2015 whose mission, according to their website, is to "renovate public basketball courts and install large scale works of site specific art on the surface in order to strengthen communities, improve park safety, encourage multi-generational play, and inspire people to think more critically and creatively about their environment."
Some of their more recent court renovations have been in partnerships with Shaquille O'Neal, Carmelo Anthony and Donovan Mitchell. O'Neal unveiled a court earlier this month at the Boys & Girls Club in Marietta, Ga., Anthony renovated one in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and Mitchell refurbished another at The Children’s Village just north of New York City.
McCoughtry's court will be unveiled to the public on Friday, June 17. She is putting on a grand opening-style event that day from 11:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m., where there will be a cookout, D.J., door prizes and give-a-ways. Admission to the event is free of charge.
The Baltimore native is generally regarded to be the best player in Louisville women's basketball history. She is the program's leader in points (2,779), rebounds (1,261), and steals (481), is a three-time WBCA All-American, and helped lead the Cardinals to their first national championship game appearance in 2009. Her No. 35 is the only number to be retired by the program.
She spent the first ten years of her career with the Atlanta Dream, after she was drafted by them with the No. 1 overall pick in the 2009 WNBA Draft. Also seeing recent stints with the Las Vegas Aces and Minnesota Lynx, she ranks 16th in all-time WNBA scoring with 5,797 points. Last year, the WNBA named her to the W25, which name the top 25 players in the history of the league.
(Photo of Angel McCoughtry: Scott Utterback - Courier Journal via Imagn Content Services, LLC)
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