Lexie Hull is certainly no stranger to standing up to adversity. From playing at Stanford alongside her twin sister Lacie to adjusting to the WNBA alone in 2022, and battling through the roller coaster that was the 2025 season for her Indiana Fever, Hull has had no choice but to learn how to bounce back from challenges. Her resilience hasn’t gone unnoticed.
Hull was one of the individuals recognized among the 2025 Glamour Women of the Year, alongside four other WNBA stars. In her cover interview with the magazine, Hull shared many thoughts from her relatively young career and how she overcame some of her most difficult moments, starting with her rookie year in the league.
“There were times when I started that it was like, ‘If I shoot, it needs to go in because otherwise I might get benched or I might get cut,’” Hull explained. “There’s real nerves there in the first couple of years where I’m playing on a losing team, we’re not doing well, we are not making the playoffs. Every little thing matters.”
Over time, Hull admits she found confidence in her game and her ability to contribute to the team, especially due to the Fever’s turnaround following Caitlin Clark’s arrival in 2024.
“I know I’m going to get open shots. I don’t need to be worried about whether they go in or they don’t because I’ve put in the work to set myself up for this, and I’ll live with the outcome,” Hull said.
That doesn’t mean the challenges she faced with the Fever stopped, however. Near the end of the 2025 WNBA regular season, Hull took an accidental elbow to the face against the Minnesota Lynx. Just one game later, she crashed headfirst into the Seattle Storm’s Gabby Williams, resulting in two black eyes that attracted significant public attention.
“I keep telling people I looked worse than I felt,” Hull answered with a smile. “I have played through a lot worse than [the black eyes], so I don’t think I would’ve taken the game off even if we had a fully healthy team. I think I’d still want to be like, ‘Put me out there.’”
A week after those incidents, Hull was mistakenly hit in the face during a game versus the Chicago Sky, leaving her with a bloody lip. But Hull seemingly didn’t mind taking hit after hit against intense competition as the Fever fought to clinch their sixth-seed playoff spot.
“I will put my body on the line, and I will try everything. I will stand up for whoever,” Hull said. “As competitors, that’s just what you do when you show up. Whoever’s on your side of the line, that’s who you fight for.”
Hull also doesn’t seem to mind that other teams around the WNBA have begun to play harder against the Fever in light of the media focus they receive due to Clark’s presence.
“If you have extra motivation to beat us because of something out of our control, that’s fine if that’s what it takes for you guys to come and try extra hard. I think a little bit of that is needed across the league,” Hull said. “Everyone should feel like they’re getting everyone else’s best, and I do feel like we get everyone else’s best.”
However, Hull made sure to note that the aggression players bring to the court stays on the court.
“You can be part of something and everyone not like each other. We can support each other while also having rivalries,” Hull explained. “Playing with both [Clark on the Fever and Angel Reese in Unrivaled], playing with every player, everyone’s a good person. I think that’s what fans don’t see all the time, that these people aren’t just cussing at the refs, pushing people down. That’s not who they are off the court, and people need to know that.”
Hull also spoke up against the increase in hate speech that many WNBA players have been receiving over the past couple of years, denouncing any excuses people may come up with to justify their vitriol.
“I think that you can be supportive of people, and I think you can have your favorite players, but I don’t think there’s room to degrade people or speak in a way that is disrespectful. That’s over the line,” Hull added.
Overall, Hull has taken every hurdle thrown her way in stride. She revealed one of the biggest challenges for her and the Fever to overcome this season involved now-Phoenix Mercury star DeWanna Bonner, who joined Indiana in the offseason before abruptly leaving shortly after the 2025 campaign started.
“I was super, super, super excited because finally there’s a player in my position that I can look up to that has won in the league and has all these accomplishments and knows what it takes, and I can learn something from her,” Hull said about Bonner’s presence.
But when the season didn’t go as planned, Hull said the Fever used the disappointment to grow stronger and band together to face their uphill battle.
“And then she randomly leaves, and we’re all just kind of like, ‘What happened?’ We were never given an explanation,” Hull said. “To have no explanation was really challenging, but I think that helped us grow closer together because we’re like, ‘All right, this is us. We’re here. We’re going to support each other. We’re loving each other. We’re going to fight for each other. We’re not going to leave. We’re in this together.’”
The Fever may not have ended up with the 2025 WNBA title, but they shocked the women’s basketball world with their Cinderella run in the playoffs. Indiana upset the Atlanta Dream in Round 1 and took the eventual champion Las Vegas Aces to the semifinal round’s decisive Game 5 before reluctantly bowing out in overtime.
https://clutchpoints.com/wnba/indiana-fever/fever-news-how-lexie-hull-learned-turn-setbacks-strength