A year ago, Forbes was drafted 28th overall by her home-state team, the Los Angeles Sparks, but she was cut in training camp. She then played 41 games across three leagues in hopes of getting another chance in the WNBA in 2025. In February, she got it, signing a nonguaranteed training camp contract with the Dallas Wings.
“She just has an edge about her,” Carrie Moore, Forbes’ head coach for her senior season at Harvard, told reporters earlier that month. “And she’s a shot-maker, but she’s also fearless. … I don’t think you can really teach that. I think you just either have it or you don’t.”
Forbes is joining some familiar faces in Dallas: The Wings’ general manager is Curt Miller, who was the Sparks’ head coach in 2024. And Wings head coach Chris Koclanes was Forbes’ position coach for her graduate year at USC in 2023-24.
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Forbes, a 6’ guard/forward, had long been considered a potential WNBA prospect. She was the No. 35 recruit in her high school class, and at least one future WNBA scout saw her in her two years at Harvard, where she transferred after starting her college career at Cal.
But her stock rose during her year at USC. (The Ivy League does not allow graduate students to compete, so Forbes had to use her remaining eligibility after graduation outside the conference.) Forbes was the second-leading scorer on a Trojans team that won the Pac-12 Tournament and advanced to the Elite Eight.
“I watched her be just elite in how she competed and elevated that program at Harvard,” Sparks general manager Raegan Pebley told reporters in April 2024. “When she came to USC, we got to see her do the same thing. … [We were] seeing her be excellent in the role that she was in and also celebrating the role that was by her and next to her. And that goes a long way.”
“We are ecstatic that she dropped to [No.] 28,” Miller said in the same press conference.
The transition to being a professional was “kind of overwhelming” at times, Forbes recently told The Next. Immediately after the draft, rookies have to juggle moving with workouts and final exams. Once camp starts, they’re learning lots of new plays and terminology and adjusting to WNBA rules. They’re also trying to wrap their heads around suddenly seeing their dreams come true, starting their adult lives and playing alongside players they may have idolized growing up.
“It’s definitely a lot kind of running around in your brain,” Forbes said.
But Forbes had a few things going her way. She prepared for the Sparks’ training camp with Koclanes, who had coached under Miller in the WNBA for several years before moving to USC. It also helped that she wasn’t moving far: USC is less than 3 miles from Crypto.com Arena, where the Sparks play.
Forbes felt like she performed at her best in camp, and early on, Miller told the Los Angeles Times that Forbes was “beyond her years with basketball knowledge.” But she was cut on May 12, the day before WNBA teams had to finalize their opening-day rosters.
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When her time with the Sparks ended, Forbes briefly went home to Folsom, California, just outside Sacramento, and then headed back to Los Angeles. She figured she would keep training there in case a WNBA team needed her on a hardship contract later in the season.
However, her brother Mason had other ideas.
Mason was in Australia playing for the Waverley Falcons in the NBL1, the country’s top semiprofessional league. He told his sister that he thought he could convince the Falcons’ women’s team to sign her. Then he went to work.
“He kind of did the wheeling and dealing from over there,” Forbes said with a laugh.
Everything came together quickly, in about 48 hours. During that time, Forbes ran the idea by several people, including Koclanes and Australian Stephanie Talbot, who she’d played with in the Sparks’ camp. She didn’t know much about the NBL1, but her conversations were encouraging, and she decided to go for it.
When Forbes landed in Melbourne, Australia, she stepped straight from the California summer into the Australia winter, a change she called “harsh.” She also arrived in the middle of the Falcons’ season, so she had to catch up quickly on the court while adjusting to a whole new country.
“They kind of already had their thing going,” Forbes said, pointing to the presence of WNBL veterans Rebecca Cole and Carley Ernst on the roster. (The WNBL is Australia’s professional league and one of the best leagues in the world.) “They kind of added me in to make some threes.”
The Falcons had started the season 2-8, with three of those losses coming by 25 points or more. But by the time Forbes debuted on June 7 with 13 points and six rebounds, they’d started to turn things around. And with her in the fold, they “went on a crazy, insane run,” winning their final 13 games to claim the NBL1 South and NBL1 national championships in August.
In 16 games with the Falcons, Forbes averaged 16.0 points, 3.8 rebounds, 3.1 assists and 1.3 steals in 27.8 minutes per game. She shot 37.4% from 3-point range on 7.7 attempts per game. Only Ernst took more total threes than Forbes’ 123, even though Forbes only played about half the season. Forbes also had at least 20 points and five assists in all three games of the national championship run.
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Partway through her time in Australia, Forbes signed a contract to join a team in New Zealand, Mainland Pouakai, for its season after the NBL1 concluded.
