Originally published by Women’s Health
There’s a room with a piano at the apartment complex where most of the Seattle Storm players reside, and they’ve given it a nickname: “Dom’s Room.” Dominique Malonga tends to retreat there when her brain gets too overwhelmed—after practice, after a game, or at the end of a long week juggling professional basketball with assignments for her computer science classes.
“I spend my life there,” the 20-year-old tells me over Zoom in April. She’d taken piano lessons as a kid, and when she came back around to it four years ago she realized she hadn’t forgotten how to play. She taught herself piano pieces on YouTube and disappears to Dom’s Room when she needs an escape. “When my mind is full and I need to reset and calm myself, I just go play.”
Much of Malonga’s fanfare as one of the WNBA’s brightest young stars has centered on her athleticism. The 6-foot-6 French center was drafted second overall by the Storm last year; she was the youngest player in the league at the time, but her size, mobility, and ability to dunk made her impossible to ignore. She spent much of her rookie season quietly studying the game behind a team full of veterans. She gradually became a threat off the bench, and subsequently the youngest player ever to post a double-double and reach 100 career points.
But basketball is only part of what she’s building. While she’s learning the league, she’s also chasing a college degree and filling every spare hour with something new, working toward a life that extends well beyond the court.
Off-Season Side Quests
Malonga is calling from Seattle, where she just arrived ahead of training camp after a whirlwind WNBA off-season. She underwent wrist surgery in October, taking her time to truly recover physically and mentally for the first time in years. “It was the first time I had time for me,” she says.
She then spent the first two months of this year in Miami competing in theUnrivaled3-on-3 league, before going home to France to play in the FIBA World Cup Qualifying Tournament. She suffered a concussion two games in, going back into recovery mode, and spent the rest of her time off with family in France.
“When I can stay at home, I stay at home. I’m not really going to go anywhere,” she says. A family of former basketball players, the Malongas tap into their competitive side with card games like Skyjo. “My dad is obsessed with this game. We do tournaments and everything.”
And somewhere in the midst of all that, she signed up to get her bachelor’s degree in computer science at Southern New Hampshire University, an online program that will take her five or six years to finish. She simply Googled “computer science” and chose something that would fit into her lifestyle as a professional athlete.
Malonga always knew she wanted to get a college degree, even before she knew she wanted to play basketball. While domestic WNBA players do not strictly need a degree to go pro, they are required to be 22-years-old and have exhausted their college eligibility, so most players earn one in that time. But international players like Malonga only need to turn 20 in their draft year. The Cameroon-born, France-raised phenom began playing with ASVEL Féminin in the Ligue Féminine de Basketball as well as the French national team at just 16 years old, so she’s been a bit busy the past few years—and the decision to get her bachelor’s degree now is entirely up to her.
She excelled at math and science in school, and adding tech into the mix felt both current and useful. “We don’t even understand how it’s going to be in the next five or 10 years,” she says. “I want to be able to navigate that as I am leaving my print in basketball, and also leave my print in the world tomorrow.”
Her ultimate goal is to build an app, “any type of app,” though she hasn’t nailed down the concept yet or whether she wants it to connect back to sports. First, she’s focused on getting the degree and finding her rhythm with studying—at the time of our conversation, she’d only been in the program for six weeks. Assignments are due every Sunday, so her plan is to start her weekly modules on Wednesdays. But considering she also has a full-time job, sometimes those assignments get done at 11 p.m. on Sunday night, she tells me with a laugh.
So far the class material hasn’t exactly been what she expected. She’s currently studying digital community and how to navigate online spaces. “We have to read a lot of articles and use the resources and then write about that,” she says. “That’s a lot. I’m like, ‘Okay, where’s the maths?’ I want to calculate something.”
But the assignments also ask her to draw from her real life, which has given her an edge. “I use a lot of my experiences in basketball. In this class, for example, we talk about growth mindset, how to overcome challenges, how to set goals, and that’s exactly what I do every day. So that’s really easy, to have that experience.”
