- For 30 seasons, female professional athletes in the United States have been part of an effort to build a professional basketball league while also confronting racism, sexism, and anti-LGBTQ bias.

Today's guest recounts that history and the players whose gritty determination on and off the court built the league and changed the country.

She's Tamryn Spruill this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(bright music) (bright music continues) (bright music continues) Hello, and welcome to "Story in the Public Square" where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

And my guest this week is Tamryn Spruill, an award-winning journalist and lifelong lover of basketball whose new book is "The W: A History of the WNBA."

Tamryn, welcome to the show.

- Welcome.

Thank you for having me.

I'm so glad to be here.

- Well, we are thrilled to have you here.

And, you know, in that introduction, I mentioned that you're a lifelong fan of basketball and women's basketball.

Where did that love of the game originate?

- It originated with my father.

I grew up in the '80s and he was a huge fan of the Celtics/Lakers rivalry and would watch basketball.

And as a kid, I wanted to spend time with him.

I was a tomboy who wanted to impress him, and I would horn in and just take over the downstairs den to watch (chuckles) and enjoy the games.

And a true love developed from there.

And from then it became watching women's college basketball.

He was a huge fan of Tennessee and a huge fan of Pat Summitt.

And that's where it began, well before the WNBA was really started.

- The college game seems in some ways more established than the WNBA.

Talk to us a little bit about that dichotomy, the sort of the thriving places like Connecticut and Tennessee and elsewhere where women's college basketball is big time well before there was a WNBA.

- That's a really great question.

I think it's because perhaps there was no pro league for the women to go to.

So the concentration was people just doing what they could in college and knowing that they would have to go play overseas.

And of course you have these legendary coaches at the programs you mentioned like Stanford, Tara VanDerveer, Geno Auriemma in Connecticut and Summitt in Tennessee.

And some of the best players who made it to the WNBA once it was started came from those schools.

- So before there was a WNBA, if you had a good career at one of those schools or elsewhere, there were other good players coming from other places too.

But if you had a good college career and you were a woman's basketball player 32 years ago, what did your future entail in the world of basketball after your college days were done?

- It just entailed falling completely off the radar.

It entailed packing up and moving overseas to another country that paid salaries, had pro leagues.

Italian league was huge, leagues in Russia, Turkey has a strong women's basketball history.

And that's what players would do because they had nowhere to play here.

And so they just kind of fell off the radar and we couldn't see them year round past the Olympics.

It was just fans had to wait until the next Olympics to see their players, to see their favorite players from college.

- Well, and so here we are in the 30th season of the WNBA and you've got this terrific new book.

I mentioned this to you that I thought anybody who's a fan of the WNBA needs to have this book because it's such a comprehensive history of its 30 seasons.

Let's start with today, in terms of if you were to do a State of the League Address, you know, how is the WNBA doing today?

- The WNBA is doing better than ever, but it's as mired as it's ever been.

I was thinking about this the other day and considering that it seems like the league, if it was going to gain visibility and the kind of foothold and the mainstream culture that it has now, it was always going to be like this.

And by this I mean mired in controversy with off-court stories dominating what's happening on the court because for so long people just didn't want this league to exist.

They did not want to give the league much respect, the players any respect.

It was a cultural punchline for many years.

Up until even 2018, "Saturday Night Live" had a skit that was pretty derisive against the league and mocking fun at the players for being tall, Black and gay and just came out really hot with that.

(chuckles) And it drew widespread condemnation from fans and coaches, like Cheryl Reeve, who's always been outspoken.

And to see other women playing these roles that are degrading other women, you know, it just really didn't land well.

And a year where the W was really trying and kind of, you know, at a cusp, like starting to turn the corner a little bit.

But now we have these conversations involving Caitlin Clark, we have Sophie Cunningham and now Enes Kanter and all these things having to do with trans players and what's allowed, what's not, and kind of trying to make a mockery of some players and trying to drive wedges.

Stephanie White, coach of the Fever, I heard, came out recently and said, "You know, you're trying to break our league and I'm not going to let it happen."

So it's a lot of players now being used as political pawns basically.

- But the game itself, has it evolved in those 30 years?

- Oh my goodness, yes.

When it first started, it was rightfully so, (chuckles) you know, some of the commentators were like, "This is not good."

(Jim laughing) Very low shooting percentages, you know, 20%, 16% from behind the arc shooting, that kind of a thing.

I've never seen more efficient basketball in my life than the league right now, even teams that are not at the top of the standings.

