The WNBA Is Larger Than Ever
On June 30, WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert held an interview revealing the league would expand into 3 more cities in the next 5 years– bringing the WNBA team count to a league record of 18. “This historical growth is an effective reflection of our league’s extraordinary momentum, the depth of skill throughout the game, and the rising demand for financial investment in ladies’s expert basketball,” Engelbert said.
The move– including groups in Cleveland, Detroit, and Philadelphia– marks a brand-new step in the previous 3 years of growth for the ladies’s basketball league. According to StubHub information, tickets sales for the 2024 season went up 93 percent from the year before, viewership quadrupled, several franchise teams offered out season tickets, and some of the greatest WNBA stars received nationwide acknowledgment. “If you would’ve informed me we would eventually have offered out arenas, I would’ve most likely chuckled,” Aces star A’ja Wilson informed Rolling Stone in June 2024. But as the league’s development continues to escalate, specialists and fans alike are seeing that the bigotry that has followed ladies’s basketball since its start is just growing more powerful.
It’s difficult to talk about women’s basketball in 2025 without going over Indiana Fever star player Caitlin Clark and Chicago Sky baller Angel Reese. Interest in their rivalry go back to their 2020-21 college season, when they played for the University of Iowa and Louisiana State University, respectively. However what’s followed their relocate to the league– and the nationwide spotlight– is the ongoing disparity in how fans deal with Clark and Reese because of their race. Social media protection is filled to the brim with wrap-ups of WNBA games, but behind playful arguments of who’s the much better player is a growing characterization of Black players as violent, aggressive, and hazardous to their white counterparts.
Indiana Fever guard Caitlin Clark (left) is protected by Chicago Sky forward Angel Reese. Brian Spurlock/Icon Sportswire/Getty Images
Elizabeth Taylor, an associate teacher at Temple University, has actually invested years studying the crossway of gender and sports. She informs Rolling Stone that the WNBA has actually constantly been one of the most progressive sports leagues in the U.S., most likely since of their players’ intersecting identities and vocal statements on gender discrimination. This has made the league rather associated over the last few years with liberal concepts of activism and racial equality. But as the sport has actually grown, she keeps in mind that an increase of brand-new fans has actually considerably changed the makeup of the average WNBA advocate. “With the televising of games and increase in fan participation, we are seeing a development in fans who may not be as left leaning,” Taylor states. “That definitely plays a role in what we’re seeing from fans, in regards to how they engage with the players.”
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One of the greatest focuses in the past couple of months has been on viral flagrant fouls between WNBA players. What began as discourse surrounding Clark and arguments that she’s been targeted on the court because of her outsized group of fans has actually rapidly spiraled into very finely veiled bigotry toward Black WNBA players in basic. Throughout a June game between the Connecticut Sun and Chicago Sky, Reese entered an on-court argument with a number of Suns after Bria Hartley pulled her braids. Hartley, Olivia Nelson-Ododa, Tina Charles, and Reese argued, with Reese pushing the group before it was solved. Videos of the clip were filled with comments calling all of the Black women involved “egalitarian,” or “filthy” players– even though Reese and Charles welcomed on video camera after the clash. When Black Washington Mystics player Okikiola Iriafen got an ostentatious nasty call during a matchup in between the Mystics and Indiana Fever, she was called “violent” by web experts for days. But that same treatment wasn’t applied when Indiana Fever player Sophie Cunningham battled Connecticut Sun player Jacy Sheldon. Sheldon had fouled Clark with an eye poke earlier in the game and on a later on play, Cunningham slammed Sheldon in the back of the head as she increased for a layup, getting Sheldon’s ponytail and continuing to shake her as refs and her colleagues tried to separate the melee. Cunningham was ejected, however the viral clip turned her into a star. In 3 days, the white and blonde basketball player went from 300,000 TikTok fans to 1.4 million.
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“Research shows that mainstream media overrepresents white players,” Taylor says. “Black WNBA players get less limelights, regardless of winning more end of season awards. And Black athletes who are non feminine or present in typically non feminine ways get the least quantity of limelights.”
There’s also the trouble with attending to in-game bigotry. In 2024, Phoenix Mercury star Brittney Griner said that lots of players underwent racial slurs from fans during games– attributing the attack to brand-new WNBA viewers. “I don’t appreciate the brand-new fans that sit there and scream racial slurs at myself, my colleagues, and the people that I bet because, yeah, those might be challengers however those are buddies, too,” Griner said. “They do not should have that, so I don’t appreciate the brand-new fans that think it’s okay to do that.” Retired WNBA legend Sue Bird, who is white, likewise kept in mind the league’s issue with racism, but pressed back versus assumptions that it began with Clark’s popularity. “Caitlin didn’t bring bigotry to the WNBA. This has actually been occurring,” Bird stated in a 2024 podcast episode. “That, I believe, has actually been a shock for everybody. That other individuals are amazed by this. We’ve been trying to inform you.”
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There’s a real life cause and effect to this sort of language. Fourteen-year-old WNBA superfan and sports analyst Selah Viana has been consumed with the league since she was six. However she informs Rolling Stone that as she’s begun to think about a career reporting on females’s sports, a great deal of the racist coverage has actually left her feeling disappointed. The WNBA growing seems like an amazing development. But is there a method to alter the prejudice that’s growing with it?
“Bigotry is really steeped into sports culture. And the WNBA is a sensitive topic for Americans since it’s generally Black women, the 2 groups that society tends to put their troubles on,” Viana states. “I’m a young Black sports journalist, and seeing those stereotypes being placed on expert women at the top of their level? It’s kind of discouraging.”