Christianity Today

It's amazing what you can learn about a person in 140 characters or less.

Take the Twitter page of Maya Moore. Her mini-bio at the top is a good place to start:

Basketball player, daughter, & drummer. Friend & red velvet cake lover.

So few words, so much meaning.

Basketball player. And how! The youngest member of the U.S. Olympic team—now in London for the 2012 Games—Moore, 23, is not only one of the world's best but perhaps the winningest. Ever. Since ninth grade, the 6-foot forward has played almost 400 games, winning 97 percent of them. That includes three high-school state titles, two NCAA championships and a 90-game win streak at the University of Connecticut (as a two-time national player of the year), a WNBA crown with the Minnesota Lynx as the league's rookie of the year, and most recently, a EuroLeague championship with a pro team in Valencia, Spain. Now she hopes to add Olympic gold to the list.

Daughter. Moore can't say enough about her mother, Kathryn, who "has helped me to grow into a smart young woman who keeps things in perspective." Kathryn taught her only child—named after Maya Angelou—the value of faith, family, and hard work. When Moore was 11, Kathryn and her daughter left the comfort of extended family in Jefferson City, Missouri, and moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, where Kathryn was starting a new job. "It was a hard, lonely time," Maya tells Christianity Today, remembering how middle-school kids mocked her height—she towered over everyone—and her size 13 shoes.

"It was tough," she says. "My mom and I had to figure out how to do things on our own. Like, were we going to go to church because we'd always done it before, or were we going to do it for ourselves because we want this in our life?" Moore says that around that time she began to "own" her faith, and has considered herself a Christ follower ever since. (Her father, former Rutgers basketball star Mike Dabney, left before she was born. They have reconnected in recent years, though Moore doesn't like to discuss it. "It's a relationship in progress, and God is faithful," she says.)

Drummer. Moore has been playing since age 9, and her love of music is second only to basketball. Her Twitter page includes retweets from TobyMac, LeCrae, and Chaz Miles, and links aplenty to hip-hop and gospel. She's forever wearing ear buds, constantly in motion, always in rhythm; spontaneous dance moves are inevitable. And singing, singing, singing. Moore led hundreds of fans in a chorus of "Glory to God Forever"—dividing the audience into three groups—at a Faith and Family Night following a Lynx game last summer. "The sound was like angels singing to our Lord," says teammate Taj McWilliams-Franklin, who believes that if Moore ever blew out a knee, she could pursue a second career as a singer.

Friend. Those closest to Moore say this is her greatest asset. They describe her as selfless, sensitive, and ever encouraging. Tina Charles, who shared an apartment with Moore while they were teammates at UConn, says, "Maya is an extraordinary person, humble, giving. Living with Maya, I grew as a young woman. I looked up to her on and off the court. As a friend, she's going to be there for you in every possible way." Because of Moore's faithful witness, Charles says, she gave her own life to Jesus at 19.

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