She grew up in Salinas, California, and played at Tennessee, where she set NCAA records for career strikeouts and wins that established her as the most prolific pitcher in the history of the college game. Her size, six feet tall, gave her a release angle that hitters found difficult to calibrate, and her rise ball arrived at that angle with enough late movement to produce swings that were mechanically correct and still wrong. She joined Team USA and won silver at the 2008 Beijing Olympics as a young pitcher at the peak of her college reputation — and then waited. Softball was removed from the Olympic program after Beijing, and Abbott stayed in the national team pipeline through the entire twelve-year absence, pitching professionally in Japan and in the NPF while the sport worked toward reinstatement. She made the Tokyo 2020 roster at 35, thirteen years after her first Olympic appearance, and won silver again. The thirteen-year arc between those two moments is among the longer stretches any athlete has held together at the elite level of an Olympic sport.

She married pitcher Stephanie VanBrakle in 2018. Her Japan career ran parallel to everything else and operated on a different scale: she became one of the most celebrated foreign players in the history of the Japan Softball League, winning multiple championships and carrying a public profile there that American coverage of her largely missed. The million-dollar contract drew significant attention in 2016, most of it focused on the number. Spread over six years, it averaged roughly $167,000 per season.