Serena Williams and the Toronto Tempo Are Coming for the WNBA

We’ve reached the top of one other week. However earlier than we clock out for the weekend, we’re giving credit score the place it’s due. Serena Williams and the Toronto Tempo are the newest champions in our Winner of the Week sequence.

The primary WNBA group based outdoors the USA—the Toronto Tempo—simply received a significant new investor: none aside from tennis legend Serena Williams. Ceaselessly an advocate for girls in sports activities, Williams put her cash the place her mouth is and introduced on March 3 that she was changing into a co-owner of the group, which is able to start enjoying in 2026. “New courtroom, new sport. 🏀,” Williams wrote on Instagram to announce the partnership. Kicking off Women’s History Month proper!

Technically the league nonetheless must approve Williams’ funding, per People, however in line with a press launch from the group, as soon as that is settled she’s going to assist design the uniforms and different merch. “This second isn’t just about basketball; it’s about showcasing the true worth and potential of feminine athletes—I’ve all the time mentioned that girls’s sports activities are an unimaginable funding alternative,” Williams mentioned within the release.

There isn’t a a part of this that is not good. 2024 was big for girls’s basketball, with Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese making their respective faculty video games into must-watch sports activities tv, then bringing that power and a spotlight to the WNBA after they had been drafted within the first spherical. And naturally, they don’t seem to be the one thrilling rookies—a private spotlight of final 12 months for me was seeing Cameron Brink play for the Sparks earlier than an harm took her out for the season. That buzz, coupled with pleasure over athletes like Ilona Maher, Simone Biles, and Katie Ledecky on the Olympics made 2024 the 12 months of “everybody watches ladies’s sports activities.”

Girls’s sports activities has all the time wanted boosters. Kobe Bryant was a major supporter of the WNBA. Geena Davis, impressed after starring in A League Of Their Personal, has been a champion for Title IX for over twenty years now. Williams herself already has a minority stake in Los Angeles ladies’s soccer group Angel Metropolis, whose principal proprietor is her husband Alexis Ohanian. It was co-founded by Natalie Portman and boasts a protracted roster of movie star buyers, as do a handful of other NWSL teams; Brittany Mahomes is a co-owner of the Kansas Metropolis Present; Michelle Williams of Future’s Youngster has a minority stake within the Chicago Sky.

…However there is not any one like Serena. She is a cultural drive, extensively considered our best dwelling athlete, a lady whose childhood was became an Oscar-winning movie, who danced on the Tremendous Bowl, who stands for full domination of her sport and has earned he respect of even probably the most begrudging misogynists. For her to make use of her platform to raise a brand new franchise is commendable—for her to spend money on it’s downright useful. Serena Williams believes that this WNBA group might be worthwhile, which the league at present just isn’t. That is big.

She simply may have gone the Tom Brady route and brought a gig commentating on tennis matches for a hefty wage. She may open the Serena Williams Sports activities Academy and earn do-gooder factors. She may most likely have a chat present if she wished. And Williams should still take any of these paths, however for her to join the women pouring money into women’s sports as an alternative of simply cashing out is an actual enhance.

In April 2024, Macaela MacKenzie, writer of Money, Power, Respect: How Women in Sports Are Shaping the Future of Feminism mirrored on the “Caitlin Clark impact” in an essay for Glamour, writing, “Equality for girls’s sports activities begins with equal alternative, equal pay, and equal funding…We’ve seen epic athletes earlier than…However time after time, the thrill fades…It’s as much as us to maintain up the momentum.”

Williams’ funding is clearly not a one-and-done deal that fixes the patriarchy, but it surely completely is an indication of rising, not fading, momentum. It isn’t an arrogance mission or symbolic stamp of approval. It has the potential to develop the league considerably. If 2026 is the 12 months the WNBA faucets into a global market, creates merch that flies off the cabinets and attracts the A-listers who repeatedly sit courtroom aspect to observe the boys? Grand slam dunk. Sorry, needed to.