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’s been filming for Andscape this season, she described her routine: Bluestone Lane in San Francisco’s Financial District, a vanilla latte, her devotional, some quiet.
“I have a plan in my head, I have times in my head, and if everything doesn’t go according to my time, it stresses me out,” the Golden State Valkyries guard said. “So for me, the mornings are in my control.”
For a player who has spent most of her professional life navigating things very much out of her control, the ritual matters.
Burton, 26, is in the middle of one of the WNBA’s better stories right now. The Valkyries sit second in the league. She’s 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’s Most Improved Player. She’s 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.
“When it comes down to it, basketball is talked about a lot in my life, family is talked about in my life, and school,” Burton has said. “But 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.”
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’t fully her own until college. At Northwestern, she started reading the Bible for herself — not just absorbing what she’d grown up with, but actually grappling with it.
“I 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,” she said on the Sports Spectrum Podcast. “That’s where I saw a shift in who I was and what I really prioritized.”
The faith she found at Northwestern didn’t insulate her from what came next.
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.
“I’m struggling because I don’t know where He wants me,” she told him, “but my faith in God is getting stronger.”
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’s training camp with something she’d been trying to find since being drafted: genuine confidence.
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 — the first player in Valkyries history to do so — 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’s first-ever win.
She has said the biggest change this season isn’t showing up in the box score. It’s what she stopped trying to carry.
“I won’t get anywhere if I try and do it on my own — in basketball, in my life and my spiritual life, like, in everything,” Burton said. “I can’t do it alone without God, but I also can’t do it alone without the people around me.”
For Burton, peace isn’t contentment — it’s something she actively prays for, a kind of groundedness she has to choose when a career can flip on any given night.
“I think peace is one of the greatest gifts that I could ever ask for,” she said. “It can’t be circumstance-based and it can’t be circumstantial, because there’s so much that’s 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.”
Most athletes’ faith shows up in post-game interviews — a quick “I want to thank God” before moving on to the pick-and-roll. Burton’s runs quieter than that. It’s in the morning routine she guards. It’s in the Instagram bio. It’s 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.
“If I could talk to the 2024 version of myself that had just gotten waived,” she’s said, “I would tell myself that everything’s 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.”
Burton hasn’t made an All-Star game yet. She’s still proving things. But watching her this season — steady, confident, playing like someone who knows exactly who she is when the ball isn’t in her hands — she seems less like a player chasing something and more like one who has already found it.
