How basketball gave UCLA slugger Megan Grant the joy to make softball history

Between home run No. 1 and No. 38, Grant earned a national championship ring with UCLA women’s basketball, heard her name called fourth in the Athletes Unlimited Softball League draft and helped power a Bruins lineup that turned nearly every showing into an offensive avalanche.

For the past three years, Grant lived under the exhausting gravity reserved for elite hitters. Every at-bat carried expectation, every slump invited scrutiny and every moonshot intensified the hunger for the next. Softball wrapped itself around her identity, as high-level sports often do.

Basketball disrupted that cycle without ever pulling Grant away from the diamond, giving her just enough distance.

Mornings blurred into basketball practices, and afternoons drifted toward softball workouts. Weeks became a weave of lifts, flights, games and late-night swings. On a basketball trip to Las Vegas for the WBCA Challenge, UCLA’s coaching staff helped locate a batting cage for Grant, who dragged along the team’s dietitian and athletic trainer so she could hit between games.

“To be able to do both in one day, it just filled my mind with all this confidence,” Grant said. “I’m like, ‘Hey, I can do anything.’

“I love that little back and forth. Sometimes I’m shooting a ball and then other times I’m hitting a ball. So I just love that reset. It was really great for my mind, just to let it flow, but then also flush it and reset.”

Grant understood the balancing act meant chasing softball history couldn’t make basketball an afterthought, and basketball couldn’t pull her far from the sport that had shaped her life.

“She got recruited to play softball,” Christine Grant, Megan’s mom, said. “So it was like she could never let them see her exhausted, because she needed to be there for them, just as much as she was there for the basketball team, or more, really.”

When Megan was 12, her family learned her softball team was headed to the Colorado Sparkler/Fireworks tournament — one of the crown jewels of the fastpitch calendar — while she was committed to an AAU basketball tournament in Portland. The Grants were too new to elite softball to grasp the magnitude of it all. Megan sensed it immediately.

The idea of her softball team traveling without her gnawed at Grant. Christine said that was the moment her daughter planted her flag, declaring that her softball team would “never go anywhere without her again.”

“And they never did,” Christine said.

Still, basketball never truly loosened its hold. At Aragon High, Grant hoisted two Central Coast Section titles, consumed by the game she called her “dream.” But once softball took center stage, ambition started demanding greatness.

“I’m just in love with the craft of just getting better, trying to be the best version of myself,” Grant said, “whether it was basketball or softball or even volleyball, too, I just tried to strive for greatness in whatever I could do.”

Basketball let Grant revisit her 12-year-old promise with fresh eyes.

“(Basketball) brought her the perspective of, she’s more than a softball player and more than a basketball player,” said Jordan Woolery, Grant’s longtime co-star in the middle of UCLA’s lineup. “It’s easier to be successful when you have that perspective.”

At Mo Ostin Basketball Center, Grant was anonymous in the best possible way. Surrounded by All-Americans and what became six top-20 WNBA draft picks, Grant realized that — for the first time in years — her worth had nothing to do with how often the ball found her hands.

Her role, the one head coach Cori Close envisioned to complete a team built to win it all, centered on joy and culture. Christine said Megan embraced the responsibility of keeping the Bruins “full of joy,” reminding them “who they were as a unit and as individuals.”

“I thought we were doing her a favor, and boy, was I wrong,” Close said on the Welcome To The Party Show. “She has brought us so much energy, so much joy, such a different perspective.”

None of that was foreign to Grant. Christine said her daughter had always understood the temperature of a room and the role she needed to play in it. As a volleyball middle blocker, she could “smash in somebody’s face and walk off, then that was it.” In basketball, she supplied life without demanding the spotlight. In softball, she knew greatness was hollow unless it carried teammates in its wake.

Don’t let her humility fool you, for it never dulled the violence of Grant’s edge.

Christine laughed, remembering Megan arriving at basketball practices with the same fearless wiring forged by growing up as the youngest among two brothers, fully convinced she could battle Lauren Betts — “absolutely no problem.”

“And then (Megan would) get humbled,” Christine said. “And then get hard on herself … but it’s like, girl, they’re you in softball.

“And then she let herself just enjoy it, and just learn from them. … They took her in and were like, … ‘Look what you did for us over here and just being light, learning how we can play with joy.’”

Eventually, basketball stopped being about what Grant lacked and became about how it taught her to pour into a team without needing to consume it. By spring, that looseness followed her back into the batter’s box.

Grant was almost impossible to rush at the plate. Her strike zone shrank and pitchers treated the heart of it like live ammunition. Walks and hit-by-pitches accumulated alongside towering homers. Yet despite losing 76 plate appearances to 64 walks and 12 HBPs — while being walked more than five times as often as she struck out — frustration rarely surfaced, channeled into her trust in the next batter up.

“For Megan to take so many walks is so impressive for a hitter who’s chasing records and breaking records and setting records to be patient,” Inouye-Perez said. “The amount of strikeouts (12) she has speaks to how locked in she is.

Oftentimes, the consequence waiting on deck was Woolery, a one-two punch that made detours around Grant a dangerous gamble.

Long before they began terrorizing pitchers, Woolery and Grant arrived at UCLA as the nation’s top two infield recruits. “We both had those aspirations to break records,” Grant said, “but we just didn’t know how we were going to do it.”

The first shared benchmark was 50 combined home runs in 2025, a number they missed by one swing. So for their last go-around, they pushed for 60.

Competition never fractured their partnership, Inouye-Perez saying it was “not me versus you. … It’s, ‘What can we do together?’”

Pitch around Grant, Woolery waited next. Watching Woolery climb the UCLA RBI record book, Grant grinned and reveled in it. Their pursuit of shared greatness turned historic as the duo became the first Division I teammates to both eclipse 30 home runs in the same season.

“It’s like, the best show ever,” Woolery said of Grant’s hitting.

“It’s crazy to think with the stuff that we’ve done,” Grant said, “that she’s my teammate — like it’s not just some other person across the country, it’s someone who I see every single day, hold very dearly to my heart.”

Woolery labeled this season the freest she’d seen Grant play. Freshmen TikTok-danced through innings alongside veterans. And UCLA’s offense swelled into something both devastating and joyful.

That joy mattered to Grant because it had once felt difficult to hold on to. As Christine put it, softball is a sport that forces players to live alongside failure, and as Megan’s stardom grew, failures came with greater scrutiny.

“The biggest learning curve to her,” Christine said, “was remembering the joy that was in her heart and bringing it out even when she’s failing, because she’s in a sport of failure.”

Without basketball, Grant admitted, “I might not have been as freed up as I am.” That emotional release — something she called a “very key role in what’s going on this year” — eventually surfaced physically, too.

Grant said she had “never felt fitter,” while Christine saw a player with sharper, quicker feet and lighter athleticism born of basketball conditioning and unfamiliar movement patterns.

It all snowballed into something unbelievable: a national championship in one sport, a top-four professional draft selection, an NCAA home-run record and a postseason run still ahead in the other.

Inside UCLA, perhaps the greatest season ever for a two-way athlete told the story of a phenom who discovered that joy and greatness were never opposing forces.

Basketball gave Grant enough perspective to return to the batter’s box lighter, freer and able to recognize what everyone else already knew.

Yeah, she was kind of good at this sport.

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

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