An apprenticeship on the WNBA

Since the alliance launched in 1997, I have, at assorted times, approach surfed and stopped, parachuting in mid-game, acquisitive to be anon wowed. I already rode a bus from New York City to the Mohegan Sun bank to watch a above assistant in a preseason bold for the Connecticut Sun. (I larboard aboriginal in the additional bisected to play blackjack, but conceivably that accommodation says added about me than the WNBA.) All told, I apparently watched the agnate of one abounding game.

These data may not assume hasty -- abounding 30-year-old women acceptable accept even briefer histories with the WNBA -- until you accede that I'm a above women's academy basketball player. I was a green in top academy during the WNBA's countdown season. I was arena at the University of Colorado during the league's determinative years and was in my mid-20s if the WNBA should accept been hitting its stride. I am the ambition audience, yet I had never accustomed a dime, or an black of my attention, to abutment the women's able alliance of the bold I love.

And the absorbing affair is, I'm not an anomaly. The league, as WNBA admiral Laurel Richie readily accepted to me, accept to do a bigger job of capturing the absorption of changeable academy athletes. The WNBA has somehow absent the baiter on transitioning us into constant admirers of the alone abiding women's able alliance in this country. Richie and her agents are currently in the action of acclamation that problem, brainstorming means for the alliance to advance a afterpiece affiliation with the NCAA and even the AAU, which would put the WNBA at the grassroots level.

Even so, the overarching catechism remains: Why accept I never cared about the WNBA? My ambiguity against the alliance has consistently fabricated me uncomfortable, as if my amateur agenda should be revoked. But, this summer, instead of blank the WNBA, I'm aggravating something different: I'm analytic for answers. The WNBA isn't perfect, but as I'm learning, the flaws are hardly fatal. In fact, some of the flaws are strengths. And therein lies the league's Catch-22 -- its advance is necessarily apathetic because there is no one fix.

I'm not abiding if bigger compassionate the WNBA will construe into acceptable a fan of the league, but it's a starting point.

So, on the aperture day of the season, I went to Madison Square Garden to watch a challenge amid the Sun and New York Liberty. And at the alpha of June, I went aback to the Mohegan Sun to watch the Sun play the Los Angeles Sparks. I was searching for answers, acquisitive I would see the WNBA bold in a new light; that my long-held assumptions, namely that the superior of play doesn't bout the superior of players, would be antipodal as I watched Cappie Pondexter cesspool step-back jumpers, Kara Lawson beat the brawl to the accessible (wo)man and Candace Parker beat shots off the glass.

I capital to see if, by watching games, talking with players and bouncing account off of Richie, I ability become a fan. I sat with Richie for the Sun/Sparks contest, and as we watched and talked, I explained my capital affair with the league:

As continued as the division is a summer afterthought, it will never wow basketball purists.

The best affair about women's basketball has never been monster dunks; it's accomplished fundamentals and teamwork. For some people, that will never be enough. As one sports biographer able-bodied abreast in the women's bold said to me, "The anathema of women's basketball is that it's not men's."

But it doesn't accept to be a curse. Women's basketball flourishes overseas, a lot of conspicuously in Russia, Turkey and France, area there are traditional, feature winter seasons and top-tier players acquire upwards of $600,000 a division (compared with the WNBA max of $105,000). In these leagues, teams play calm for eight months and advance the affectionate of accent that after-effects in beautiful, accustomed hoops. In the NCAA, women's teams absorb a few years together, with players generally training about the clock.