Marlo Rodriguez [00:00:42] My name is Marlo, M-A-R-L-O, and my last name is Rodriguez. And I’m from Oakland, California, and I’m super pumped. I’m really excited about the Valkyries, it’s a long time coming for women’s sports and for the Bay Area to have a team. I love the name. Valkyrie means a woman warrior in Norse language. And it’s very intentional. And I love the colors. It’s just a great representation of women’s sports and the Bay Area and being the sister team for the Warriors. I’m pumped up about the Valkyries and let’s f***ing go!
Sean Sandhu [00:01:22] My name is Sean Sandhu. Initially I was excited and then I got a little apprehensive and then we watched the pre-season game and I am so pumped now. Because that game was, I mean, at least the second half with so much energy, is some of the best basketball I’ve ever seen.
Sarah Yergovich [00:01:40] My name is Sarah Yergovich. I feel like the San Francisco Bay Area has such a strong women’s sports community and really strong athletes that come from the Bay Area. We just haven’t had that professional basketball team that is kind of the next step following up. So I’m super psyched and super psyched that we’re getting such awesome players on the team and finally seeing them like play their best. So cool.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:02:04] The Golden State Valkyries will make their debut tonight as the Bay Area’s first WNBA team. And the Valkyries are part of a wave of energy and investment finally going into women’s sports. And the Bay Area is leading the way. Today, we talk with the San Francisco Chronicle’s women’s sports reporter, Marisa Ingemi. About what we can expect from the Valkyries’ inaugural season.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:02:41] I guess to start, Marisa, the Bay Area now has a WNBA team. It’s sort of been a long time coming, right?
Marisa Ingemi [00:02:49] It’s been a minute since there was an expansion team. The last one was 2008 with the Atlanta Dream. So when the league was first talking about expansion, the Bay Area was always one of the markets that was brought up first. So the WNBA opened their expansion process, they were looking for bids. And the one they picked was the bid from the Golden State Warriors. Joe Lacob, the Warrior’s owner, he used to own a professional women’s basketball team in the ’90s that actually predated the WNBA, so he’s always been very involved in that. So it kind of seemed like a natural fit. So in the next two years, there’s going to be a wave of WNBA expansion. Next year Toronto Tempo and the unnamed Portland team are coming into the league and the Golden State Valkyries are kind of the first team of that wave. This is kind of the blueprint for everyone else right now with two expansion teams coming in next year.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:03:46] I mean, why has, I guess, the Bay Area been thought of as one of the first to do this.?
Marisa Ingemi [00:03:54] Yeah, well, the women’s basketball market is really strong. You have Stanford, you have Cal, and they continuously draw strong audiences for their women’s basketball games. And then just like TV marketability as well like, if you look at like the ratings of which markets are drawing for WNBA games, the Bay Area has consistently been one of the highest out of market ratings. And then a lot of talent has come out of here too. Between Stanford, between Cal. Just local players, Sabrina Ionescu, who’s one of the best players in the WNBA for the New York Liberty, is from here. She’s from Walnut Creek. Chelsea Gray is from here. She just won a championship MVP with the Las Vegas Aces a couple of years ago. So it’s also just one of the bigger markets that didn’t have a team period. But they’re kind of trying to fill out gaps of where there isn’t a presence, and this was kind of one of the more obvious ones.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:04:43] Let’s talk about the team first. How would you describe the team as it stands right now?
Marisa Ingemi [00:04:49] Expansion teams tend to not play so well. It kind of takes a minute to come together. Expectations should be tempered a little bit. I do think the Valkyries are going to be a very fun team to watch. Their head coach Natalie Nakase, who came over from coaching as an assistant coach with Las Vegas where she won a couple of championships, she’s really wanted an approach of a team that shoots a lot of three-pointers is really aggressive on defense and strong in transition And that’s kind of the way they’ve built their roster. So nine of the players who made the, 12 player opening date roster were taken in the expansion draft. So they really relied on that to take league experience players because some of the players they have are brand new to the league. They wanted to be able to have that veteran presence.
