8 May 23 - 29, 2024 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents That March, University of Oregon for- ward Sedona Price received millions of views on the social media app TikTok after creating a series of videos that pointed out the inequalities between the men’s and women’s NCAA National Championship tournaments. Compared with the lodging, the weight rooms, the meals and the mer- chandise given to the men’s teams, the wom- en’s competition was clearly an afterthought. And, finally, someone was talking about it. A few months after Price’s videos, a gen- der equity review of the NCAA published by the law firm Kaplan, Hecker & Fink called her efforts the “contemporary equivalent of the shot heard round the world.” While the NCAA looked to make internal changes, female athletes were handed the reins to achieve their own fame. For the first time, the Supreme Court’s NIL ruling al- lowed student athletes to cut deals with brands or local sponsors, introducing the idea of getting paid to play to college-level athletes. “We inherited more than 500 stu- dent entrepreneurs overnight,” Antonio Ba- nos, associate director of Texas Christian University’s Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, told the Observer. In response to the court’s ruling, TCU launched an NIL-specific curriculum at the Neely School of Business for its student ath- letes. An upper-level elective course teaches the basics of legal contracts, brand building, business strategizing and taxes, as well as how to prioritize mental health and wellbe- ing. In the three years the course has been active, female athletes have shown “tremen- dous” engagement in the program. “They see the most potential and have peers who have had success [with NIL],” Banos said. “Women’s basketball players have been shown to be the big winners in this NIL race. They’ve been very active on social media, they’ve been actively connect- ing with their audiences on a deeper level, and that is something that I believe is able to make waves.” Four of the top five highest-earning col- lege female athletes are basketball players, according to On3.com. The website’s NIL ranking algorithm factors in an athlete’s per- formance, social media influence and expo- sure to determine a monetary valuation which, for some athletes, is in the millions. “Prior to July 2021, it was about the per- formance on the field, on the court, at the pool, at the track. Now they are student ath- lete influencers,” Banos said. “The audi- ences are able to see them as much more [than athletes] because their stories are be- ing told now. It’s not just ‘Caitlin Clark the basketball player,’ it’s ‘Who is Caitlin Clark as a woman?’” Price, who now plays at TCU, is the 10th- highest-valued female athlete on On3’s list, and TCU-commit Hailey Van Lith is fifth. Prior to graduating from the University of Iowa, Clark ranked fourth across all men’s and women’s sports on the NIL ladder. Lou- isiana State University’s Angel Reese ranked eighth. The first wave of NIL-era college athletes is aging into the big leagues, and they’re tak- ing their millions of followers and fans with them. The 2024 WNBA draft, where Clark and Reese were two of the biggest names, was the most watched ever, with 2.45 mil- lion viewers on ESPN — a 307% viewership increase from 2023’s draft, which was under 600,000. “I can’t believe this happened three years ago,” Price recently posted on X on the anni- versary of her TikTok posting. “The NCAA really had no idea how amazing college women’s basketball is. But don’t worry, they know now!” The Wings Take Flight in Dallas Shortly after announcing their 2026 move to Dallas, the Dallas Wings sold out a game that, before this season, had never been open to the public. The first pre-season game of the year is generally a practice run for facilities and operations staff, said Greg Bibb, president and CEO of the Wings. “But when Indiana won the draft lottery back in December, I took a little bit of a flier and reached out to Indiana to set up a pre- season game for the first available date with the hopes that Caitlin Clark would enter the draft and they would draft her,” Bibb said. “Things aligned … We sold out in 15 minutes.” By pure coincidence, the next two games on the Wings’ schedule were against the Chicago Sky, the team that drafted Reese. Each of those games sold out as well. While Bibb is happy to take advantage of the swell of interest in women’s basketball that has been dubbed the “Caitlin Clark Effect,” he thinks the stage had already been set for a superstar personality to join the sport. Just as the athletes coming into the pro- fessional leagues are the first to experience the NIL era, they were also the first to grow up watching the WNBA, which was founded in 1996. According to a report pub- lished by the Aspen Institute, State of Play 2023, girls are currently participating in sports at the highest rate in a decade. As more girls begin playing basketball at younger ages, the talent pool has become deeper, Bibb said, and each year the talent in the WNBA draft draws more excitement than the year prior. “This business, women’s sports, the WNBA, we were already heading in the right direction. Thankfully, for the Caitlin Clarks and the Angel Reeses of the world, that acceleration of growth is now happen- ing,” Bibb told the Observer. “But we will surely sell out games this summer that do not involve Chicago or Indiana, and I think it just speaks to where we are in terms of the women’s sports landscape.” The growing interest in the sport became increasingly obvious to Monica Paul, execu- tive director of the Dallas Sports Commis- sion, between 2017 and 2023. Both years, Dallas hosted the NCAA women’s final four tournament. Paul thought things were get- ting big in 2017, when the tournament’s view- ership on ESNP beat all previous records. By the time the 2023 tournament rolled around, the hype couldn’t be contained. The Dallas Sports Commission plays a middleman role between the city and pro- fessional sports events and teams. It was in- volved in developing the plans for the Dallas Wings’ 2026 move to Memorial Auditorium, which can hold 3,000 more fans than the Wings’ current stadium at UT Arlington. It was Johnson who first approached the Wings with those plans in the summer of 2022, and Bibb was “immediately im- pressed” by the interest. The final contract agreed upon by the Wings and the City Council keeps the team downtown for 15 years, while the city pays $19 million in sub- sidies. The money is allocated from revenue from alcohol and beverage sales, the hotel occupancy tax and convention center profits rather than from the city’s general fund. When the Wings move to Dallas the team will be the crown jewel of the convention center’s ongoing, decade-long, multibillion- dollar facelift. Other projects in the immedi- ate area include construction of a new convention center and the redevelopment of 30 acres that will become a mixed-use area. “If you build it they will come. We just had to be patient,” Gracey said. “It’s finally paying off, those investments.” The brand-new downtown stadium will also give players access to a training facility on par with what would be offered to the Mavericks. As conversations surrounding equity between men’s and women’s sports continue to prevail, enhanced training facili- ties for WNBA teams is beginning to trend, Bibb said. Women’s teams in Seattle and Los Vegas have recently welcomed state-of-the- art training spaces, and one in Phoenix is under construction. Two more cities have plans for better training areas in the works, according to Bibb. By that measure, Dallas is right on the curve. Paul, who grew up playing sports in high school and college, said the opportunity to bring professional women’s teams to Dallas is also an equitable move for young female fans. Growing up, Paul may not have had the option to go watch women like herself play in the big leagues. She wants to change that for the next generation. “The players are someone to aspire to be,” Paul said. “To have the ability to go out and watch the best of the best, I think that’s inspiring.” Hopefully a Holy Trinity Unlike the two years of negotiations the city went through to secure the Wings, City Council member Adam Bazaldua said that Trinity FC’s contract with the city was “the fastest [he’d] ever seen government work.” “They were just about to close a deal in Arlington, and we got word of it,” Gracey said. “Once we found out they wanted to be in Dallas, we wanted to make sure that we could do everything we could to create that opportunity.” Unfair Park from p6 courtesy Dallas Wings The WNBA’s Dallas Wings will be moving downtown to the Memorial Auditorium. >> p10
