Though Chiney was all too familiar with lengthy recoveries, battling back from her Achilles injury was no less challenging. At the outset, she went home to Houston, where she spent time under her family’s roof.

“I was by myself laying down or sitting down because I could barely carry myself,” she says.

Once again, Chiney squeezed everything she could out of her downtime. When she wasn’t rehabbing, she typically spent her free moments watching the news, reading up on the world of finance and, of course, keeping pace with sports talk on ESPN.

“I had a nice little woman cave where I stocked up and educated myself,” she says.

Chiney always made sure to catch First Take, paying close attention to how Stephen A. Smith, Max Kellerman and their guests deftly discussed a wide range of sports topics from day to day. One morning, as the debate raged on her TV screen, she thought to herself, I’d like to be on that show someday, though she never imagined she'd get that chance.

Two years later, Chiney was on set at ESPN’s Seaport studio in New York City, going head-to-head (and word for word) with Stephen A.—and even fielding compliments for her work from him.

“I would never imagine myself in that position with my background as a women’s basketball player speaking with Stephen A. as a diverse woman,” she says.

The journey there wasn’t without highs and lows. As Chiney’s physical condition improved, so did her media resume. She continued to appear on air with ESPN, both in studio and as a color analyst for women’s college basketball games, and added gigs with Pac-12 Networks and Uninterrupted to her resume.

In early 2018, Chiney was back in Uncasville, training for her impending comeback with the Sun, when she got a call from ESPN. Her producers wanted her to be on campus in Bristol the next morning to do some on-air NBA analysis during a segment on SportsCenter.

Chiney accepted the offer without question. She was looking to land a multi-year deal with ESPN, in part because she had developed a passion and an aptitude for media work. The security of a TV contract would also ensure that the 6’3” power forward wouldn’t have to spend her offseasons hooping overseas and risking bodily harm in the process.

As Chiney saw it, doing this SportsCenter hit would improve her chances of getting the job she wanted. So she drove those 63 miles to Bristol, did the hit about the NBA and headed back, confident that she’d nailed her latest appearance.

That is, until hours later, when Chiney saw that her hair had become a trending topic on social media. The whole time she was on air, her hair had been out of place, unwittingly shifting attention away from her meticulously delivered words.

“I saw it and I was, like, 'Oh my God, this clip has millions of views,’” she says while sitting in a makeup chair at Spectrum SportsNet’s studio in El Segundo. “I'm here fighting for my life to try to get this position [at ESPN], my take was amazing, and this is how the world's gonna know me?”

That night, Chiney became uncomfortably familiar with the challenges of being a female sports analyst. She had experienced, first-hand, the unfortunate reality of the expectations placed upon her physical appearance while on camera. She had also seen how so many of her male counterparts had worn the same suit, show after show, without so much as a peep of criticism from the viewing public.

To her, the same double standards between men and women that were so evident in sports and wider society were just as prevalent in the broadcasting world.

“A lot of people question me just because they can, because of my gender,” she says. “I could have the most prepared, most analytical take and people will just find a reason to poke holes at it or say ‘kitchen,’ just because it's socially acceptable in sports to have that jock mentality.”

Nowadays, Chiney looks back at that incident as a learning experience. She knows how to handle hair and makeup emergencies. And, just as before, her main focus is fine-tuning her sports takes and making sure she delivers them cleanly when the cameras are rolling. After all, that’s not only the job she wanted, but also the one she landed when she signed that coveted multi-year contract with ESPN in May 2018—less than three months after going viral for the wrong reasons.

“I always tell people that are curious about being a woman in my career that they see you and judge you before they hear you,” she says. “But the most satisfying part of this struggle is the moment you realize you have won them over, meaning that they recognize the hurdles you have jumped to reach that broadcaster/analyst table and respect you for that.”

Chiney officially landed her deal at ESPN mere weeks before the start of the 2018 WNBA season. Though she was productive for the Sun coming off her second major injury and regained her All-Star status, the totality of her life at that point took its toll on her. And it played a part in her angling to join Nneka on the Sparks in 2019.

“I will be the first to say that I am not great at the balancing act,” Chiney says. “I have made tough decisions in my life to get better at it, to the point of relocating and leaving my team in Connecticut to come to LA. What got lost in the headlines is that my life was out of balance between the grind on the court and off the court, and fitting in my support system of family and friends.”