How the WNBA Became the Most Fun, Complicated, and Exciting League in Sports

Caitlin Clark! A'ja Wilson! Angel Reese! This year, women's hoops emerged as a dominant popcultural force. But the road to sports-league supremacy has been long and winding. This is the inside story of how the W finally broke through.

- EMMA CARMICHAEL

BEFORE THIS YEAR, the last WNBA AllB Star Game I covered in person was in 2009 at Mohegan Sun, the casino off I-95 that has been home to the Connecticut Sun since 2003. I'd paid my own way to be there, and I never got paid for the story I published afterward. The Houston Comets, the most dominant team in league history, had folded less than a year earlier, and the WNBA had just cut team rosters from 13 to 11, amounting to a 39-player layoff. It was the Great Recession, and distinctly not a time for growth, or even optimism, in women's basketball. "The big vision is to grow this business," then league president Donna Orender told reporters before the 2009 season. "Sometimes in order to do that, you have to take a little bit of a step sideways."

Fifteen years later, the league is moving forward, and at a remarkable clip. In July, I found myself covering another WNBA All-Star Game, this time in Phoenix. The three-day event was dizzying and overscheduled in all the ways an event of this magnitude is supposed to be-but for the WNBA has simply never been before. Tickets sold out six weeks before tipoff, and downtown signage announcing the game and ads for players' sneaker deals were as unavoidable as the baking desert heat. Around the city, there were enough panels and private parties to get lost in-or turned away from at the door.

"If you're in the city, you know it's All-Star," Jess Smith, the incoming president of the Golden State Valkyries, the league's first expansion team in 17 years, told me in Phoenix. "I had four parties last night! That seems typical, but it wasn't."