[June 6th marks the NBA’s 75th birthday, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of basketball figures and stories. Leading up to a crowd-sourced weekend post on the bball stories, histories, and contexts you’d highlight—share ‘em in comments or by email, please!]
Before Colin
Kaepernick began his protests in the summer of 2016, WNBA
stars were already doing so; but as is too often the case, we don’t
recognize these female athletes as fully as we do their male counterparts. So I
wanted to make sure to end this NBA and bball series by highlighting and
briefly AmericanStudying a handful of the many phenomenal WNBA stars, past and
present, on and off the court:
1)
Sheryl Swoopes:
Swoopes, Lisa Leslie, and Rebecca Lobo were the first three players signed to
the WNBA when it launched
in 1996, and honestly any one of them could occupy this spot on my list. But
Swoopes was the first signed, and I’m highlighting her in particular for that
reason and because of this sentence from her Wikipedia page: “She returned only six weeks after giving birth to her son to
play the last third of the WNBA inaugural season and led the Comets in the
1997 WNBA Championship.” If that doesn’t sum up the badassery of WNBA stars and
female athletes everywhere, I don’t know what could.
2)
Cynthia
Cooper-Dyke: While Swoopes was a big part of that inaugural Houston Comets championship
team, Cooper-Dyke was the unquestionable centerpiece of their
dynasty (the Comets won the first four WNBA championships), winning two
regular-season MVPs and all four Finals MVPs in the process. What makes that
resume even more impressive, however, is that Cooper-Dyke had finished her
college career at USC a full decade earlier, after the 1985-86 season. She
spent the next decade playing on European teams, and then signed with the
Comets at the age of 34, making her stunning subsequent
dominance of the league that much more striking still.
3)
Dawn Staley: Not
gonna lie, this is something of a homer pick: I grew up watching Dawn Staley
work her point-guard magic
at the University of Virginia, and have been a huge fan ever since. She
went on to make great contributions to both the US National Team and the WNBA,
but it’s really as a coach that Staley has distinguished herself from other
WNBA stars: literally, as Staley began
coaching the Temple University women’s bball team while she was still in
the WNBA; and then through her subsequent successes, with Temple, with her current
coaching job at the University of South Carolina, and with the US National
Team. She’s the first person to win
the Naismith Award as both a player and a coach, which just about says it
all.
4)
Maya Moore and Renee Montgomery: I’m grouping
these last two stars together because of the similar reason why I’m
highlighting them: each left a promising WNBA career over the last few years in
order to pursue social justice work and activism. Moore did
so in 2019, putting her career with the Minnesota Lynx on hiatus to work
for criminal justice reform, as illustrated by her successful efforts for the release
of her partner Jonathan Irons from prison. Montgomery did
so in 2020, retiring from the WNBA in order to take
part in that year’s protests and activisms for racial justice and equity. These
two inspiring stars have extended the legacy of those 2016 protests and remind
us that WNBA athletes have long contributed to well more than the world of
sports stardom.
Crowd-sourced
post this weekend,
Ben
PS. So one more
time: what do you think? Other bball stories, histories, or contexts you’d
share (in comments or by email)?
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