Rough Notes: Another Precipice
How the Valkyries win over the Fever joins the WNBA's currents of change.
This is a Rough Notes Deep Dive: intimate & wide lens writings on current cultural + political moments in the WNBA, women’s basketball histories, my own personal becoming, and how we continue to transform one another. They are sometimes free and sometimes just for paying subscribers; upgrade your subscription to dive deep every time.
All of a sudden it’s mid-summer and the Golden State Valkyries are 7-6. I’m traveling back and forth between Chicago and the Bay Area, trying to hold life together, hustling for side gigs, obsessing over uncovering women’s basketball histories, following the choppy throes of another WNBA season. And I’m swinging between types of posts, within the bandwidth of Rough Notes; this here is a scrappy ‘lil deep dive.
If you’ve been reading Rough Notes for a while, you know that last year, I fell hard for Angel Reese, her ability to rebound as though saving a life, and the way she (& Chennedy “I-90 Interstate” Carter & motivational preacher T-Spoon) sparked an ailing Chicago franchise. It felt revelatory. One day, Angel turned 22 at the Met Gala, and the next she practiced at a rec center (YMCA?) in the suburbs when the WNBA commissioner suddenly announced that all teams would fly chartered for the season. I watched the agony and absurdity and wonder of that season unfold from press row (until the Sky PR folks ghosted me, but you know, Tristan, it’s never too late), a roller coaster of broken records and renewed pride and killing Sky Guy and perhaps veering a bit off the tracks by the end.
What I mean to say is: women’s basketball is a perennial precipice. That’s magnified right now by a WNBA season plowing ahead while negotiations for a new players’ contract wait in the wings like Marge Gunderson in Fargo (lmao no, I don’t know high brow film references, I just googled “main character that doesn’t enter until the final scene.”) Joe Lacob’s $50 million made from the Valkyries blazes upward like a corporate sunrise. Pazzi fans rejoice, the war is over. There’s new Stud Budz content spilled every day. Diana Taurasi doesn’t even play basketball anymore. Change surges through us.
This season, I was extremely lucky to attend the first 6 home games of the Golden State Valkyries, in my “home town” of the Bay Area. It was there, last week, that I witnessed another wild momentum shift in the WNBA: the brand-new Valkyries of sixth — or maybe seventh? — women ripped a game away from the Indiana Fever with surprising force. It was a delight to behold, but what also sticks with me is how quickly the league’s narratives evolve.
It wasn’t all that long ago that critics were seizing on doubts about the young and scrawny Indiana Fever, when the Valkyries were nothing but a gleam in the basement offices of Chase Center’s eye… Not anymore. For new WNBA fans in the Bay Area, the Fever have always been synonymous with the WNBA’s top tier, their red jerseys barging into playoffs predictions like an assumption. Neither Aliyah Boston nor Caitlin Clark are rookies, they are repeat All-Stars. Instead, the Valkyries are the ones with surprising potential, and predictions are becoming impossible to impose.
Last week in San Francisco, for the first time since 2023, I saw a game that included “little cc” (Caitlin Clark) where she was not actually the main point. In fact, she had perhaps the worst shooting game of her career and never even scored a three in Ballhalla. But even more than her performance, the culture within Chase Center felt different, too. Yes, there were Indiana fans around, somewhere, and you could hear them, but as usual the crowd was drenched in lavender. Overwhelmingly, the crowd showed up for the Valkyries: a team without superstars, down 3 starters thanks to EuroBasket, but who are a testament to the power of collaboration.
Much of this seems connected to head coach Natalie Nakase and General Manager Ohemaa Nyanin’s vision. There’s a quietness to their success, the backbone of Ballhalla’s amped-up vibes right now. In press conferences, Natalie constantly credits her coaching staff for their work, none of whom have coached before in the WNBA. “Again, credit to our coaching staff,” she said in the post-game press conference last week. “Like they do so much off the court stuff behind-the-scenes that you guys will never see.” She praises her players easily, including ones who returned to the team after being cut in the pre-season. “She plays with no fear,” Natalie said of Laeticia Amihere, who scored 10 points off the bench against the Fever (& who Valkyries fans pray will remain on the roster.) “That’s what I love about her.” The team recognizes its fans, too: “Our fans are kind of like our superpower,” Natalie had said before the game.
There’s a quality of mystery to the Valkyries, and of private-ness, too: a culture and chemistry whose truths belong to the team. And it demonstrates a new kind of mutuality around the growth of women’s basketball: one that values equity, and respect without getting lost in the politics of sensationalizing a single player. A way of shining light not on current superstars, but on players like Kayla Thornton and Veronica Burton and Temi Fagbenle, whose stars are rising, once given the opportunity.
did you vote for KT for all-star today?
During the Valkyries win over the Fever, a new friend invited me to sit with her and her family, then clapped so violently she had to take all the rings off her fingers. And I let myself do something that I think sportswriters don’t let themselves do enough: I felt proud. I felt connected with the community of people who make this possible. Who are these Bay Area fans and what makes them so ready for a WNBA team now? That’s a question I’ll keep exploring here in Rough Notes.
After the game, I listened to an interview with Layshia Clarendon, who among many other things, is one of those Valkyries fans. In the interview, Layshia spoke about watching the WNBA change before their eyes after retiring last year from the league: “I want to see [the league] get to a place where it's experiencing things that I never could have imagined. I was a part of one of those bricks in the same way Lisa Leslie was a brick, so that I could play in it… I was a shoulder. Stand on my shoulders.”
I welled up with tears! What a gorgeous image. A direct command. A prayer for where negotiations stand, all that’s at stake. A fuel for women’s basketball fandom. In fact, my favorite thing about change in the WNBA is this idea of the outcome being unknown: or maybe specifically, that the outcome could be funkier, or more radical, than what is expected. Maybe I’m naive to believe in radical potential in a professional sports league. Maybe I’m impossible. Maybe I’m just swept up, as usual, in watching the WNBA in-person during its “hype era,” in how satisfying and visceral this all is. Maybe I’m too sentimental and sensitive for my own good. But I’m latched on to the unique potential in the Bay Area right now, where the edges of WNBA bend, give way, and sometimes even snap. And watching the Fever play in Chase Center made me itchy with belief in what this could mean.
I’m traveling the next few weeks: back to Chicago and to see two friends marry one another. I’ll be watching the Valkyries through the screen while continuing to write. I have so much in-the-works for upcoming Rough Notes, and beyond: articles about Bay Area basketball from Oakland to San Francisco and the women of the WBL who played here first, brewing artistic collaborations including a return to the prison camps of World War II, and new explorations, like a look into this groundbreaking new book about women’s basketball, and more. I hope you’ll follow along, and support this hustle-filled, heartfelt, independent work.
And I’ll be back in Ballhalla mid-July: where I hope fans and athletes continue to unsettle and change meaning in the WNBA. Shoutouts to the intergenerational queer dance parties after games, to the people complaining that their signs got confiscated by the Chase Center gods, to the woman making “Fuck Trump” pins for her entire section, to half the Valkyries team — and Tina Charles! - who hung out late at Rikki’s, to Carla Leite for jumping over the court side seats and running up the stairs like a performer leaps from the stage. To a team that knows no bounds. And to the fight for a new collective bargaining agreement freshly opening the curtains.
