Val Whiting  Valeria Olivia Whiting (born April 9, 1972) is a former professional basketball player. Whiting was born on April 9, 1972 in South Orange, New Jersey. She grew up in East Orange, New Jersey, and eventually moved to Wilmington, Delaware during the 80's. By middle school she was almost six feet tall and she even skipped the fourth grade. Being tall, awkward, and shy, she was subject to bullying. In an effort to fit in, she tried out for the middle school cheer squad but didn't make the cut. She says, "Boys only seemed to like the girls that were popular and cheerleaders, so I thought that if I was popular, the bullying would go away." She went into basketball after being cut from the cheerleading team. Despite her father playing college basketball, and her mother being offered a scholarship to play, they never mentioned the sport to her, and she wasn't interested in the sport until her math teacher suggested that she tryout for her middle school team. In the beginning, she found basketball extremely confusing, even scoring for the wrong team once in a game. But she was undeterred by these minor setbacks. On weekends, as a requirement of her father, she would have 6 am workouts to work on her game, honing her skills, which she says she didn't enjoy. She played streetball every weekend against grown men, the challenging situation helping her improve and develop grit. In one incident, she knocked down an adult man off of a rebound during a pick up game. Frustrated and angry, he said, "That's not a girl, that's a man." Val recalls being extremely hurt by this remark, as she was only 13 years old, and was still trying to figure out what it meant to be female and an athlete. Val Whiting didn't begin to love the sport until tenth grade, which was also when she received her first college recruitment letter from Princeton. That moment was when she realized that she could play college basketball. Motivated, she pushed herself harder, attending multiple exposure camps. After these camps, the letters poured in as she gained the interest of many high level college basketball programs. Years later, one assistant coach even said that she would never be a great basketball player, only because of assumptions that she made of her during a high school tryout at Ursuline Academy. She says, "I'm glad that I didn't hear that then, because at that point I was fragile, and it would've demotivated me.