Sabrina Ionescu Explained How She Hustled Men At The Park For Slurpee Money When She Was 10

Sabrina Ionescu went No. 1 in the WNBA Draft last month and will head to Brooklyn to join the Liberty soon, as she continues her ascent in the basketball world. Ionescu is expected to continue advancing the women’s game, something she’s been doing for years, even before she had a national profile.

In an interview with Ernie Johnson on Thursday morning, Ionescu told Johnson about how while in elementary school she used to hustle men at the local park with her brother during the guys’ lunch break, then turn around and spend that money on 7-Eleven snacks and slurpees.

“They didn’t think I knew how to play, they didn’t think I knew how to shoot,” Ionescu said. “So we’d kind of bait them into some competitions, some shooting competitions, some games, for money, like ‘hey, a couple bucks that she can’t beat you.’

“And I was out there acting like I didn’t know how to play, then when the game started, I’d start hitting free throws, hitting threes, and that’s how it got to the point where we were able to get enough money to go to 7-Eleven across the street.”

After a while, Ionescu said, the guys started to learn and avoid the Ionescu siblings’ hustle, but by that point, we can assume, they’d had more than their fair share of slurpees, hot dogs, and candy from the corner store. No one will be caught off-guard like that after Ionescu’s monster career at Oregon, but next up, she’s bringing her hustle to the WNBA.

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