Ruthy Hebard ready to return to the Chicago Sky, 12 weeks after birth of her son: ‘All this has just shown me how much I love the game’

The morning Ruthy Hebard gave birth to her son, Xzavier, the Chicago Sky forward met strength and conditioning coach Ann Crosby at the gym in Deerfield.

Compared with a typical in-season WNBA workout, it wasn’t much. A yoga session focused on core strength and flexibility. Light walking on the AlterG machine, which reduces body weight to reduce impact. A truncated strength routine with four light weightlifting assignments.

But for Hebard, the extra exercise was a small, crucial step toward one ultimate goal — getting back on the basketball court.

For months, Hebard has spent every day facing the same nagging doubt: Can I do this?

As she prepares to return to the Sky this weekend — only 12 weeks after Xzavier’s birth — Hebard knows that question has been answered. While she didn’t play Friday in an 82-68 loss to the Atlanta Dream, she’ll get another chance when the teams meet again Sunday at Wintrust Arena.

And in the process of becoming a mother, Hebard has reconnected with the joy that kept her on the court in the first place.

“All this has just shown me how much I love the game,” Hebard told the Tribune. “I love being around my teammates. I just love everything about basketball. More than anything, I just want to be back.”

Hebard was afraid to pick up the phone.

For all three years of her WNBA career, she had worked under one coach. James Wade drafted her, trained her in a backup role behind veterans such as Candace Parker. And after Parker and Azurá Stevens left in free agency, Hebard was in the best position of her career to play a more regular role in the frontcourt.

Hebard didn’t know how to tell Wade that plans had changed, that she was due in April, that she didn’t know when or how she would be back on the court.

This had all come as a surprise — a massive, scary, ecstatic surprise. Hebard noticed her body slowing down, growing exhausted despite running two-a-day training sessions while abroad with KSC Szekszárd in Hungary. But outside of uncharacteristically overwhelming cravings for Snickers and Portillo’s cheese fries, she had no idea why she felt so off until the positive pregnancy test.

For the first time in her life, basketball was the greatest unknown. Hebard felt she could trust Wade. Still, the questions loomed: What if he’s angry? What if he’s judgmental? What if I tell him and he’s like, “OK, goodbye, good luck.”

When Hebard finally dialed the phone, she was met with tears.

Wade, the Sky’s then-coach and general manager, calmed Hebard’s fears immediately. Her roster spot wasn’t going anywhere. He told her stories of his own son, Jet, as an infant and urged her to come home as soon as possible.

Team owner Michael Alter and his wife invited Hebard and her boyfriend, Logan Sand, to their home for dinner to dispense parenting advice and support. Crosby and Wade came over days after Xzavier’s birth with gifts from the coaching staff. And throughout the process, the Sky emphasized their focus for Hebard’s role: mother first, athlete second.

Hebard knew her rights: the collective bargaining agreement negotiated in 2020 specifically protects players who become pregnant, guaranteeing full salaries through the year along with child-care stipends and other workplace accommodations. But for Hebard, this genuine support from the team was the most important aspect of returning to work.

“As a mom, you’re stressed already, you’re worried about everything,” Hebard said. “So having them there, to be reassuring me and just having them be genuinely happy for me, that really helps a lot. From an organization, from a front office, the main thing a mom needs is just positive reinforcement because the stress and the worry is already on you all the time. Hopefully all organizations are doing that.”

In the early hours before a matinee Sky game against the Los Angeles Sparks at Wintrust Arena, Sand was already on dad duty.

A smooth game day requires plenty of preparation for Hebard and Sand: a loaded stroller packed with bottles and diapers and a pair of bulky noise-canceling headphones strapped to Xzavier’s head to block out crowd noise.

While Hebard took the bench with her teammates, Sand cradled Xzavier in his designated seat along the baseline, where the infant is slowly adjusting to his role as one of the most popular faces at games.

“If he’s asleep, it’s a lot easier,” Sand told the Tribune. “If he’s up, we’re having a party.”

For weeks after Xzavier’s birth, Sand attended every practice and shootaround, pushing the infant in his stroller or cradling him in his arms as Hebard sporadically ducked out of film and training sessions for a quick reunion.

Hebard is the only mother currently on the Sky roster, but her teammates quickly took to the newest teammate. Dana Evans holds Xzavier before practices, with Courtney Williams and Kahleah Copper battling for position as his favorite auntie and Marina Mabrey poking her head in during practice breaks to check on him.

“They pass him around like a joint,” Wade joked during a pregame news conference in Phoenix.

Hebard knows she’ll eventually need to wean both herself and Xzavier off their constant proximity.

“I’m getting better at it,” Hebard joked. “I know there’s a good balance of needing to be away. It’s so hard but I’m getting there.”

