WASHINGTON — Sometimes, when Ally Wilson is hanging out in the Washington Mystics locker room, she watches what’s happening without fully understanding. The divide isn’t cultural, though Wilson is Australian and many of her teammates are American. It’s age: Wilson is 32, her next-oldest teammate is 26 and the Mystics’ average age is just 24.
So when her teammates are dancing, making TikToks and generally acting like players who are just a year or two out of college, it’s because they are.
“I have not been on a team this young before,” Wilson told The IX Basketball on May 10 with a laugh. “… The locker room is interesting. Yeah, you can definitely tell there’s an age gap between us, that’s for sure.”
Wilson came to Washington this spring as one of six players on nonguaranteed training camp contracts, and she was the only one to make the final roster.
She’s part of a wave of players who are getting their first WNBA minutes later in their careers. Over the past 20 seasons, 15 players have debuted in the league at age 30 or older. But seven of those debuts have happened just since 2024.
“I set the tone,” New York Liberty guard Julie Vanloo, who debuted with the Mystics in 2024 at age 31, jokingly told The IX Basketball.
The Mystics brought Wilson in to lead with her experience, even though this is her first WNBA season. That’s because her resume in international competition and high-level Australian leagues is as long and decorated as nearly anyone’s.
“That kind of on-floor, on-court leadership of just kind of awareness of what’s going on and passing that along to four other players, that’s not a small thing,” Mystics head coach Sydney Johnson told reporters on May 10. “That’s a huge benefit for our roster.”
Wilson grew up in Murray Bridge in South Australia and followed her father, a former pro himself, into basketball. At the time, playing in the then-fledgling WNBA wasn’t on her radar. Her goal was to play in the Olympics for the Opals, Australia’s 5×5 women’s national team.
Wilson rose quickly through the ranks of professional and international basketball. She debuted in Australia’s top professional league, the WNBL, at age 16 in the 2010-11 season. In 2012 and 2013, she represented Australia in youth tournaments, including the 2013 Under-19 World Championships.
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For more than a decade, Wilson continued to play year-round in Australia, coming back from four knee injuries and a broken nose over the years. She has played for five WNBL teams and four in the NBL1, Australia’s top semiprofessional league. In 2025, she surpassed 250 career games in the WNBL. And at 5’9, she has played point guard, shooting guard and small forward depending on what her teams have needed.
“I feel like my biggest strength on the court is I’m a playmaking guard,” she said. “I can score, I can pass the ball, so I sort of just try to plug in where I can and do whatever I can do to help a team.”
Australian forward Anneli Maley first played with Wilson in 2019 with the Diamond Valley Eagles in the NBL1. They’ve been teammates several more times since then, including in the 2025-26 WNBL season with the Perth Lynx.
“She’s always been special,” Maley told The IX Basketball on May 15 about Wilson. “She has an edge — a competitive edge. She’s someone that you always want on your team but you hate playing against.”
Maley added, “You never know when you’re going to get a pass from her. She’s very creative, and she will … find a way to get you the ball. So I think that that’s the best thing about her, really, is that as a teammate, she always finds people and makes them better.”
In 2020, though, Wilson considered retirement. She hadn’t been selected for the Opals in a while, and she wasn’t enjoying basketball anymore — partly, she said, because she was focusing so much on outcomes like making the national team and not on the process of getting there.
Ultimately, she decided she wasn’t finished yet.
“When I did commit to continue to play, I was like, ‘I’m just gonna throw everything that I have into this and attack it like I’d never had before,’” Wilson said.
She signed with the WNBL’s Bendigo Spirit in 2021 and started playing 3×3 in 2022, both of which helped her find joy in basketball again. Though she didn’t know it at the time, the Bendigo opportunity would lead her to 3×3, as the Australian 3×3 coach saw her play for the Spirit and reached out to recruit her to a training camp.
In that first camp, Wilson wasn’t immediately enamored with 3×3. She was trying to learn a whole new set of rules, and the game was even more physical than 5×5. But she eventually found her rhythm and became a mainstay with the Gangurrus, Australia’s 3×3 women’s national team.
In her 3×3 debut, Wilson won a bronze medal at the 2022 Commonwealth Games. Then she teamed up with Maley to help Australia qualify for the Olympics in 3×3 for the first time ever. The Gangurrus finished fifth at the 2024 Paris Olympics behind Wilson’s 7.1 points per game, the second-most of any player in the tournament. And in pool play, Wilson had 8 of Australia’s 17 points in an upset win over the United States.
“Qualifying for the Olympics was a super, super hard thing that brought us very together,” Maley said. “So, yeah, it was an incredible experience. She’s an awesome teammate. There’s no one else who I’d rather step out on the floor with, really, when it gets to crunch time.”
Playing 3×3 helped Wilson improve on both sides of the ball. She became a better defender because she knew she wouldn’t have help behind her. The physicality of the game pushed her to finish better through contact, and the pace taught her to rely on her instincts.
“It’s helped me so much with my game,” Wilson said. “… You have 12 seconds [on the shot clock] and you need to make the play that you see. There’s no sort of time for too much thinking.”
Many of the strides Wilson made in 3×3 translated directly to 5×5 as well, and after the Olympics, she got back in the mix with the Opals. She was part of the gold-medal-winning Asia Cup team in 2025 and participated in a World Cup qualifying tournament this year. Her goal now is to make the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics with the Opals and fulfill her original childhood dream.
