Opinion: With women’s basketball finally getting the recognition it deserves, a team in the Pacific Northwest is needed
———-
Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese, Cameron Brink, Paige Bueckers and Hailey Van Lith. These names are arguably the most recognized college women’s basketball players in the country right now. Last year’s women’s March Madness tournament had the excitement and enchantment that reeled in viewers and proved women are just as badass and deserving as their male counterparts. Combined with the incredible Las Vegas Aces championship win in the WNBA Finals earlier this year, women’s basketball feels like it is finally getting the recognition I have been praying for ever since I joined my first youth team.
The WNBA announced on Oct. 5, 2023, that a team will be added to the program in the Bay Area, sharing the same Chase Center arena as the Golden State Warriors; the team will start competing in the league in the 2025 playing year. While I have lived in the Portland suburbs since 2010, my family is originally from the Bay, so a team being there naturally made me very happy. However, since it isn’t local to me, I’m dismayed that I still won’t be able to watch a WNBA game in person for a while.
This got me thinking: the Pacific Northwest has always been vocal about its support for female athletes and the NWSL team, the Portland Thorns, has garnered successful support in PDX, so what about here for the next expansion?
The Thorns most notable proof of support was their record-setting attendance game in August 2019. The crowd totaled 25,218 fans, and while this was considered incredible at the time, the records all around for women’s sports spectators have improved considerably post COVID-19 and arenas being able to have unlimited capacity measurements. The home opener for the second-place winners of the Women’s NCAA tournament last year, the University of Iowa Hawkeyes, had a record of 55,646 fans. To garner even more attention, the game was played outside in their football stadium rather than on a traditional indoor court. The proof is in the pudding — women are equally badass athletes and people actually want to watch them.
Some further reasoning for the City of Roses as a WNBA expansion site is that Nike was founded here. This provides a solid support system and marketability in the city for inclusivity and great athletes, no matter their gender. Nike is like God in the Portland area, and if they were to be a main sponsor of a new WNBA team there, it would surely spark the interest of hundreds of Oregonians and UO students and alumni whose lives revolve around the company.
Additionally, there is a myriad of women’s basketball talent already coming out of the Pacific Northwest. Two of the names in the first sentence call the PNW home. Brink, who plays for Stanford, is from a suburb of Portland, and Van Lith, who transferred from Louisville to LSU this season, is from a small town in Washington called Cashmere. Brink especially has changed the course of women’s basketball in Oregon, offering camps to little girls who want to be just like her. Van Lith was a student under the late Kobe Bryant, who was also a huge advocate for women’s basketball. If these two had the chance to play close to home once they get to the WNBA, they would surely continue to spread their love of the game and their talent within the community.
Furthering the support within Portland and the suburbs around it is the sports bar that opened up during the 2022 NCAA Tournament, The Sports Bra. The bar has created a home for women’s athletics to be focused on the center flat screen rather than the smaller one in the corner with no volume –– which is what every other bar likes to do. It provides a space to show passion and heart when you may not be able to in other spaces.
Additionally, the Sports Bra community makes me most ecstatic to go once I turn 21. You can point-blank yell at the television and engage with the games as a woman without being called “too loud” or “too passionate” by stereotypes and society. The owner, Jenny Nguyen, had the bar highlighted in the New York Times, where she stated there was a “huge hole in the industry,” and thus she filled the hole while simultaneously creating a safe space for any and every human in the women’s sports fandom.
While the Pacific Northwest may seem like a small corner of the country, it’s home to passionate fans. Enthusiasm for sports is not shy here, and another professional team would boost morale. Hopeless Portlanders have been begging for more teams for years, and they will come out guns a-blazin’ for a WNBA team.