Our friends at The Believer are now publishing web exclusives. To celebrate, we’re sharing excerpts of their inaugural weekly column, in which Katie Heindl (author of the beloved Basketball Feelings) writes about the WNBA for both longtime fans and the casual observer. If you want to follow along and bypass the paywall, pick up a Believer digital-only subscription. For just $16 a year, you’ll also have full access to the magazine’s complete two-decade archive, including the most recent issue.
When I started writing “seriously” about basketball eight years ago (before that, I wrote NBA fan fiction for David Roth’s irreverent and sadly defunct sports site, The Classical, and did some light basketball blogging at the also defunct Vice Sports), I was trying to emulate other sports journalists—they were my entry point. I was citing stats, describing technical highlights, nodding to games the night before. Early on, my blogs and articles were, in their lightly coded ways, small handshakes with the audience I imagined was reading them, and beyond them, some larger gatekeeper. I wanted to write about the game to fill all the gaps I saw in sportswriting—who were the athletes, really? What were the larger metronomic forces at work? How far did the cultural reverberations go?—but I still succumbed to its codex.
All art does this, to some degree. Frameworks are borrowed, built on, changed and improved. I came to realize the emotional references and cadence I was squeezing in around convention was what I actually wanted to write about. That my form—writing “around” basketball—was about the function of basketball, what it touched on in life and what was so elemental about it. Quiet beats, like body language and tics in postgame pressers and the tangled, live action of the floor, and big issues, like franchises and entire leagues that moralize while covering for bad behavior. Pressing down on these underlying pulses, there’s no end to the entry points.
Primers, as maps of a world already in motion, assume some understanding of that world. You likely know what the WNBA is, but maybe you didn’t know this is its twenty-eighth season. You might have read about the discrepancy in salaries between athletes in the WNBA and athletes in the NBA. But maybe you didn’t know the difference comes down to revenue sharing: the WNBA made $200 million total revenue in 2023, the NBA $10 billion in 2022. It also comes down to broadcast deals, athletes in the W not getting cuts of their own merchandise sales, the NBA having a fifty-year head start, and most importantly, the historic undervaluing of women’s games. There are plenty of entry points into this fully formed universe. It is a universe now set to expand, with the Bay Area’s newly announced Valkyries, Toronto’s yet unnamed team, and two more expansion franchises (cities with interested parties include Portland, Philadelphia, and Nashville), bringing the league franchise total to sixteen by 2028, according to WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert.
Read the rest of the essay over at The Believer.
