A full-court press for social justice
How the WNBA became the most progressive league and ‘a walking protest at all times’
From the beginning of their more than two decades on the court, the players in the WNBA have defied society’s expectations.
Sheryl Swoopes, a marquee founding member of the league, found out she was pregnant just before the league’s inaugural season in 1997 — and started playing six weeks after giving birth, setting a precedent for many female athletes who didn’t want to put their careers on hold to have children.
Then, in 2005, Swoopes became one of the highest-profile active athletes to that point to come out as a lesbian. She didn’t think the announcement was a big deal at the time. But, she said, “I still get messages from people saying, ‘You saved my life ,’ from parents saying, ‘Thank you for helping me understand my child.’ ”
Today, challenging the status quo is a hallmark of the league’s players. They pushed the envelope long before it came into vogue among modern-day professional athletes, and led the way in protesting social injustice and racism.
The breadth of action among WNBA players is unparalleled among professional sports leagues.
They include singular efforts like Seimone Augustus’s opposition to a ballot measure in Minnesota aimed at amending the state constitution to ban same-sex marriage, Maya Moore’s basketball sabbatical to focus on criminal justice reform and Natasha Cloud’s fight against gun violence.
Often they include unified undertakings, such as the league’s dedicating this season to Breonna Taylor, a Black woman who was killed by the police, and the players’ collective stand against the co-owner of the Atlanta Dream, Sen. Kelly Loeffler, who had criticized their support for the Black Lives Matter movement.
This off-season, many players have quickly transitioned from playing basketball to focusing on encouraging people to vote.
How the league in some cases pioneered or foreshadowed today’s wave of activism among professional athletes is not a story of deliberate joint action hatched in a secret meeting.
Rather, players see it as the natural outgrowth of who they are, a drive borne of necessity in a league dominated by Black women, many of them lesbians.
“We are a walking protest at all times as a WNBA athlete,” said Mistie Bass, who in 2016 took a knee during the national anthem while with the Phoenix Mercury. “If you think about it, we have so many different stigmas. We’re just constantly in the fight. I don’t think we have ever not been in a fight for equality, for justice.”
Over time the players have grown more emboldened and less fazed by the possibility of punishment by league officials, who have sanctioned them from time to time.
“The W is the movement,” said Layshia Clarendon, a guard for the Liberty. “It’s where this country is going. It’s where progressive and forward-thinking folks are looking to.”
The league is still seeking a broader following, but the increasing activism hasn’t diminished viewership, which is dwarfed by that of the NBA but has shown gains recently. Ratings for the Seattle Storm’s titleclinching Game 3 win over the Las Vegas Aces this month, shown on ESPN, were up 27% from the final game a season ago.
Amira Rose Davis, an assistant professor at Penn State University specializing in race, sports and gender, said there was a disconnect at first between how the players saw themselves and how the league was envisioned by the NBA, its chief financial backer.
“There was a lot of this conversation that we’ve come to really understand in women’s sports: ‘How can we make it palatable? How can we make it something that we can sell? Shorten the shorts, right?’ ” Davis said. “That tension is something that was always there, but then you always had players pushing back on it.”
The WNBA’s players had little leverage to argue; they were constantly told that they should feel lucky to be paid to play basketball at all in the United States.
“We were so happy to be there, but there was this nervousness every morning whether the lights would be on so we could practice,” said Sue Wicks, a former centre for the Liberty who was 30 when the WNB A launched.
By the end of the second season, though, the players were fed up with being paid average salaries of $30,000 and not receiving year-round health benefits or a portion of merchandise profits and revenue. Some players earned as little as $5,000 in the league’s first season, and their contracts could be terminated by teams at any time. They began organizing the first labour union of professional female athletes.
Although league officials resisted, a collective bargaining agreement was reached. It was modest, but included significant improvements: minimum veteran salaries, doubled to $30,000; year-round health care; retirement plans; paid maternity leave; and revenue sharing.