Dunking on the Competition
Another skill Malonga’s been working on this off-season? Her notorious dunks, which she did for the first time in a game on U.S. soil at Unrivaled on January 24. She then did it two more times that season. And fans can expect to see her unleash that rare women’s basketball skill this WNBA season, too. “I always said that that’s something that I really want to implement in my game,” she says. “Now it’s really natural. It’s a layup for me now.”
She says a dunk doesn’t require as much effort as it used to, because she’s worked hard in the gym—but not necessarily on the skill itself. “I feel stronger,” she says. “I really can tell the difference since I got in the States. [I’ve] just been really, really working. When I’m here, that’s all I do. I’m living in that gym, so I think that’ll really help.”
Malonga has specifically worked on strengthening her core and gaining muscle mass in her entire body. As a post player, she’s going up against the most physical players in the WNBA, so her mission was to match up with them before mastering other skills. “That was really a focus of mine for the first month that I was here, and now it’s just a routine,” she says of her rookie season. “Now you see what kind of work worked for you, and you just keep that and build on that.” Her computer science studies have also made her more interested in the tech the Storm use to track performance, and she recently bought an Oura Ring to analyze a bit of that herself—not just the data it provides, but the software used to create it.
Her first season at Unrivaled this year improved her speed and conditioning, she says, since full-court 3-on-3 basketball moves at a quicker pace than the usual 5-on-5. “I had more space to express myself on the court. I had the ball more in my hands. I tried more things,” she says. “Overall, I think Unrivaled changed me. So I’m really excited to have a live game to see what it looks like.”
Most significantly, this off-season shifted Malonga’s mindset. Recovering from injury, getting back on the court, and being injured again in the span of a few months taught her that things will not always go the way she maps it out in her head—and that’s okay. “You need to find a way that it will still work,” she says. “This is really what guided me this off-season.”
When she arrived in the States for the first time as a rookie, she didn’t put any pressure or expectations on herself to perform, choosing to take her time to get acclimated to an entirely new country and organization. “It’s another life. It’s completely different,” she says. “And if you’re not great in your mind, if you’re not comfortable where you are, you cannot be good on the court.” She trusted the process and trusted that the Storm coaching staff would put her exactly where she needed to be—listening, learning, and constantly putting the team’s needs first.
She says she feels lucky to have had a team of “amazing vets” likeNneka Ogwumike,Skylar Diggins, and fellow French national team memberGabby Williamsto learn from in her first year. “I didn’t have to carry a team like some rookies had to do,” she says. “I just had time to really be comfortable in this league. I took my time.” Her playing time increased gradually, so it felt like an intentional, smooth transition.
This year’s free agency period, however, means those three vets are now wearing different jerseys—and it’s Malonga’s time to step up and be an example for a rookie class that includes star draft pick Flau’jae Johnson.
Malonga knows what her coaches expect from her and what her place is on the Storm, and is showing up with a positive attitude ready to give 100 percent of whatever she’s got. “Even in my bad days, nobody knows it’s a bad day for me, and that’s just natural for me,” she says. “I know that I don’t need to talk to lead. I will just always lead by the way I show up every day.”
A successful WNBA season for her would look like the Storm winning it all, but she prefers not to go into year two saying she wants to achieve anything specifically for herself. “Knowing what I worked on, I just want to be able to impact the team the best I can and just really give my everything, so that’s what I focus on right now,” she says.
Much like the app she wants to build that doesn’t have a concept yet, or the piano songs she has yet to learn, or the dunks that are only really getting started, Malonga’s approach to all of it is the same: Don’t project too far ahead, just do the work in front of you. “I think by thinking like that, it will come,” she says. No matter what happens, she’ll take it head on and figure it out herself.
Amanda Lucci is the director of special projects at Women’s Health, where she works on multi-platform brand initiatives and social media strategy. She also leads the sports and athletes vertical, traveling to cover the Paris Olympics, Women’s World Cup, WNBA Finals, and NCAA Final Four for WH. She has nearly 15 years of experience writing, editing, and managing social media for national and international publications and is also a NASM-certified personal trainer. A proud native of Pittsburgh, PA, she is a graduate of Ohio University’s E.W. Scripps School of Journalism. Follow her on Instagram @alucci.
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