Inspired by her overseas experiences with her corgi, Pancake, the Las Vegas Aces center is preparing for the Aug. 20 release of her first children’s book, “Pancake’s Passport.” The 120-page picture book with 10 chapters also has a Bible guide.
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Gustafson hopes the tales of how Pancake has been a steady source of peace during her journey as a professional athlete will help calm children — and adults — with anxiety, such as herself.
“I think any dog owner can say the same thing, especially when you have those bad games. You’re always trying to figure out ways to uplift yourself and find something positive off the court — and Pancake is definitely that,” she told The Next.
“Pancake’s Passport” is the first book to be released under Gustafson’s new publishing company, The Inspired Bookshelf.
“I’m doing a little bit of a different route for publishing. I’m not using a traditional publisher; I’m instead making my own,” she said. “I’m also working with another company that is helping me make the book itself like the design, the layout and everything. It’s a bit of a hybrid format of traditional and self-publishing. I wanted to add a little bit of an extra faith element to it as well.”
Creating her own company and promoting her book allows Gustafson to tap into her marketing side. She received a bachelor’s degree in marketing from the University of Iowa in 2019 and just completed her MBA from the UI’s Tippie College of Business.
“I’ve always had a marketing mind. I loved it in college and undergrad and being able to further explore that in my MBA,” she said. “I’m just excited to keep going with it. I’ve always kind of had a creative mind with telling these stories and writing. That’s had my heart for a really long time, especially with my dad growing up. He’s an author as well. So, just to have that extra role model in my life has been really awesome. It gives me motivation to keep writing.”
Her father, Clendon Gustafson, is a retired school administrator who has written a series of Christian children’s books under his own publishing company, The Cottage in Frostwood Forest. He has always encouraged his daughters, Megan and older sister Emily, to make time to read and write.
“We’ve spent many Saturday mornings writing together ever since she was a very little girl,” he told The Next. “This is exciting for me; I’m very proud of her.”
Raw determination and talent
Far from the bright lights of Las Vegas, Gustafson grew up in Port Wing, a quiet town of about 150 people along Lake Superior in northern Wisconsin.
Just like her parents and much of her extended family, Gustafson attended the South Shore School District, which averages an enrollment of around 200 students across K-12. Like in many small rural schools, students participate in nearly everything just for the programs to survive.
“For our tiny little school just for our athletic programs to even exist, pretty much every kid had to go with every sport,” Clendon Gustafson said. “Our numbers are so tiny that basically if a kid were to concentrate only on basketball, we wouldn’t even be able to run the programs.”
The Gustafson sisters participated in volleyball, basketball and track, excelling in all three sports. When Emily was a senior and Megan a sophomore, their dad — who was also South Shore’s superintendent, K-12 principal and special education director — stepped in to coach the girls basketball team.
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“I had a pretty good team, so I thought, ‘Well, I’m not going to just let them go without a coach, or just have anyone walk in off the street to coach them.’ So, I did that one year,” he said.
He led the team to the state tournament that season as Megan began to turn heads with her ability to score and run the floor as a 6’3 forward who could play any position as needed. By the time she graduated in 2015, she was Wisconsin girls high school basketball’s all-time leading scorer with 3,229 points — a record that still stands today.
“She had raw talent in high school, but we didn’t have her own personal trainer or anything like that,” her dad said. “Our eyes were opened when she got to college that all these other players had their own personal trainers and all this type of professional training and workouts and things like that. Our minds were kind of blown when we found out about that because we didn’t even have a schema for that sort of thing. We just go dribble the ball and shoot in the offseason, and that’s about it. All raw work through middle school and high school. Through high school, it was raw determination and drive and strength.”
Iowa’s then-associate head coach Jan Jensen recognized that raw talent during several recruiting trips to northern Wisconsin.
“I knew she would be all-Big Ten, and I felt like she’d be an All-American, just because she had an uncanny ability to score, and you could tell she knew how to work,” Jensen told The Next. “But until you get them here and you see them game-in and game-out, or day-in and day-out, with the way they approach their work and their goals, that’s when you know.”
One thing Jensen wasn’t prepared for was Gustafson’s culture shock when she got to Iowa City her freshman year.
“Megan’s never going to be the chattiest in any group or room. That’s just not who she is,” said Jensen, who is now Iowa’s head coach. “She was really quiet in our first team get together. Lisa [Bluder] was coaching the Pan Am Games, and I had everybody over to my house. And she just seemed quiet and really kind of off to herself. So I had coffee with her, and I said, ‘Hey, is everything good? You’re a little quiet.’ She’s like, ‘I loved it. You just have to remember that there are more people on my team than I’ve ever had in my class.’ We had 14 or 15 on the team and her senior year in high school, she only had 11 people in her class.”
