She grew up in Canoga Park, California, and played at UCLA, where she became one of the most decorated players in program history, winning the Honda Award as the nation's top collegiate softball player and earning multiple All-American honors. Her speed was the most visible part of her game, but her consistency at shortstop and her on-base discipline made her valuable in ways that do not always register in highlight packages. She joined Team USA at a time when the program was at the height of its Olympic dominance and held her position through two full cycles. After her playing career she became an advocate for diversity and inclusion in softball, founding the Natasha Watley Foundation to provide opportunities for young Black girls to access the sport, addressing a pipeline problem that the sport had not systematically confronted before.

She has spoken extensively about the isolation of being the first, the experience of arriving in a program with deep institutional culture and carrying a distinction that none of her teammates shared. The foundation work is a direct response to that experience: an attempt to make the path she walked less singular for the players who come after her. The sport she played at the Olympic level is still working through the access and representation questions her career first raised.