WNBA Rough Notes: We Are Endless
Before the playoffs / Everywhere I go / Chicago, Illinois
I applied for press credentials for the Chicago Sky’s 2024 season because I wanted to write more about the WNBA, and South Side Weekly said I could try it there. Then I realized that inherent in this want was an intention of writing differently than I ever had before. I struggled with the pre-set container. Maybe I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing, so I just allowed myself to be. Or maybe I understood that writing was most importantly a way to return to myself. And to find all of you. Anyway, that’s why I started writing Rough Notes. It’s hard to do something you really want, but it’s easier when you lower the stakes. I hope this project helps to lower them for you, too.
The Sky’s season might be over, but the playoffs are alive. And animating this WNBA postseason is the league’s strange metamorphosis. I can’t get my head around these unfinished changes, and spend much of my time walking or on a bicycle or making my breakfast slipping between arguments about what the hell is happening right now: 2.3 million Sky vs. Fever viewers / Death threats and AI images / Deranged and increasing ticket prices / Barbie Night / ‘If this is it.’ All I know is that I’m desperate for this momentum to not only include the new or the profitable, but to better understand the parts we already hold as a sport, as a culture, as a way of life.
What I’m trying to say is that women’s basketball did not become important in 2024; its been important for as long as the game itself has existed. And what really sets women’s basketball apart is that its contours were shaped by a world that disparaged it, if not actively refused it. “I don't think too many people watch the WNBA…” says a 2008 post from InsideHoops.com, which I just flicked back to because there are only 4 pages in total on the website’s WNBA forum. “And if they do, there won't be too many people willing to admit it.”
How true. 2008 was the last year I played competitive basketball. I was tired and haunted and self-hating, and I arrived at college in Vermont desperate to kiss a boy. “I remember you being kind of like… sort of embarrassed to talk about basketball,” says the boy I kissed, who is now my best friend in the world. “We shot around once, like early. I wanted to know about you playing basketball and you were kind like, shy about it.” I remember how binary basketball felt to me at the time: either I played it, or I didn’t. And there were so many other things I wanted to do instead: meet new people, write poetry, figure out how to get stoned, learn Spanish so I could speak it well enough to crack jokes abroad. But also, it felt impossible to only care about women’s basketball — to talk and wonder about it, to watch it, to love it. And yes, I was afraid it was too gay. Because “there won’t be too many people willing to admit it” is a very 2008 way of saying “our society treats queerness with shaming.”
But there were people willing to admit that they loved the WNBA. I wrote my thesis about Brittney Griner in 2012, but also as an ode to those who claimed women’s basketball as their own (something I was still working on doing.) It was hard to find many academic sources about the WNBA, so I scoured online forums and YouTube comments and early days of Twitter and cold emailed people. And I found a few people who’d written about the league and its fans. These quotes I saved chaotically and emailed to myself like small treasures. I was proud to find these writings, to save them, and quote them. Like Susannah Dolance, a sociologist who the internet tells me is still a faculty member at Century College in Minneapolis, who wrote in 2005: “Not only do lesbians socialize and connect at the games, they feel that the WNBA actually belongs to them.”
By the end of college, when I’d started to circle back to a love for women and basketball, I did so with repentance and prayer. That was also when I first got a press pass, to the 2013 Final Four in New Orleans, where I saw the Cal Golden Bears (my childhood team!) playing the very end of their best season in decades. For that game, I sat as close as possible to Cal’s bench, so I could best see Layshia Clarenden’s mohawk and allowed myself to leap and scream alongside the family members and friends who loved that team the most.
Perhaps this is why I care so much about women’s basketball being more than one thing. As a self-centered kid who didn’t live up to her own expectations as a player, that was beyond my grasp. But returning to basketball, and to myself, is an opening. Basketball is an impossible number of things, only some of which I have begun to understand. I felt this so often over the Chicago Sky season: when I watched players’ faces still moving through emotion at their arrival to an interview or a press conference. When former rivals now teammates pulled one another up off the floor with the kind of intimacy usually shared by siblings or lovers. When I interviewed a player, just us, about shared anxieties. When A told me about arriving in the JV Girls’ Basketball locker room before their final game to a bad-funky kind of energy concocted from a place that she, as the devoted head coach, could not locate. The groups of fans in matching t-shirts at a Sky game, realizing that it’s a whole family, whose collective identity is women’s basketball. Teresa Weatherspoon standing with tears in her eyes and her face like a statue while the final buzzer sounds on a thirty point blowout to end the Sky’s season, and her first year back in the WNBA.
And if this is true, if the WNBA has already held an impossible number of definitions for years and decades and generations, how can a league eager for a makeover by popularity and profitability remember how it came to be? Now that the WNBA is on the brink of that golden ticket, what will become of the ones who, long before so many of us, were willing to admit they loved women’s basketball, that it belonged to them? What happens to the 2005 lesbians who dared to claim this sport, who willed its existence onward? Does any of it matter? It’s like the league is chasing the promise of love from someone who closes their eyes when we stand naked. I can’t bear the feeling that women’s basketball might eat its own, especially those whose stories are long steeped in subversion and transgression. Because even with the unknowns of transformation, with the outpriced season ticket holders and TV deals and discrepancies in salaries and the heightened security, no matter the decisions made by the business of professional sports, what remains true is women’s basketball is without edges. It is endless. And it never quits living inside of us.
P.S. There were two Chicago Sky games to end the season, that I still have not written about: the final season home game against the Phoenix Mercury, when I lost my mind (in a good way), and the season-ending loss to the Connecticut Sun, after which I wondered if the players were losing their minds (in a bad way), and whether this was a ribbon tugging at a larger unraveling. To keep Rough Notes going a while longer, I will soon tell you about both.
Also, I brought my friend J into the fold this season. We created a photo essay together in South Side Weekly that comes out tomorrow. I’ll send it out! And then we’ll create something visual and even more unhinged here as well.
We adore you and your writing!