The women’s game shines in Basketball: A Love Story
By Erica Ayala
From an experiment to an experience
The 2019 WNBA Draft in April will make the first where the league predates the majority of eligible college players. Top prospect Katie Lou Samuelson, for example, was born just 13 days before the opening tip-off of the first WNBA Game. Next spring, she could very well find herself the first pick of that very same league (so we think in our way-too-early 2019 WNBA Draft Board).
Yet, it won’t really be the same league, will it?
“The W” offers a behind-the-scenes look at the nearly year-long process of training and marketing the 1996 women’s national team.
The NBA Commissioner at the time, David Stern, worked closely with USA Basketball ahead of the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta. Val Ackerman was one of the NBA executives Stern assigned to the project. “I was I was at the center of that [while] working at the NBA,” Ackerman told us in a phone interview Wednesday.
“[The national team] trained for almost a year and toured before Atlanta, That was our way to test the waters before we launched the WNBA in the summer of ’97. We announced our plans to do that after Atlanta was over.”
Ackerman had been with the NBA for eight years before she was eventually tapped as founding commissioner. Additionally, Ackerman was one of the first women to receive an athletic scholarship at the University of Virginia. “Because I’d played, David saw me I think as a resource on the women’s side. And he was plotting things and so there I was ready willing and able to help.”
Klores paints a picture of Stern as somewhat of a mad scientist ready to show his new creation to the world. As players were getting back into game shape after time away from competition, the NBA was striking broadcasting deals with NBC, ESPN, and Lifetime, and trying to prove to media outlets the WNBA was for real and worth the time to cover (I’m talking 1997, just a friendly reminder).
In his short, Klores takes us along the wild ride to tip-off, but then also reveals some of the missteps of the league in the early years. Marketing of the players was a glaring example. The league has fallen short in showing off the genuine personalities of its players.
After Diana Taurasi was selected first overall by the Phoenix Mercury, she did a league promo spot with her hair down, wearing a halter top and jeans, while dancing a posing behind a glittery backdrop. Needless to say, that image is a far cry from the Taurasi we know today. The 15-year veteran pulled no punches about that shoot in her interview for the film.
“When she says–and I go on camera–you know like she had to do that spot for the WNBA with that halter top and lipstick and she says, ‘get the f*ck out of here’ and she says, ‘f*ck this’, it was great,” Klores told us Friday over the phone. Yeah, that sounds more like the GOAT!
But, before Taurasi and the UConn Huskies was Immaculata University.