It's commonplace for a team to shoot 45, 50%.

- [Jim] Wow.

- And, it's just mind-boggling how consistent that's happening.

So players have really leveraged what they have instead of feeding into what traditionally was the league isn't worthwhile because you don't dunk because you can't dunk.

Some players can, but choose not to because they want to preserve their bodies, you know.

It's not an easy task.

It is hard on the body.

It's hard on the knees and ankles.

So they got stronger and more competitive and even the bottom-ranked team could bring it every night and pull off an upset.

It's, you know, the league is that stacked with talent from all over the world.

- I want to talk to you more about some of the, sort of hot button issues around the league today, but I do, this is a history and I want to start with the history of the league before we get into some of the more controversial stuff today.

So let's talk a little bit about the origin story.

Where did the WNBA come from?

- It came, it was the mastermind of Val Ackerman who became the first president, who's the inaugural president of the league.

She was the first woman to hold, to be a staff attorney with the NBA working under former Commissioner David Stern.

And she just kind of had this idea in the back of her head and was just brainstorming and waiting for the right time where something like that could be feasible.

And it's amazing to me that there was the, what is it called?

Women's Basketball Coaches Association every year around the Final Four would convene and have a yearly meeting.

And the sponsor pulled out in the late '90s and they were kind of stuck like, "Well, what are we going to do now?

We don't have the money to fund this ourselves."

And the other coaches called on Ackerman and they said, "Do you think David Stern and the NBA might consider sponsoring what we're doing?"

And the NBA said, "Yes."

And David Stern has professed a long support and respect for the women's game.

And after that event came off successfully with the NBA swooping in at the last time to help out this organization.

Hundreds of letters flooded in thanking the NBA and Mr.

Stern, and the result for him was just eye-opening.

He was just stunned by the vibrant community that existed as what women's basketball was at the collegiate level and was kind of like, "Okay, maybe we need to start this ball rolling to, you know, plant seeds towards getting a league."

- Yeah.

So, I'm an old hockey fan, right, so the birth of hockey leagues is something that there is some precedent for, but why haven't there been more professional women's athletic leagues in any sport prior to the birth of the WNBA?

- That's a great question.

There had been many attempts and the attempts were not successful, starting with the one that had the most promise was the ABL, the American Basketball League.

And it was founded on the premise that if we're going to have a league for women, it needs to be one where there's equity and they're treated with respect because the ones that had folded, kind of folded because of gimmicks.

Players would boycott games.

They would just go to center court and say, "We're not playing because we haven't been paid.

Our paychecks haven't come in, so."

And, of course, they were not treated well by the league owners for doing that.

And then you had other leagues that were really tapping into gimmicks and to try to sexualize the players.

So okay, let's have the players compete in tight leotards, you know, that kind of a thing.

And so nobody's going to take that seriously and it's a one game titillation and then it's done.

But the ABL was offering mid five figure salaries in the '90s.

They started a year before the WNBA did, but with the NBA branding behind the WNBA, they couldn't compete and eventually the WNBA kind of forced them out.

And so all the great players from the ABL, which, you know, kind of filed into the WNBA and the owners of the ABL were kind of like, well, this was what the NBA wanted all along.

(chuckles) They were trying their best to push us out of the way and take all of our players.

And to this day, kind of maintain that the NBA was sabotaging their efforts to get TV contracts and viable sponsorships.

And nothing ever came of it under the court of law, but these are allegations that still stand.

Gary Cavalli, one of the co-founders of the ABL, to this day says, you know, (chuckles) "I know that that's what they were doing even if I couldn't prove it."

- Well, so the book really sort of documents the struggles, sort of the ebbs and the flows of the WNBA over that 30-year history.

And one of the constant struggles is to attract fans to the professional women's game.

What were the challenges there?

- That's a great question.

It's wild, you know, the optics, if you see, for example, Diana Taurasi and Sue Bird at UConn, and you know, Sue Bird was drafted in 2002 and Taurasi two years later.

And you see these players filling up arenas and doing great things in college, and then they go to the WNBA and it kind of falls, kind of falls flat.

The arenas aren't packed for their teams and the television coverage isn't there.

And so I spoke with Andraya Carter, who covers women's basketball, the WNBA, for ESPN, and she's a former college player.

She competed at Tennessee.

And her view, she just kind of presented questions.

Is it because we can accept women playing a game when it's not serious because it's not for pay, it's for college?