“What impresses me most,” Pouakai head coach Paul Flynn said in the team’s press release, “is her strong leadership qualities and how she has proven time and again she can lift her teams to succeed on the big stage.”
Forbes spent about two weeks at home after winning the NBL1 national championship before flying back across the Pacific Ocean for preseason. With Pouakai, Forbes shouldered more responsibility than she had with Waverley. In 13 games, she averaged a team-high 18.5 points, 5.4 rebounds, 4.2 assists and 1.1 steals in 34.1 minutes per game. She took a team-high 16.9 shots per game, about half of which came from behind the arc, and made 35.9% of her 3-pointers.
“A lot more pressure was on me to make shots and make plays, which was good,” Forbes said. “I felt like I really got better. And the defensive scout would be focused on me. … So I feel like that really pushed me to, again, kind of have that level of pressure on yourself, like, ‘OK, if you don’t make the shots, we’re not gonna win’ type thing, which was good for me.”
Forbes led Pouakai to an 8-4 regular-season record, including a memorable win over the Tokomanawa Queens in late November in which she scored a league-record 39 points. But Pouakai lost to the Queens in the league semifinals in December, ending their season.
Forbes enjoyed her stint in New Zealand both on and off the court. The slower pace of life there felt like a salve after she’d rushed from place to place for months. After returning home just before Christmas, she trained in Sacramento for about a month before yet another league needed her.
This time, the flight was much shorter: to Nashville, Tennessee, for Athletes Unlimited.
“I haven’t had an offseason, really, in a long time,” Forbes said. “But … AU was kind of perfectly timed in terms of just breaking up my training a little bit. Like, OK, I’ve done skill work, skill work, skill work for 30 days. All right, let’s go see what works.”
Forbes finished 27th on the Athletes Unlimited individual leaderboard, averaging 4.1 points in 14.8 minutes per game. The experience boosted her confidence that she could play at that level, alongside players who are in the WNBA or on its fringes. And she soaked up all she could from veterans like Kia Nurse, who she’d met with the Sparks, and Alysha Clark.
With the Athletes Unlimited season overlapping with WNBA free agency, there was plenty of chatter in Nashville about WNBA opportunities. Players, especially those in similar situations as Forbes, checked in with each other about whether they’d heard anything from teams.
The odds weren’t in their favor. There were 31 players drafted from U.S. colleges in 2022 and 2023 who were healthy but didn’t stick on a WNBA roster in their draft year. Just seven of them were invited to a training camp the following season, according to data tallied from Across the Timeline and Basketball-Reference.
Still, Forbes felt confident a WNBA team would give her another shot, and when Dallas did, she felt a swirl of emotions. “I was super relieved and grateful for the opportunity, and excited, obviously, to be with Chris and under Curt,” she said. “I really enjoyed playing under Curt when I was in LA, and I feel like they have a similar system [in Dallas].”
Since the Athletes Unlimited season ended in early March, Forbes has been preparing for training camp, where she’ll battle for a roster spot with players like veteran Kaila Charles and rookies JJ Quinerly and Madison Scott. Over the past year, she believes she’s improved her ball-handling, her finishing around the rim, her shooting and her understanding of how to get to her spots against pros.
“I’m very much confident that I have a legitimate chance to make this team,” she said. “… I can play at this level. I can add value to a team.”
Moore believes Forbes can carve out a role in the WNBA similar to that of Naz Hillmon, who Moore coached as an assistant at Michigan. Hillmon was a second-round pick in 2022 and hasn’t been a star for the Atlanta Dream. But according to Moore, Hillmon is the type of person and teammate every organization wants to keep around, and so is Forbes.
“The [WNBA] is … adding teams, which means more roster spots, so the more [Forbes] can just really stay in and continue to get opportunities to make a name for herself, I think that can only help,” Moore said in March, shortly after Forbes signed with Dallas. “… She’s got such a great presence about her, and she’s just an incredible addition to any type of organization that I think, at some point, someone is going to latch on to. …
“[Forbes] can really help [a team], especially if they need somebody that’s going to stretch defenses and be able to knock things down and be that kind of versatile guard.”
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When training camp starts on Sunday, Forbes will look to show she’s a knockdown shooter — something she thinks the Wings need. But she also wants to show a lot more, including her decision-making offensively, her competitiveness on defense and her value as a teammate. Her mindset this time around will be that she already made the roster — not because she’s cocky, but because she knows she needs to think that way.
“Everyone says if you’re not [drafted in the] first or second round, you’re not going to make it,” Forbes said. “And you kind of just have to ignore all of that and fully dive in headfirst, as if you’re on the roster. Because if you don’t treat every day like that, you’ve already lost.”
Forbes already beat the odds once to get invited to training camp this season. Using all she’s learned over the past year, she’ll try to beat the odds again and make the opening-day roster.
