Lauren Betts just picked up her third major honor of the year. But she did not spend her ESPYs speech talking about the trophy. Fresh off winning the Honda Award and the Big Ten Female Athlete of the Year, the Washington Mystics rookie used her Best College Athlete acceptance speech to speak about something she has never treated as separate from her success — her mental health.

“Your mental health is not separate from your success; it is the foundation of everything you do,” Betts said, as per ESPNW. “The strongest people aren’t the ones who never struggle; they’re the ones who have the courage to let someone walk through the struggle with them.”

That message wasn’t new for Betts. She has been open about her mental health for over a year now, treating it as something worth talking about rather than hiding.

She followed the same instinct on Wednesday at Lincoln Center, accepting the award for a senior season that ended with UCLA’s first-ever national championship, a 37-1 record, and a perfect Big Ten mark. Her path there started somewhere much harder.

Betts wrote about her struggles in detail in a Player’s Tribune essay titled “I Want To Be Here.” She traced part of it back to being bullied as a kid over her height and build. This stuck with her as something long before she ever became one of the sport’s most recognizable prospects. That weight resurfaced hard after her move to UCLA for her sophomore season, when the hype around her name collided with emotions she hadn’t dealt with since a difficult freshman year at Stanford.

Nevertheless, these struggles aggravated right after a spotlight-grabbing move to UCLA for her sophomore season. The noise and hype around her name just got into her psyche during those months. Furthermore, she didn’t even know how to deal with that feeling.

It built for roughly six months before reaching a breaking point. Betts has described a morning when her anxiety and depression became severe enough that she recognized her own safety was at risk, and she made the decision to check herself into a hospital.

“I knew the headspace that I was in was too dangerous to ignore,” Betts wrote as per The Players’ Tribune. “I’d never felt so scared in my entire life. I don’t want to do this anymore…. That horrible thought kept popping up in my mind. I couldn’t go back to my day-to-day and just pretend like nothing happened. I felt like there was no other option but to go to a hospital.”

Her mother stayed with her in Los Angeles for about a week after she was discharged, and Betts stepped away from basketball entirely during that stretch. When she returned to the team, she chose to address her teammates directly in the film room rather than pretend nothing had happened, telling them what she’d been going through. Their response, by her own account, was overwhelming support.

Betts eventually returned to the court and built the season that defined her college career, an NCAA title, tournament Most Outstanding Player honors, and a fourth overall selection in the WNBA Draft. None of that has pulled her away from talking openly about where it started.

Her ESPY win puts her alongside a small group of past winners who also went on to become WNBA MVPs, including Diana Taurasi, Candace Parker, Maya Moore, and Breanna Stewart. Her college and pro teams both marked the moment publicly.

“The one, the only, Lauren Betts!!! Congrats on taking home the ESPY for Best Collegiate Athlete – Women’s Sports, Lo!” UCLA’s team account posted.

“She’s got an ESPY!!” the Mystics posted. “Lauren is the 2026 ESPY winner for Best College Athlete, Women’s Sports!”

That college chapter is officially closed now. Her next one is still very much a work in progress.

Lauren Betts is still settling into her role with the Mystics

Betts’ rookie transition to the WNBA hasn’t matched the pace of her college success. Over her last eight games, she is averaging 5.6 points, 3.8 rebounds, and 15.6 minutes per outing, modest numbers for a player picked fourth overall this spring.

Part of that comes down to circumstances rather than performance. Washington already had Kiki Iriafen and Shakira Austin holding significant frontcourt minutes when Betts arrived. Head coach Sydney Johnson had to get creative to find her consistent playing time behind them. The franchise has seen such a situation before, when 2024 sixth overall pick Aaliyah Edwards fell out of the rotation for the same reason and was eventually traded to Connecticut before finishing two full seasons.

Whether Betts avoids that same fate likely comes down to how Washington manages its frontcourt logjam over the second half of the season. The Mystics, currently seventh in the East, will next host the Portland Fire on July 16. This could be another chance for Betts to push for more minutes as the team weighs development against its own playoff push.