But then socially and you know, notions about women kind of say, "Oh, well, I don't want to take women seriously as pro athletes."

Is that it, you know?

I don't really know.

And, but the invisibility by the media definitely didn't help matters, you know.

If you can't watch a game until the playoffs, you don't know who to root for.

You're not going to be buying team merch and swag to represent a team.

You don't even know who's on the teams (chuckles) because you haven't seen them play.

And for years, that has just been, like, just chipping away at any goals that the league had for viability.

You can't be viable if you're not being seen, like, that's just the basic, you know.

- And I guess what was the challenge of getting the kind of.

I mean, we live in a golden age of sports television, and we have for a quarter of a century now, where there are plenty of channels on.

Even before streaming services, there were dozens of cable channels where I could watch an entire season of ax throwing (Tamryn chuckling) before I could watch the WNBA.

Why was it so hard to get the TV time on some of those networks?

- That is a great, I love how you presented that question.

(Jim laughing) You watch ax throwing, you can watch cornhole - Yeah.

- And all of these things.

And I will just add that I think it was 2018 there.

I remember watching an Atlanta.

I wanted to watch an Atlanta Dream, Washington Mystics playoff game.

And I go to the channel and it's college football, like an early season college football game that they did not cut away from to show a playoff WNBA game.

And it was an amazing series.

It was just a riveting series, and I think I got to start watching it in the third quarter.

- Yeah.

- And so that's absurd.

And so I think this is questions for our institutions and for people who work in media who make decisions, "What are your priorities based on?"

It's quick to say that, "Oh, well, the leadership is not, oh, excuse me, the viewership is not there.

People don't want to see it.

Nobody likes the WNBA."

It's because you're not showing them (chuckles) and giving them a chance to develop as fans.

And so it really goes back to that, like who's making the decisions and why?

And that goes back to a lack of respect for women playing basketball for some reason and team sports in general.

That's been a problem in this country.

We can see how women who compete in individual sports can become household names are recognizable and embraced, but when it's a whole team, somehow it becomes a problem.

So we can look at Salem Witch trials and, you know, groups of women are dangerous.

And this is something that's been across, you know, a good portion of our human history with religion and patriarchy and all these other factors kind of playing into it.

- You know, so the history that you track also tracks with changing the acceptance and perceptions of LGBT Americans.

And you write very openly about the role of lesbian women in the WNBA.

How does that dynamic play with, I guess, I don't know if it's the public acceptance or the media portrayal or the media acceptance of the league as something that people are going to want to invest time and commercial dollars in?

- Wow, that's a fabulous question because I think that that is probably the biggest reason that the league has struggled to gain viability.

So if networks are like, "We don't want to show these women," you know, there's a reason why.

And the fact that most players didn't really start coming out until after Brittney Griner entered the league in 2013 as the number one pick, she came out before the draft day.

But before that, players were very quiet about their personal lives.

If they were gay, they were told to be quiet.

Sue Bird confessed, after retiring, that that's what she was told early on, that you have the look, you fit this image of the girl next door, and, you know, if you want endorsement dollars, this is what you need to do.

You just need to be quiet about this part of your life.

And so with that kind of... And she said it in a way that really made sense.

She's a newly college graduate, new college graduate and is looking at the career she's wanted her whole life.

And so you're being told that if you are open about who you are, it's probably not going to happen, but if you stay quiet and just keep everything under wraps, then it probably will.

So that's really putting somebody in an unfair and impossible situation, and we know what choice she made because she didn't come out until much later in her career.

And so there was rampant homophobia inside organizations, and just in our society, there was not the understanding the education about LGBTQ in life.

People were openly discriminated against.

We see how Ellen DeGeneres in the late '90s was vilified and turned into a social pariah for coming out on the cover of "Time" magazine.

So with the league tipping off its first season in '97 and seeing what happens to Ellen, who is a white woman with a national sitcom on TV, what, you know, leverage do you have as a queer person or a Black person to make a stand on this, you know?

For so long, the players did not have the leverage to stand up and say, "We're going to be who we are."

I mean, it all would've been shut down probably.

- Yeah, so you mentioned Brittney Griner and her historic role being the first professional woman to come out before she started playing.

She also, people will recognize the name because she was detained in Russia.

And that ties into a whole set of complex issues, including the economics of playing in the W. Tell us a little bit about why Brittney Griner and so many other great WNBA players spend their off season, first of all, playing overseas, and then we'll talk a little bit about Brittney's case in particular.

- Sure.

Yes.

