Patience pays off for Temple grad Peddy
Shey Peddy and a friend were visiting Sweden in the fall of 2019 when a sudden urge to visit a tattoo parlor hit.
At age 30, the Temple grad was finishing her best year as a professional, from participating in the EuroLeague with a club in Latvia to winning a title with the Washington Mystics in her long-belated rookie WNBA season. In her travels, she’d picked up “The Alchemist,” the allegorical novel by Paulo Coelho, about a shepherd boy chasing his “personal legend,” the animating crusade of his life.
The moment was r ight , Peddy decided, to get her first tattoo. Through two colleges, three WNBA cuts, pro stops in five countries – all of it was inscribed in the script “Patience is a virtue” on her left forearm.
“Everything that happens is on time for you,” Peddy, now 32, said recently, “and it’s when it’s meant to be.”
Peddy’s peripatetic journey through basketball is a testament to her passion. It’s also a mark of her toughness, a native of Roxbury, Massachusetts, who’s been a winner across the world. The latest installment over the summer was a highlight-reel buzzer beater in the WNBA playoffs, Peddy nailing a corner 3-pointer to eliminate the Mystics and take her new team, the Phoenix Mercury, onto the next round in the Bradenton bubble.
This being women’s basketball, Peddy had her brief moment in the sun. Then five days after her last game in the Wubble, she was off to Turkey for her next gig, with Nesibe-Aydin.
Peddy has been adapting to new environments her entire basketball life. Raised in the Mission Hill projects, she rose to stardom at a suburban high school, Melrose. After two seasons at Wright State, Peddy transferred to Temple, the signature recruit of new coach Tonya Cardoza, a 14-year assistant of Geno Auriemma’s at UConn and a fellow Roxbury native who played with Peddy’s mother.
The connection paid off for both. Peddy was the Big 5 Player of the Year in 2011 and the Atlantic 10 POY in 2012, leading the Owls to the NCAA Tournament as a junior and the WNIT as a senior. The accolades landed the 5-7 guard as a second-round pick (No. 23 overall) of the Chicago Sky, just the third Owl ever drafted to the WNBA.
But Peddy, despite feeling she’d played well, didn’t make it out of camp with the Sky, a team loaded with backcourt depth. She tried out again the following summer, cut by the Mystics this time.
The second cut “broke my spir it ,” Peddy said, and forced her to reassess. She played in Israel in 2012 but remained unsure if she could make it a career so far from home. If she was looking for a sign, the second WNBA nearmiss pointed toward retirement.
Ultimately, though, she decided to soldier on.
“Seeing your dream, not being able to make it a reality, it hurt,” Peddy said. “I wanted to quit basketball and go to a different lane, but I stuck it through.”
Six summers later, Peddy found herself ostensibly in the same position, again cut by the Mystics before the 2019 season. But this was a different Peddy, as a player and a person.
In between, she’d traveled the basketball world, with clubs in Israel, Austria and France. She was a three-time MVP and a twotime champion of the German league and tasted EuroLeague competition with TTT Riga, against many stars she’d been told she wasn’t good enough to play with in the WNBA. She’d gone from a young fish out of water afraid to try food in foreign countries to a savvy world traveler, steadily ticking off items on her bucket list – Santorini down; next up, Maldives – and relishing learning new languages.
More than just the highpowered scorer with the admitted street-ball edge to her game, the Peddy that auditioned in 2019 had wisdom to impart to young players, even those supposedly ahead of her in the depth chart. So when the axe fell, the Mystics kept Peddy around, as a video and analytics coach.
As injuries hit, Peddy signed a succession of short-term contracts, playing 15 games for the Mystics, on the way to their first WNBA crown. That team’s chemistry, with leaders like MVP Elena Delle Donne and Broomall native Natasha Cloud, offered a sense of destiny, like it was where Peddy was meant to be.
“It just felt different,” Peddy said. “There was no drama. You’re really in a locker room where everybody genuinely likes each other, on and off the court. There were no cliques or anything. We were all blended and we hung out. Even on the road, we ate breakfast together, lunch, dinner. … You just knew this was a special group, and I wanted to be a part of it.”
Peddy traveled to the Wubble for the 2020 season as a Mystic, playing nine games before the roster math again worked against her. The Mercury picked her up for eight games (naturally the first vs. the Mystics), averaging 17 minutes and four points per. She even pushed into the starting lineup — on a team with Skylar Diggins-Smith, Diana Taurasi and Brittney Griner — by the postseason for the fifth seed.
“Shey may not have been on our team at the start of the season, but she was a key part of it by the end,” Phoenix coach Sandy Brondello said during the season. “Her experience, defensive ability, basketball IQ and personality allowed her to quickly gain chemistry with her new teammates and become a valuable member of our team. Her game-winning shot in the first round will be one we will all remember.”
In the playoff opener against No. 8 Washington, a win-or-go-home affair, Peddy logged 27 minutes and scored 12 points, the most in her WNBA career. The capper came at the buzzer, Peddy parked in the right corner as Diggins-Smith drove the lane, the Mercury down two. Peddy caught the kick-out with 1.5 seconds left, stayed rooted to the floor as a defender lunged at her — patience is a virtue, remember — and calmly sank the shot to send the Mercury on and the team that gave her a WNBA lifeline home.
It wasn’t just one of the plays of the WNBA season. It was a poignant, full-circle moment for a player with one of the richest tales of adversity and perseverance in a league full of them.
“It was a bittersweet moment, and even now it is,” Peddy said. “I find myself at times re-watching it , sometimes in awe of what happened. I feel like in some ways it’s hard to celebrate because it’s against my old team, a lot of girls I talked to all day, every day in the bubble, that we still have bonds and chemistry. But then it kind of felt good, too. I understand I wasn’t having probably the greatest season in the bubble, but I don’t think I would’ve wanted to make that shot against any other team in that moment.”