Marisa Ingemi [00:05:32] They have a lot of role players. So players who have come off the bench and produced without that starring role. They have only one player who started more than 30 games last season. So there’s a lot stepping into roles they’ve never had before, which is exciting because you have a few international players who are making their WNBA debuts. People who have watched international women’s basketball are gonna know some of those names or seen them in the Olympics. If you watched the US women’s national team in the Olympics in 2024, when they beat France in the gold medal game, like two of those players are on the Valkyries now after training camp. I think they’ll be a very fun team to watch. I think they’re gonna get some scrappy wins. I think it could surprise some people. I do think people are going to really enjoy watching this team.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:06:12] Any players from the Bay Area?
Marisa Ingemi [00:06:15] No one from the Bay Area specifically, but there are some names that people are going to recognize. Kate Martin is probably the most recognizable name on the roster. She comes from the Las Vegas Aces. She kind of had this viral moment in the WNBA draft in 2024 when she went to support her Iowa teammate Caitlin Clark as a top overall pick, and then she ended up being drafted in the second round. She had the fifth highest selling jersey in the league last season despite being a bench player.
Kayla Thornton comes over from the New York Liberty where she just won a championship last year. She was one of their best bench players, really strong defender, shoots a lot of threes, really exciting player. And then I think people are going to really enjoy watching.
Julie Vanloo. She’s a Belgian point guard and she’s 32 years old, but it’s only her second WNBA season. She played for the Washington Mystics last season and was seventh in the WNBA in assists. Really strong distributor, really creative playmaker, can shoot a little bit. It’s interesting because their general manager Ohemaa Nyanin talked recently about how they don’t really have a face of the franchise. And that is kind of true, like Kate Martin a little bit is filling that role just because people know who she is. But for the most part, like this team’s really gonna be able to create your identity as a group and we’ll see who emerges.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:07:57] I know another sort of notable name you mentioned earlier was their coach, Natalie Nakase. I know you’ve interviewed her before. I mean, what’s she like?
Marisa Ingemi [00:08:06] Very intense. She loves basketball. You can tell like how much this means to her.
Natalie Nakase [00:08:11] That’s what sports is about, right? That’s the beauty of sports is that you wanna be number one, you wanna be a champion. No one kind of goes back and is like in five years I wanna be number two.
Marisa Ingemi [00:08:21] She’s a former player at UCLA. She had to retire early in her professional career because of knee injuries and she’s gotten into coaching, she’s coached on the men’s side in the NBA with the Los Angeles Clippers. She coached under Becky Hammond at the Las Vegas Aces and Hammond was the first woman to be on an NBA coaching staff when she was a coach for the assistant coach for San Antonio Spurs in the 2010s. She Ggoes over to the Aces and really just kind of builds a dynasty over there, and Nakase has kind of been her protege. She has a very specific style she wants to play. She’s very direct. Um, she wants to be that three and D team, as they call it, of a three point shooting team, get those rebounds, play a strong defense. And yeah, she’s been very clear of what she’s looking for from this team. And we’ll see what it looks like with her first year as a head coach.
Natalie Nakase [00:09:07] Again, like, my dad taught me when I was young, like you always got to be the best. And so I almost feel like he has trained me in a way, or he’s raised me you know, to be where I am today. And so I can’t wait to get get to work. Obviously, this is day one, but I’m just ready to get to work and start achieving that goal.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:09:25] And there have already been some pre-season games, right? I mean, what’s it been like to watch them play, so far, what’s their vibe?
Marisa Ingemi [00:09:33] They had one preseason game at Chase Center where it was more than 17,000 people. I keep telling people I had high expectations and I was blown away. It felt like being at a Warriors game, like it just felt so intense and so real. And that was just a preseason game. We didn’t learn as much as I think we could have hoped in this preseason. Like two games is really short, especially for an expansion team. The whole of camp was less than 21 days. That’s not a lot of time for a brand new professional team to come together. I think we’re going to learn a lot the first few games about what they’re actually going to look like and what their real vibe on the court’s going to be.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:10:40] Seems like your main takeaway from the pre-season game so far is really about the fan base and what that sort of looked like. I mean, I feel like I’ve already seen a lot of Valkyries gear out in the wild. And it just feels like people are feeling really excited and really, I mean, already deciding to sort of invest in the team here in the Bay.