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As Gustafson became more comfortable with her new surroundings, she also began to step up her game.
“After her freshman year, I told her, ‘You have the potential to be one of the greatest that ever was. But do you want it? Because if you want it, there’s nothing standing in your way.’ And it was at that point when she just took it to another level,” Jensen said.
By the end of her senior year in 2019, the shy girl from a tiny town who never had a personal trainer won a slew of awards including Naismith College Player of the Year, AP Player of the Year, ESPNW and USBWA national player of the year and the Lisa Leslie Award given to the nation’s top center.
At a celebration honoring the Hawkeyes’ successful season and trip to the Elite Eight, it was announced that her No. 10 would be just the second Iowa women’s basketball jersey retired at the time, joining Michelle Edwards’ No. 30.
Neither her dad nor her post coach could have predicted the success of her college career.
“Only possibly in my wildest dreams,” Clendon Gustafson said. “It’s more like my wild dreams were, ‘Wow, I think maybe she’ll get some time playing in a Division I school.’ That’s what I was thinking.”
“She came in a nice player, top 100, but to leave here as the No. 1 player in the nation?” Jensen said.
Trusting the process
Gustafson’s journey in the WNBA hasn’t quite been on the same trajectory as her college career. After being drafted in the second round at No. 17 by the Dallas Wings, she was waived just days before their first game — a mere six weeks after being named National Player of the Year.
Instead of heading to social media to complain, she headed to the gym and transformed her game to include face-up shots and 3-pointers. Of her 2,804 points scored at Iowa, only three of them were a 3-pointer, hitting just the second one she attempted in four years.
She was called back to Dallas about a month later and finished the rest of the season with the Wings. After limited playing time over two seasons, she was again waived by the Wings in 2021. She received another chance when the Washington Mystics picked her up on a hardship contract, but was eventually waived before the 2022 season.
Phoenix invited her to training camp and signed her just days before the 2022 season started. She had her most productive year in the WNBA during her second season with the Mercury in 2023 with 269 points and 131 rebounds over 34 games, including 15 3-pointers.
Jensen is in awe of the way her former player has quietly kept working to maintain a spot in the league.
“She went from the top of her ultimate game and then got drafted, and then got cut, and then got picked up, and then played a role, and then they recruited her and asked her to become a forward,” Jensen said. “And what’s crazy to me is that no one in that league has ever had her really play a true post. And I understand that the league’s bigger, faster, there’s a lot of taller centers. But she’s always scored over really good tall centers, but they just never played her down there. So to survive she had to completely change her body, change her game, and she’s done it.”
As a free agent, Gustafson signed a two-year contract with the defending champion Aces in 2024. After seven starts last season and taking a break from overseas competition in the offseason to work on her game with the Aces’ training staff, she severely injured her left ankle the second day of training camp when she landed on another player’s foot. She has yet to suit up for a game this season as she recovers, but is determined to come back soon better than ever.
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“Basketball is where my heart is. Obviously, even though there’s tough times and early on in my career, I was cut, but it’s been a long time since then. I have grown,” she told The Next. “Even with my time in Phoenix, I was a very big contributor off the bench, and with Vegas last year, too. I hope to see that role grow when I’m back from injury. I think I’m starting to really just kind of get into my prime.”
This season she could have gone back to wearing No. 10 — the number she wore in high school, college and much of her pro career — after Kelsey Plum left the Aces for the Los Angeles Sparks. But she’s sticking with No. 17.
“To me, 17 is just kind of a new stage of my life. Obviously, I loved my time at Iowa. My jersey is retired, it’s a really amazing time, and I look back on it with really fond memories. But I’m grown Megan now,” she said. “This has been a really fun part of my career. I was drafted number 17. Also, if you add up my niece’s birthday, Aug. 9, eight plus nine is 17. It’s just kind of a new way to step into my grown professional career.”
Jensen will forever be a fan of her star post player and doesn’t hesitate to share her story of hard work and perseverance.
“She’s just the best story ever for anybody. I tell everybody who is a fan of ours that they need to meet Megan,” Jensen said. “She’s grateful, takes the lesson, has beautiful faith — just a great human being. She has a humility, balanced with extreme confidence, and she just has a gratitude that’s just really cool and very refreshing.”
