It's About Damn Time!

Lizzo said it best. The WNBA tipped off their highly and most anticipated 28th season on Tuesday with the Indiana Fever and the #1 draft pick, Caitlin Clark prime time on ESPN and Disney+. It seems that everyone is excited about this season; from Google featuring women’s hoopers that takes you to all things WNBA with a click, A’ja’s shoe, the Chi (aka Bayou) Barbie at the MET Gala, the new charter plane deal for the league, the addition of a team in Toronto and dropping the name and logo of the 13th team in Cali, it’s all been leading up to this Fever pitch (Pun intended)

Now, it was a long time ago, but I worked for a WNBA team. I sold tickets for the 2012 WNBA World Champion Indiana Fever. I started right before their championship season started and it was a slow moving train all the way through. When the Fever started making that run through the playoffs did fans start packing the arena. The last round against the Minnesota Lynx were legitimate sellout crowds.?

To think that a dozen years later, that there were multiple teams boasting sold out season tickets ahead of opening night is wild to me! Watching the games on Tuesday were surreal and also very different from each other. The Fever vs. the Sun was high quality production with multiple camera angles and good commentating. The Liberty vs. the Mystics was a low quality production to where the women’s faces were blurry and the shot was from a high angle and just went back and forth from basket to basket. Then every once in a while there would be a low angle in the huddle shot, but that was as dynamic as it got. I think that the overall quality and minimum standard of expectation needs to be raised across the board whether the game is being broadcast on ESPN, Disney+ or an RSN. With all the hype and new eyes on the W, it's worth it to put on the best show to showcase the talent and storylines for all the new fans.?

I was also pleasantly surprised by all the advertisements that actually featured the WNBA players! That was definitely new. Now a few of them were Clark in her Iowa uniform, but it was cool to see some W ads and W athletes for product placement.?

And I was excited about that SKIMS campaign. Long time ago, I was invited to an end of the season meeting with Team presidents and executives from around the league. I was selected from a leadership initiative that the league launched to incentivize employees at teams that they felt were poised for management and they wanted to keep in the league even if there weren’t opportunities at the team that they currently worked for. I was excited to have the opportunity to attend the meetings. In one of the round table discussions where a mix of employees, executives and presidents talked about different issues and how to come up with creative solutions or ideas to address these issues.?

There was one question that was asked of each table to discuss about the marketing of the league and the athletes. I mustered up the nerve to share my marketing idea that I had been thinking about since I started doing research in my masters program. An ad campaign that ran through the NBA playoffs for the start of the WNBA season. It would feature the top athletes from each team playing a pick up game. But the edgy part was that the women were playing “shirts and skins”. Now, the women that were skins would be blurred out, but it would be tongue in cheek and funny for the women to not think twice about going skins in the ad because the tag line would be about the women play just as hard as the men and should be taken as serious as the men professional basketball players but that there is a different aspect of the game because they are women.?

My table was silent. I think a few people tried to pretend that I didn’t even share an idea and those that did respond, just tried to argue me down that no one wanted to see that from the W players and that it wouldn’t land, that it wouldn’t be funny, etc. I am a woman and because this was many years ago, I was closer to being a former collegiate basketball player and I thought that this was funny and provocative.?Plus, I did do quite a bit of research on the topic of women in sports in the media and sports marketing and earned a master's and doctorate in this field, but that is for a different newsletter on a different day.

Fast forward to the era of social media and TikTok, IG and consuming news and sports in short digestible videos that are 30 seconds or less. And aha ...now I know that they weren’t playing in their SKIMS, but WNBA players are being advertised in their underwear dribbling the ball and doing some moves. The angle was far more women’s empowerment and body positivity, featuring W players with different skin tones, with tattoos, a mother, etc. instead of being clever or on the nose with humor, but still thought it was cool and up to date way to showcase that women’s basketball players are just as good at the game but that they are women.?

Here’s to hoping one day I get the opportunity to revisit my idea, maybe SKIMS could use a creative director as it relates to their sports partnerships. Anyway, I love the love the W is getting and hope it's here to stay for more than just this season, because it's about damn time!