As Wilson found success in her second act of basketball, she started to think about the WNBA. Specifically, she thought, “I feel like my best is good enough.”
In 2024, Wilson decided to leave Bendigo and sign with Perth. It was a tough decision, she said, but the right one for her WNBA aspirations.
“The style that we played at Perth was pretty similar to how it flows here in the W — all concept [rather than set plays], push, space and pace — which I felt like really set me up to come in here and have a bit of a seamless transition,” she said. “… So the last couple years that I’ve spent at Perth, developing and getting better, have been huge for my development to bring me here.”
Following her first season in Perth, Wilson got her first WNBA opportunity when the Chicago Sky signed her to a training camp contract in 2025. Though she’d talked to other Australians about their experiences in the WNBA, she knew every team and coach was different. So she headed to the U.S. with little sense of what to expect.
Wilson was cut in training camp, but she learned a lot about where her game needed to take another step. She played 3×3 over the summer, including in the FIBA 3×3 World Cup, and then got another season of development at Perth. She tried to make her ball-handling, her reaction time and her vocal leadership that much better, to put her at the level needed to stick in the WNBA.
When her second chance came, it ended up being a great fit for her style of play. Johnson has coached 3×3 before and values that pace of play. In the WNBA, he wants the Mystics to shoot in the first eight seconds of the shot clock. That’s been no problem for Wilson after playing with a 12-second clock in 3×3.
In Wilson, Johnson and his staff saw someone who had played at the highest level of international competition, fit their style of play, could play multiple positions, and could add shooting to a team that didn’t draft as much shooting as expected this year.
“The Australians know what they’re doing basketball-wise,” Johnson said on May 8. “… She makes threes, she makes passes, she facilitates offense, [she has a] high IQ, she competes. … [She’s] just a high-IQ, skilled player who can help us stretch the game.”
Crucially, the Mystics also saw Wilson as someone who could connect with and help guide their younger players, even though she’d be a WNBA rookie herself. Before she’d ever played a game for the Mystics, Johnson mentioned Wilson multiple times alongside 26-year-old Michaela Onyenwere and 25-year-old Shakira Austin as leaders who he wanted to stay connected with and who he trusted to elevate the team.
Asked about the moment when Johnson told her she’d made her first WNBA roster, Wilson chuckled.
“Um, it didn’t quite go like that,” she said.
She continued, “I just didn’t get cut. So no news is good news here.”
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Wilson made the team despite being unavailable for any preseason games, the first for personal reasons and the second with a neck injury. Without those game reps, everything felt new in the season opener against the Toronto Tempo. She’d never even been to Canada until the Mystics’ plane touched down.
But when she checked in midway through the first quarter, she quickly shook off her nerves and found ways to impact the game. Her first WNBA points came late in the quarter, when she caught a kick-out pass from center Lauren Betts on the perimeter, saw the seams in the defense, got all the way to the rim and finished through contact.
Two days later, Wilson played important minutes in an overtime loss to the New York Liberty. She finished with 5 points, four rebounds and two assists in 23:46, including a game-tying assist with about seven minutes left in regulation. In overtime, she had two offensive rebounds in 1:56 while also running the point.
“I was just super keen to get out there, get sort of my first one under my belt,” Wilson said. “Those first games are always like, you try to feel it out, see what your role is, see where you fit in. So I felt much more comfortable on the court tonight [against New York]. … Tonight was awesome.”
Though Wilson has struggled with her 3-point shot to start the season, she knows the Mystics want her to stay ready and keep shooting. Overall, she’s averaging 3.0 points and 1.8 rebounds in 14.5 minutes per game, playing both on the ball and off.
“It really is only the beginning,” Maley said. “I’m really excited to see where she goes and what she does. … The WNBA has only seen a little bit of her. There’s so much more to her and so much more that she can give, but I’m so happy for her. She deserves all of her flowers; she deserves every opportunity. She’s worked so hard.”
In addition, Wilson has been a calming force for her teammates, including by speaking up in huddles, practices and film sessions.
“Yes, it’s her first go-through in the W, but she’s played in big moments, and that steadiness, that kind of passes along to players as well,” Johnson said on May 10. “So those are things that maybe don’t always show up in the box score, but coaches and, honestly, good players realize how important that is to have someone like that around.”
“She’s just really good at vocalizing and being a leader,” rookie point guard Rori Harmon told The IX Basketball. “… It’s good to hear her and hear her voice and hear her knowledge and experience. … She’s fun; she’s exciting. She’s just a very smart player, and I learn a lot from her.”
Harmon has particularly watched Wilson’s pace — including when she goes fast and when she goes slow — and tried to apply that to her own game. That’s the kind of thing that Wilson has learned with experience and that the Mystics want young players like Harmon to be able to see in action.
Meanwhile, Wilson is seeing something equally powerful: what her WNBA dream looks like in real life, not just in her mind’s eye.
“It’s amazing, absolutely amazing, and being able to play and contribute and all that sort of stuff makes it even … sweeter,” she said. “Yeah, it’s been a long, winding road for me, but I felt like everything’s happened in my journey to lead me to this point now. So even though it happened a little bit later than I would have liked, I’m just so blessed and grateful to be here.”
Monumental Sports and Entertainment, the group that owns the Washington Mystics, holds a minority stake in The IX Basketball. The IX Basketball’s editorial operations are entirely independent of Monumental and all other business partners.
The IX Basketball’s Dylan Kane contributed reporting for this story.