Public support didn’t always come from the people the league almost exclusively marketed to: families with parents who are straight and cisgender, whose sense of gender identity matches their sex assigned at birth. LGBTQ fans embraced the WNBA from its earliest seasons, though the league did not create a Pride campaign until 2014.
Today, lesbian players and their families are embraced by the league and its fans, and the WNBA amplifies progressive conversations around gender and sexuality. After the Storm won the championship this season, ESPN showed Sue Bird, Seattle’s star point guard, hugging and kissing her girlfriend, Megan Rapinoe, the U.S. women’s soccer star.
The vibe of challenging norms blossomed in other ways.
Before Colin Kaepernick first took a knee during the national anthem in 2016, members of the Lynx, then the reigning champions, sought to peacefully advocate social change.
Recent police killings weighed heavily on Augustus and her teammates.
Alton Sterling was killed by police outside a Baton Rouge, Louisiana, convenience store Augustus frequented as a child. A police officer in suburban St. Paul, Minnesota, killed Philando Castile during a traffic stop. While visiting her in Minnesota, Augustus’ father had been pulled over by the police. He could have been killed like Castile, she thought.
The team and coaching staff convened, deliberating how best to uniformly convey their feelings. They settled on wearing black warm-up shirts that read, “Change starts with us — Justice & Accountability” on the front. The back featured the Dallas police shield, in recognition of several police officers who had recently been killed; the names of Sterling and Castile; and the phrase “Black Lives Matter.”
Four off-duty Minneapolis police officers working security at the arena walked off the job.
The moment also created a swell of unity throughout the league. Some players like Bass, following the lead of her Mercury teammate Kelsey Bone, began to kneel during the national anthem. The Mercury, Fever and Liberty wore similar shirts. The league initially fined the teams and players, then rescinded the penalties less than a week later after an outcry from players and fans.
“It could have just been the Minnesota Lynx doing this and then we would have looked like the one bad apple in the league,” Augustus said. “But because of the rest of the teams’ following suit, it really made a bigger impact and brought us together a little bit stronger than we were before.”
With that current of activism, it wasn’t surprising that the league’s players would have a forceful reaction to the killings of George Floyd in May and Breonna Taylor in March.
“I knew we were not going to have a season this year if we don’t launch something special,” commissioner Cathy Engelbert said.
Among several efforts, the WNBA has created a social justice council and is working with the Say Her Name Campaign, which focuses on police violence against Black women and girls.
“You find your way in it, in a way in which it speaks to your own authenticity as an individual,” said Nneka Ogwumike, president of the WNBA players’ union. “But then also you find a lot of strength and we’re able to speak out collectively, as we demonstrated in the past few years and most notably this season.”
The recent surge in visible activism has yielded mixed feelings for Bass four years after she first knelt.
“Not much has changed since then in terms of social justice and making things better, which is why we were kneeling,” Bass said. “But to see now, not just not in the WNBA, just overall, the full embracing of it has been difficult to watch, because you’re like, ‘ Where were you four years ago?’”
NBA teams began kneeling regularly at games this summer.
Notable WNBA players like Cloud and Renee Montgomery opted out of the season to fully pursue social justice causes. Montgomery, a member of the Lynx team who wore the Tshirt four years ago, was moved to act after protesters arrived in her neighbourhood in the Buckhead area of Atlanta in June to protest the police killing of Rayshard Brooks.
Then she watched as the sports world mostly came to a standstill after the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man, in August.
“I’m sure everyone thought if sports stops, once they got back going, it was going to be due to the pandemic,” she said. “No one thought that sports would stop because of race.”
The NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks walked out of a playoff game, and WNBA teams, and others in different sports league, joined them.
“We become a better league and more valuable because of the space we use to fight social justice,” said Dawn Staley, the women’s basketball coach at the University of South Carolina, who was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame after her WNBA career.
“Everybody knows they ’re leaders when it comes to that. If anything, it gives other professional leagues a space to say: ‘It’s OK to speak out. It’s OK to be unliked.’ Because we’ve been unliked for 23 years by mainstream America, you know what I’m saying? You can survive not being liked for saying something that’s right.”