Professional
In 2003 she was drafted as the No. 3 overall pick in the first round by the Detroit Shock in the WNBA Draft.
In just her first year in the league, Ford led the Shock from a worst to first record and a WNBA championship in 2003. She is the first player to have won the WNBA Rookie of the Year Award and a WNBA championship in the same year. Afterwards, she played for the Dallas Fury in the National Women's Basketball League (NWBL) under Coach Nancy Lieberman.
On July 15, 2007, Ford won the WNBA All-Star Game MVP Award in Washington, D.C. when the East beat the West 103–99.
Ford missed the rest of the 2008 WNBA season due to an anterior cruciate ligament injury in her right knee, sustained on July 22, 2008 during a game against the Los Angeles Sparks. A brawl had broken out and Ford sustained the injury while attempting to restrain her teammate.
During the 2009 WNBA season, Ford averaged 7.4 rebounds per game and 8.6 points per game.
In January 2010, Ford signed a deal with Polish team CCC Aquapark Polkowice from 1st division league Ford Germaz Ekstraklasa (PLKK).
On September 12, 2012, The Canik Belediyesi basketball club was announced as having signed Ford, as well as New York Liberty veteran Janel McCarville.
Read more about this topic: Cheryl Ford
Famous quotes containing the word professional:
“The professional celebrity, male and female, is the crowning result of the star system of a society that makes a fetish of competition. In America, this system is carried to the point where a man who can knock a small white ball into a series of holes in the ground with more efficiency than anyone else thereby gains social access to the President of the United States.”
—C. Wright Mills (1916–1962)
“The American character looks always as if it had just had a rather bad haircut, which gives it, in our eyes at any rate, a greater humanity than the European, which even among its beggars has an all too professional air.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“I hate the whole race.... There is no believing a word they say—your professional poets, I mean—there never existed a more worthless set than Byron and his friends for example.”
—Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke Wellington (1769–1852)