In the meantime, the Sky have provided resources that allow Hebard to integrate Xzavier as another member of the team. There are nursing rooms at the team’s training facilities at Sachs Recreation Center and Wintrust Arena. Hebard brings Xzavier into the locker room for pregame pep talks and on the road to away games, where she is accompanied by either Sand or one of her parents.

And the Sky have stuck to their promise of flexibility. When Xzavier came down with congestion after his first handful of road games, the group agreed to keep Hebard off the road with the baby until she was ready to play again.

For Sand, the key the last three months has been striking a balance of keeping Xzavier available without being a distraction. This constancy has allowed Hebard to dig fully into her recovery process, logging extra sessions with Crosby to speed up her recovery.

If anything, Sand wants to urge Hebard to go easy on herself — to move at her body’s pace, to trust she’ll be ready at the right time.

“Pregnancy has always been a very uncertain, kind of crazy, scary process for me,” Sand said. “I know it’s a lot for the woman and the child. So seeing her playing and working out basically all the way up until the ninth month and then delivering and then jumping right back into workouts, I was just like — ‘Can you slow down?’

“She just has this incredible determination to get back on the court, and inside I’m kind of freaking out, like, ‘I want you to be 100%, I want you to be OK before you step out there.’ But I know I can’t slow her down. This is what she loves and as long as she’s healthy and good to go, we’re all going to support it.”

None of this has gone at Hebard’s ideal speed.

Preparing for Xzavier’s birth was one thing. Yoga positions and weightlifting sessions had to be modified, then modified again, as her body changed and grew. In the final weeks, her impatience at times neared a breaking point.

“This baby needs to come,” she would tell Crosby. “Soon.”

But nothing matched the frustration that followed Xzavier’s birth. Hebard originally hoped to return by the end of May — barely seven weeks after delivering. The Sky coaching staff knew this was optimistic at best.

Although Crosby had returned soccer players to the pitch after pregnancy during her time with the German women’s national team, this was her first time tackling the challenge with a basketball player. The sport brought its own unique difficulties.

The hardwood of the court is less absorbent than grass and more stressful on joints and muscles, so Crosby focused even more on maintaining Hebard’s strength and flexibility in her ankles, knees and hips.

But regardless of the sport, Crosby knew the one cardinal rule: There’s no standard timeline for a return from pregnancy.

Some athletes get back into action within six weeks. Others need a full season to recover. Any combination of factors — from trauma during delivery to hormone response — can affect a player’s timeline.

Crosby, a coach in the league since 2006, has been a mother in the WNBA, pumping breast milk in airport bathrooms and empty locker-room showers when the league and individual teams made few accommodations.

She understands the rush to return to work. When she gave birth to her second child, she was back in the gym leading workouts three days later. But Crosby worried other success stories of players quickly returning could affect Hebard’s patience.

“I do feel like there might be an unnecessary pressure to come back faster,” Crosby told the Tribune. “And it’s just to prove that women can play sports, they can have kids, they can be a mom, they can be whatever they want to be.

“But again, there’s a stigma that if you have kids, you should be on bed rest and be at home for eight weeks and you don’t have to be. If that’s what you need to recover, then you should if that makes sense. But I do think there’s pressure to come back as fast as possible — and not from coaches or GMs but from social media and the public aspect of it. Like, ‘Why isn’t she back?’”

For Hebard, that pressure also came from an internal source.

Her image of athletes returning post-pregnancy was formed by superstars such as Parker, Skylar Diggins and Allyson Felix. But after Xzavier’s birth, Hebard sought out a more familiar face for support — former Sky forward Cheyenne Parker, who currently starts for the Dream after giving birth to her daughter, Naomi, in 2021.

Parker had been a mentor on the court during Hebard’s rookie season with the Sky. Now she provides guidance and inspiration once again — this time as an example of motherhood in the WNBA.

“There are some days where I don’t feel like it’s going to happen, like I can’t do this, and I look to her and know I can,” Hebard said.

Slowing down had its perks. Hebard took the time to revisit fundamentals, improve her ballhandling and strengthen her core. Crosby believes this will be the strongest version of Hebard the Sky have seen since she entered the league in 2020.

But after months dominated by uncertainty and delayed deadlines, Hebard is ready to leave patience in the rear view.

“I’m really a person who likes to be planned out, and in this lifestyle you have a plan for everything,” Hebard said. “So I’m like, ‘OK, I’m going to have him this day.’ Didn’t happen. ‘I’m going to be back this day.’ Didn’t happen. You really just have to focus on yourself, on how you’re feeling, on what’s most important.

“But inside now, I’m ready. I just know I’m ready.”