Rough Notes: How Oakland Begins

Shapeshifting through a month of reporting and grief in my home town.

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.

• I came to Oakland this month because there are so many women’s basketball stories bubbling up here in the Bay, just underneath the impending 2025 WNBA season and the creation of the league’s newest franchise, the Golden State Valkyries. I’ve been itching to write about the soil underneath the Valkyries, to ground the much-deserved frenzy of excitement around the team in context and history. This includes stories about Oakland, not the West Bay (also known as San Francisco, and where the Valkyries will play), but Oakland: the real mecca of women’s basketball in the Bay, and the town where I was born and raised. A place I’m so determined deserves recognition from the WNBA that I’m losing sleep over it.