For nearly three decades, the Women's National Basketball Association has survived expansion, contraction, indifferent media coverage, shaky ownership, low salaries and repeated questions about whether women’s professional basketball could ever become a sustainable American sports business.
And yet, here it is.
Journalist and author Tamryn Spruill joins us to discuss her essential new book, "The W: A History of the WNBA," which traces the league from its roots in the wildly successful 1996 U.S. Olympic team through its current cultural and commercial renaissance.
Spruill takes us back to a moment when the WNBA wasn’t even the only new women’s league in town. We revisit its early rivalry with the American Basketball League, the rapid expansion to 16 teams, the financial strains that followed, and the many franchises that disappeared, relocated or were simply forgotten along the way.
We also explore the league’s long struggle for visibility. Spruill explains how limited television exposure, uneven media treatment and an inability - or unwillingness - to understand the WNBA’s actual audience kept generations of elite players largely outside the mainstream sports conversation. Eventually, streaming, social media, changing cultural attitudes and more aggressive sponsorship helped players and fans build something traditional sports media often failed to create for them.
And, naturally, we spend plenty of time with the teams that “used to be” - including the Charlotte Sting, Orlando Miracle, the newly-concluded Connecticut Sun and, of course, the original Houston Comets dynasty.