Marisa Ingemi [00:11:03] Yeah, I mean, people have been asking for a WNBA team here for a long time and people are kind of all in. We kind of saw last year with Bay FC and the NWSL where there was a pretty strong fan base, even when they struggled kind of early on, people were just so bought in, and I think that the Valkyries fan base is going to be so exciting. It’s going to be very similar where you’re just happy to have a team to support. People have bought into the branding, the vibe of the team. There are so many jerseys out there already. People will have jerseys a couple days after a player signs, and I’m like, how do you have that already? I remember the day they announced their logo and their branding. The next day I saw somebody in a Valkyries hoodie and I was like, how do you have that already? We’ve seen season ticket sales are already the highest they’ve ever been for a WNBA team with more than 10,000 sold. They have the highest median ticket price in the league now, which is significant because they have a big arena. So you would think you’re going to be able to have cheaper tickets because there’s going to more access to a Valkyries game, but the demand is still so high that the ticket prices are high and it’s not necessarily a great thing for people to- not have that access, but it does just show that the demand exists, people are so excited.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:12:10] I feel like it’s not often that we’re talking about a real investment in women’s sports, I mean, it seems like the Valkyries owners are really investing in this WNBA team, and that seems sort of notable.
Marisa Ingemi [00:12:26] Yeah, and that’s kind of been the trend in recent years has been for there to be a more significant investment in women’s sports. Like in the past couple of years, we’ve seen Seattle, Phoenix build the state of the art practice facilities, in Las Vegas as well. And they’ve really mentioned like we need that to keep up as a recruiting tool to get top players to want to come here.
So we’re kind of at this weird inflection point in women’s sports right now, where of like the past and the present and the future. Where like very clearly like the audience and the demand are outgrowing the infrastructure that has existed in women’s sports. The ratings are there, the demand is there, the audience is there. And it’s still like taking a minute for like some of these national broadcasters to like put all the games on TV even just like these small little access things that are such like a given in men’s sports? Men’s sports are growing but at a smaller rate. Where women in sports, you’re seeing like crazy numbers as far as it’s like. What percentage audience is growing, what percentage of ticket sales are growing and that investment has to exist just to be competitive.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:13:34] So is it just that there is an appetite for more women’s sports? Is that really what’s sort of at the heart of what’s driving this change?
Marisa Ingemi [00:13:42] Yeah, and I think there’s been an appetite for a long time, and it’s kind of been suppressed. Like, I don’t think it’s all of a sudden, like, oh, people care about women’s sports all of the sudden for no reason. Until very recently you couldn’t watch every WNBA game. You couldn’t watch every NWSL game. You used to have to like go online and go to random websites or I remember watching WNBA games on YouTube like those access points just didn’t exist. And now that they do, the audience is reflecting that. And I don’t think that means that like there’s this random appetite for women’s sports as much as like there has been a demand and it’s finally being met.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:14:17] And what’s your sense of the fan base for the WNBA team so far compared to maybe the men’s basketball teams.
Marisa Ingemi [00:14:27] Yeah, it’s a little bit different. Like there’s definitely going to be Valkyries fans who are Warriors fans, 49ers fans, because like it’s their local team and they’re excited. Like that definitely exists. But I think that sometimes people don’t realize, the audience for women’s sports can be significantly different because if you’re a 49ers, Giants, Warriors fan, there’s a good chance that was passed down to you, you’re from here, there’s that history, like your parents went to games, season tickets in your family, whatever. Where for women, sports, professional teams, like that hasn’t existed for as long, so like you have to make an active choice to be a part of a women’s sports fandom. So I think a lot of people come into women’s sports for different reasons because they enjoy the players on social media. They enjoy their personalities. They enjoy being in a sports space that doesn’t feel so masculine to them. So you’re going to see some people who are just Valkyries fans or Valkyries Bay FC fans or whatever. A lot of the time, women’s sports fan bases are looking for a lot more accountability. They’re looking for a lot more social change, they’re looking for a lot more of players being accessible as people. Women sports fans are asking for different things and it’s going to be really interesting to see how the Bay kind of evolves and learns from that.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:15:37] Well, it seems like a really great time, Marisa, to be a women’s sports writer here in the Bay Area. What are you going to be watching for as the Valkyries start their first season.