It all comes down to money, that for so long, the salaries were just not salaries you could live on.

If you lived on them, you would struggle.

And these are salaries that average Americans, you know, try to live on, but definitely not what you would expect for professional athletes.

We see what professional men are paid to play basketball.

We don't, you know, what women have been paid historically up until the CBA of 2026 has really paled.

So we're talking in the early years, 15, 20, $25,000 a year, like right at the poverty line.

And when you consider that, okay, the season is just, it was only 20 some games to start and in the summer, but athletes have to keep their conditioning all year, they have to train, rehab injuries, and the supportive healthcare, like with personal trainers and things like that were not always guaranteed, often out of pocket for players as well.

So even though they were happy to be playing on US soil, it's what they wanted, they packed up their bags and would go overseas because that's where they could make bigger salaries in other countries.

And over time, at first, it was a, it worked because people are like, "I have the best of both worlds.

I am playing in front of my friends and family, playing in front of my loved ones, and then going overseas in obscurity and the cold, you know, winters of Russia and making millions and hopefully getting enough that I can retire on."

The plan, the problem is that the league did not evolve the plan, and the league wanted this early on.

When it started, it was very, you know, it was stated that we want our players to continue playing overseas because they knew they couldn't sustain higher salaries than they were offering.

And, but the problem is that that didn't change.

And so as players continued on, then you have this uptick in major injuries.

I think it was 2019 where every single team, a starter on each of the 12 teams had a player go out with injury.

And that's just ridiculous, you know, you have, like Breanna Stewart who was coming off of a championship in Seattle going down with an Achilles tear in Russia and a championship game because Brittney Griner accidentally stepped on her foot.

And just the wear and tear really started to break some of these players down.

Your body cannot compete year-round.

You need rest, you need recovery.

And as someone who... Elena Delle Donne, Skylar Diggins, or a few players who never played overseas, and Delle Donne said that how can you even improve?

How can you perfect your craft if you're just going, going, going and not having time to, you know, work on your fundamentals and keep your skills up?

So failure to evolve the business model, to find more viable revenue, to pay players more, you know, had a very catastrophic impact on the league because your star players, you know, if they're not on the court because they're injured, then that's not good for the product.

- [Jim] Right.

- And it just had a spiraling effect on players' bodies and ability to stay on the court.

- Yeah, and just in the interest of time, I want to move this forward to the very contemporary.

And, you know, Caitlin Clark is, I think, synonymous with the WNBA now, among others.

You talk about the Caitlin Clark effect.

You said it was real, but there was more to the story.

What's more to the story about it?

And we got about three minutes here.

- Okay, more to the story just means that she came into the league without having won anything and got all of the attention and more than any player had ever received before, before stepping foot on a court.

And when you're dealing with competitive people in any sport, I think, you know, we're raised in a meritocracy or we're conditioned to believe that if you work hard and achieve your goals, you're going to be rewarded.

And I think that whether people openly admit it or just kind of half, you know, kind of give shade to it a little bit, her coming in with everything that they don't have, you know, kind of rubbed people the wrong way.

And it's not necessarily Caitlin's fault.

She benefited from timing, NIL being rescinded where athletes were not allowed to be paid for her name, image, and likeness, really helped her.

She was able to sign a major sponsorship deal with State Farm while still in college.

Other players were not able to do that.

And then we have the culture wars, (chuckles) kind of coming in where people have seized on what she represents in society.

The W has always favored players who look like Caitlin, as I mentioned.

Sue Burt said after retiring that I was told I have the look.

And then you can look at Caitlin, she has the look that decision makers assume will be relatable to mainstream America and maybe not giving people enough credit to, you know, enough respect for the possibility that mainstream America is going to or willing to embrace people who look differently than those two.

- We've got less than a minute left.

I have so much more I could talk to you about.

In the 30 seconds that we've got here, four players for the Mount Rushmore for the WNBA.

- Oh my goodness.

- Sorry to put you on the spot.

(laughs) - That's tough.

A'ja Wilson, Diana Taurasi, oh boy, Brittney Griner, and this might throw people for a loop, but Rebekkah Brunson, the only player who's won five championships.

- That's tremendous.

Tamryn Spruill.

The book is "The W: A History of the WNBA."

It's a great read.

Hey, that's all the time we have this week, but if you want to know more about "Story in the Public Square," you can find us on social media or visit salve.edu/pellcenter where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

And I want to thank you too for spending some time with us.

I'm Jim Ludes asking you to join me again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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