There was no “Ah-ha!” moment, no epiphany when David Stern realized that he was setting out to drastically alter the landscape of women’s sports and make some kind of social statement.
Stern, the NBA’s commissioner for three decades before retiring in 2014, insists he wasn’t thinking about anything but making money when he put together a financial blueprint for a women’s professional basketball league in the early 1990s. Several NBA staff members, most vocally Val Ackerman, a former college basketball player at the University of Virginia, had long been urging Stern to get into the women’s game.
Twenty years ago this April, months before the U.S. women’s team led by Sheryl Swoopes, Lisa Leslie and Rebecca Lobo won the first of what would become five straight gold medals in the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, Stern decided the time was right. So he walked into a ballroom at the St. Regis Hotel in New York and asked the league’s Board of Governors to get behind what would become the WNBA.
The NBA Board of Governors approved the creation of the WNBA on April 24, 1996. The league began play the following summer, on June 21, 1997, when the New York Liberty and Los Angeles Sparks played at the Great Western Forum in Los Angeles.
“It was surprisingly easy,” Stern recalled this week. “The owners had faith in us. It was a business decision.”
A business decision that created what has been for nearly two decades the gold standard in women’s professional team sports, raising the bar on what an entire generation of young women and girls playing sports can aspire to.
The WNBA opens its 20th season today and its fans have plenty to celebrate. The league has a television contract to broadcast games on ESPN through the 2022 season reportedly worth $12 million a year, they have recently added some big-name sponsors, including a marquee deal with Verizon that will put the company’s name on 10 of the league’s 12 jerseys, and they boast a fresh crop of rising young stars such as Chicago’s Elena Delle Donne, Minnesota’s Maya Moore and Seattle’s Breanna Stewart.
At the same time, the WNBA is experiencing a rocky young adulthood and identity crisis as it enters its 20s.
The league has not averaged more than 10,000 fans since the 2009 season and attendance dropped to a historic low average of 7,318 fans last year. In September, NBA commissioner Adam Silver, who helped launch the league, admitted that it hasn’t been as popular as he thought it would be. And, the WNBA continues to struggle with the perception that it is a niche league, something akin to men’s rugby, as its maximum player salary of $111,500 is about 80 percent less than the NBA minimum of $525,093. Phoenix Mercury star Diana Taurasi, whose 2014 WNBA salary was $107,000, sat out last season and was paid $1.5 million by Russian Premier League team UMMC Ekaterinburg, whom she plays for in the winter.
“The quality of play in the WNBA is really at a zenith,” said Ackerman, who was the WNBA’s president for its first eight years and is now the commissioner of the Big East Conference.
“The irony is we started with a quality of play that was much lower, but at a time when the attention was so high. Now, it’s reversed. The hope is that more fans can get dialed into this great product, because the players are exceptionally skilled. There’s a great game happening.”
Lisa Borders is the person now in charge of dialing in those fans. Two months after Silver made his comments, Laurel Richie stepped down after five years as commissioner and Borders was hired as her replacement in April. A former vice president of Coca-Cola and vice mayor of Atlanta, Borders was instrumental in bringing the Dream to the city. She also has a close, long-term friendship with Silver as both graduated from Duke University and currently serve on the school’s board of trustees.
“I would not have taken this job had I not felt that Adam was not committed and the NBA family was not committed,” Borders said.
The relationship between the NBA and WNBA is far from a transparent one, which is why it’s so hard to get a read on the health of the league. Half of the WNBA’s 12 teams are still owned by the NBA as a whole instead of individual owners. The Dolan family owns controlling interests in Madison Square Garden, the Liberty and Cablevision. Cablevision owns Newsday. In an interview with Newsday last week, Borders declined to say how many of the 12 teams were self-supporting or whether the league itself, as a whole, was self-supporting.
What puzzles Borders is why some of the league’s biggest critics really haven’t taken the time to sample the product.
“I would encourage people to come to a game,” Borders said. “You wouldn’t form an opinion on a restaurant without going there and tasting the food. The experience of a WNBA game is no different. We are inviting fans to come experience a game in a arena. And if they don’t live in close proximity, I encourage them to watch the game on ESPN.”
Yet, even among those who already engage with the league, there is a divergence, which is why it is so tricky to market the product, Ackerman said. While games tend to attract women and families, the television audience is primarily male.
“That creates some really interesting decisions on who we market to …” Ackerman said. “It made for some unsolvable questions because you are trying to reach a young guy, a kid, the women who are into Title IX.”
Two WNBA legends, Dawn Staley and Swoopes, said at this year’s WNBA draft that to continue to grow the game, the WNBA has to find a way to market itself to men similar to the way women’s tennis has.
“The men are more like us than they’re like NBA players,” said Staley, now the coach at the University of South Carolina. “We need to play on that. The average man is not dunking the basketball. We need to cater to them.”
Borders does not like to divide her fans by traditional demographics. Instead, she believes there are a number of things the league can try to target what she calls the “casual and curious fans,” those who have yet to inform an opinion on the league.
She is open to tinkering with the game, including possibly lowering the baskets, to see if they can do something to help it evolve.
“In any business if you take innovation off the table, you’re going to get behind the 8-ball and you’re done,” Borders said. “At the end of the day, the one thing I won’t take off the table is that we use a ball. But there’s no reason we can’t discuss and try and discuss things and see if they work or not. In business, we call that research and development.”
Stern, now watching from afar, believes that the league he helped start has a bright future.
“This is a 20-year-old league with a solid television contract, important sponsors and decent attendance,” he said. “People forget that 20 years in, the NBA was still in the pre-tape delay era playing in old barns. The WNBA is the premier women’s league in the world in any sport and we can feel proud of that.”