She joined Team USA and became a fixture in the outfield across two Olympic cycles, winning silver at the 2004 Athens Games and gold at the 2008 Beijing Games, the last time softball appeared on the Olympic program before its decade-long absence. She also won three World Championship titles and two Pan American Games gold medals, hitting consistently over .300 while holding down the three-hole spot in the lineup. After retiring she moved into broadcasting, covering college and professional softball for ESPN while simultaneously building a profile that led to the assignment that changed everything. In 2015 she became the first woman to serve as an analyst on an ESPN Sunday Night Baseball broadcast, calling a Major League Baseball playoff game to a national audience. The reaction was immediate and, in some corners, hostile. She returned the following season as a regular. The argument about whether she belonged was settled by the work. The softball coverage was never the warmup. It was always the main event, and baseball was the addition.

She married Adam Burks and they have two sons, and she has spoken about building a family arrangement that allowed her to pursue opportunities requiring extensive time on the road. She served as president of the Women's Sports Foundation and was a visible advocate for softball's reinstatement to the Olympic program, work that contributed to the sport's return at Tokyo. The girl who used to box the neighborhood boys grew up to break into the most resistant rooms in sports. She did it the same way she did everything else: by being better prepared than anyone expected.