Our friends at The Believer are now publishing web exclusives. To celebrate, we’re sharing excerpts of their inaugural weekly column, in which Katie Heindl (author of the beloved Basketball Feelings) writes about the WNBA for both longtime fans and the casual observer. If you want to follow along and bypass the paywall, pick up a Believer digital-only subscription. For just $16 a year, you’ll also have full access to the magazine’s complete two-decade archive, including the most recent issue.
For years the WNBA’s business plan, in ambition and practice, focused on increasing the league’s visibility. It prioritized better broadcast deals and new streaming partnerships to secure more televised games. It leaned into the athletes’ outspokenness and tendency toward activism, and capitalized on the growing profiles of its biggest stars. By and large, it worked. Even before the groundswell of interest we’ve seen in women’s sports over the last two years, there was a steady uptick in the W’s popularity within and beyond its regional markets. The Caitlin Clark Effect has certainly had an impact—and now games sell out across the country and events move to larger venues even when Clark isn’t involved, proving that the league has, in many ways, achieved what it set out to do.
There’s a sense that, given the time it took to reach this point, the next big business steps for the W aren’t as clear, or urgent. Continued expansion is a given, but while the WNBA Commissioner, Cathy Engelbert, has confirmed the addition of two new teams by 2028, she hasn’t provided more details or a concrete timeline. The exciting, and occasionally overwhelming, result of reaching once far-off goals is that the future is suddenly wide open. What’s more, there are myriad ways for the W to grow its game without tripping on the same stumbling blocks as larger leagues, like the NBA or NFL, that reneged on their support of certain players as they grew. Most easily, the W can follow the lead of its own athletes.
Last week, New York Liberty Forward Breanna Stewart and Minnesota Lynx Forward Napheesa Collier announced the launch of Unrivaled, a new three-on-three league. Stewart and Collier, who played together on the University of Connecticut’s storied Huskies squad, said the new league would launch its first ten-week season in Miami next January. Unrivaled promises six-figure salaries (the highest average salary offered by a women’s pro sports league) and equity stakes for its thirty participants. It is backed by US women’s pro soccer players Megan Rapinoe and Alex Morgan, former NBA players Carmelo Anthony and Steve Nash, pro golfer Michelle Wie West, UConn head coach Geno Auriemma, plus a few other celebrity backers. Former ESPN president John Skipper and former Turner president David Levy are working to develop a media rights deal for the tournament. Engelbert has also expressed her support for the venture: “The momentum for women’s basketball has never been greater,” she wrote. Stewart and Collier, who will both participate, have promised All-Star caliber rosters.
Read the rest of the essay over at The Believer