Tiffany Jackson former WNBA player and Texas All American dies at.jpgw1440

Tiffany Jackson, former WNBA player and Texas All-American, dies at age 37

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Tiffany Jackson, an all-American basketball player in Texas and the fifth pick in the 2007 WNBA draft, died Monday of breast cancer at the age of 37, the school said.

“We are deeply saddened by the news of the passing of Tiffany Jackson, one of the greatest players in Texas women’s basketball history,” Longhorns coach Vic Schaefer said of Jackson, who was the head coach at Wiley College, an NAIA school, in Marshall, Tex. “From her days playing for DFW Elite to her days playing at the University of Texas, Tiffany meant so much to so many people in this great state of Texas.”

Jackson was also an all-American in high school at Duncanville, Texas, whose coach tweeted Monday night that she was “an amazing mother, daughter, friend, teammate, and a role model to so many.”

A three-time All-American who played for the Longhorns from 2003-2007, Jackson was a member of the 30-5 Texas team that advanced to the NCAA Sweet 16 in 2004 and was named ESPN’s National Freshman of the Year. She is the only player in Texas women’s basketball history with at least 1,000 points, 1,000 rebounds, 300 steals and 150 blocks.

“Tiffany had a great career and was an amazing player,” said Jody Conradt, the former Texas women’s basketball coach who retired after Jackson’s senior season. “She was recognized for her versatile game and the fact that she was extremely mobile and could play in multiple positions. She was loved by teammates and we share our sadness at her death.”

Jackson, a 6-foot-3 forward, was drafted by New York Liberty and spent three seasons with the team before being traded to the Tulsa Shock in 2010. Her best professional season, when she averaged 12.4 points and 8.4 rebounds, came in 2011 with the shock.

Jackson was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2015 and, with her cancer in remission, played another season in the WNBA with Los Angeles in 2017. She retired at 32 and spent two years as an assistant coach in Texas.

Jackson had been playing in Israel during the WNBA’s offseason when she found a minor knot in early 2015. She saw a doctor when she returned to Dallas but didn’t have a mammogram, she later told ESPN, because the WNBA season was imminent. She became concerned when she noticed that it was changing. Jackson was married at the time, had one young son and was undergoing 16 chemotherapy treatments.

“My little boy is 3 and he doesn’t really understand what’s going on,” she told ESPN in 2016. “All he knows is that some days he stays with grandma and then he asks what kind of help I got from the doctor.” . They give me different ones with Spider-Man or Scooby-Doo on them and my son loves them. My husband works in East Texas so he has a long commute. There is a lot to manage.”

Jackson used her stage 3 diagnosis to try to raise awareness about the disease.

“You hear ‘breast cancer,’ and you think you get it,” she told ESPN. “But you don’t really understand it until it gets closer to you. Or it hits home.

“It was something I didn’t even have in my head, really. So I feel like just knowing that there is a way will help people. I wish I had known more. I’ve talked about it in schools and colleges. Especially with the African American community. Because we don’t get that many early screenings. So we get diagnosed when it’s stage 3 or stage 4 and we die at higher rates. So I preached, preached, preached.”