Tallest Female Basketball Players in History: Giants of the Game

Margo Dydek of Poland, standing 7 feet 2 inches (2.18 m), is the tallest player in WNBA history and the tallest woman on record to play top-level professional basketball. The tallest active player as of the 2026 season is China’s 6-foot-11 Han Xu, while 6-foot-9 Brittney Griner is the most accomplished modern giant. Extreme height gives these players a decisive edge in rebounding, blocking, and finishing at the rim.

What extreme height means in women’s basketball

Height helps in three specific spots on the floor. It lets a player grab rebounds before a shorter opponent can react. It turns routine drives into blocked shots. And it opens up easy scoring close to the rim, either shooting over defenders or finishing lobs. Stand a 7-foot-2 center next to an average WNBA player, whose height is roughly 6 feet, and the gap is close to a full foot on every possession.

The tradeoff is mobility. Players built at 6-foot-9 or taller often move slower than guards half a foot shorter, and the biggest women in the sport’s history have had to make up for it with footwork and positioning rather than pure athleticism. The ones who lasted learned to use their bodies as leverage instead of just standing tall and hoping for the best.

The tallest female players on record

The table below ranks some of the tallest women to play at the professional level, with heights confirmed against WNBA and Guinness World Records data as of 2026.

Rank	Player	Country	Height	WNBA seasons
1	Margo Dydek	Poland	7 ft 2 in (2.18 m)	1998–2008
2	Han Xu	China	6 ft 11 in (2.11 m)	2019–2023, 2026
3	Bernadett Hatar	Hungary	6 ft 10 in (2.08 m)	2021–2024
4	Brittney Griner	USA	6 ft 9 in (2.06 m)	2013–present
5	Kalani Brown	USA	6 ft 7 in (2.01 m)	2019–present
6	Sylvia Fowles	USA	6 ft 6 in (1.98 m)	2008–2022

Margo Dydek: the tallest of all time

Margo Dydek stood 7 feet 2 inches, the tallest player in WNBA history and a record still unbroken as of 2026. The Utah Starzz took her first overall in the 1998 draft, and over 11 seasons she proved a center of that size could hold her own against professional competition, not just tower over it. She led the WNBA in blocks nine times and retired as the league’s all-time blocks leader with 877 rejections in 323 games — a record that stood for 18 years until Brittney Griner passed it in June 2026.

Dydek collapsed from a cardiac arrest at her home in Brisbane in May 2011 and died eight days later at age 37. She remains the benchmark whenever the conversation turns to size in women’s basketball.

Brittney Griner: the most decorated modern giant

Brittney Griner, at 6 feet 9 inches, blocks shots at a rate few players in WNBA history can match. A 10-time All-Star, she won the 2014 championship with the Phoenix Mercury and took Defensive Player of the Year in both 2014 and 2015, the first player to win it in consecutive seasons since Tamika Catchings in 2009 and 2010. What separates her from other very tall centers is that she built a real scoring package, with footwork and touch around the basket that most seven-footers never develop.

On June 22, 2026, in a Connecticut Sun win over the Chicago Sky, Griner blocked Kamilla Cardoso for the 878th rejection of her career and passed Dydek as the WNBA’s all-time blocks leader. The context is worth keeping: Dydek reached 877 in 323 games and had held the record since 2008; Griner needed 364. Her name also reached well past basketball in 2022, when Russian authorities detained her at a Moscow airport over cannabis oil cartridges; a prisoner exchange brought her home that December. As of the 2026 season she plays for the Connecticut Sun.

Sylvia Fowles: elite production at elite height

Sylvia Fowles, 6 feet 6 inches, won multiple WNBA championships, took home a Finals MVP, and picked up Defensive Player of the Year honors more than once over her career. What made her rare wasn’t just the size. Plenty of centers are tall; few combined that frame with the footwork and timing Fowles brought on both ends of the floor. She retired after the 2022 season as one of the most decorated players in league history and was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame with the Class of 2025, alongside Maya Moore and Sue Bird — the first class to include three women’s players.

International tall players

The WNBA has pulled tall players from well outside the United States for decades. Eastern European countries, Poland and the former Soviet states in particular, have a long track record of developing big women, and that pipeline produced Dydek herself. The trend has since gone global: Hungary contributed 6-foot-10 Bernadett Hatar, who played for the Connecticut Sun in 2023 and the Washington Mystics in 2024, and China’s 6-foot-11 Han Xu is now the tallest active player in the league. That size still shows up at FIBA World Cups and the Olympics, where rosters regularly include centers at 6-foot-6 or taller.

The current tallest players (2026)

As of the 2026 WNBA season, the tallest active player is Han Xu at 6 feet 11 inches, second only to Dydek in league history. New York drafted her 14th overall in 2019; she then spent 2024 and 2025 away from the WNBA, playing in China’s WCBA and winning Defensive Player of the Year with the Perth Lynx in Australia’s WNBL, before rejoining the Liberty in April 2026.

Behind her come Brittney Griner at 6-foot-9 and Kalani Brown at 6-foot-7, the tallest American player still under contract, with the Phoenix Mercury for 2026. Bernadett Hatar, at 6-foot-10, is the notable absence: she is taller than both, but her most recent WNBA season was 2024, and her rights sit with Washington rather than an active roster spot.

The active giants also mark a changing of the guard among the game’s biggest stars. Two-time MVP Elena Delle Donne, listed at 6-foot-5, retired in April 2025 after multiple back surgeries, closing one of the most productive careers by a taller player of her generation.

Height and long-term career success

Some of the very tallest women in the sport have had shorter careers than peers who stood a few inches shorter, often because of joint and health issues that come with carrying that much frame. The players who managed both size and longevity tend to fall in the 6-foot-4 to 6-foot-7 range: tall enough to dominate inside, but not so tall that their bodies work against them over a decade-long career. That balance, more than raw height alone, is what has separated the enduring stars from the record-book curiosities.

Freshness note: roster status is the part of this page that ages fastest — Han Xu, Kalani Brown, and Bernadett Hatar have all moved in or out of the league within the last three seasons. Heights are checked against WNBA player pages and Guinness World Records; the blocks record is current to June 22, 2026 and Griner is still adding to it.