It's episode six of BOUNCE. It's our second season and it's all about the Golden State Valkyries first year in the Bay. In today’s episode, WNBA players build their personal brands one follower and endorsement at a time.
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INTRO:
HOST ERIN LIM: The WNBA is just coming off the heels of an All-Start Game weekend.
Golden State Valkyries forward Kayla Thornton DROPPED a double-double in her first ever appearance.
ERIN: But the game itself took a backseat to a message the all star players sent to the fans, the owners, and the W. ESPN reporter Holly Rowe told the story.
ANNOUNCER: This is one of the most successful all-star weekends we’ve ever seen in this league, and we know what we’re talking about. We’ve all been covering it for two decades. But something happened before the game. As you know the collective bargaining agreement is under discussion right now between the league and their players and before the game, the players came out without their warmups on with shirts that said pay us what you owe us.
ERIN: Pay us what you owe us. The black shirts with bold white lettering were distributed by the Women’s National Basketball Players Association, who are in contract negotiations with the league right now.
At a time when the WNBA is cashing in on record setting revenue, on the biggest stage these women told the world what they’re made of and what they’re worth. I was filled with pride.
Then I started to see on social media news platforms reports on the players association t-shirts, and I briefly got lost in the comments section. I felt my heart drop. Comments like “they have never been profitable” ….”bring in some money and you’ll get paid”...”nobody would miss the WNBA.” and the hits just kept rolling.
It’s the total opposite of what it feels like to be at a Valkyries game … or how community comes together at the KALW studio during our live Bounce events. I know what the “in real life” feeling is in these spaces. And I refuse to believe it's just a violet bubble.
So, in the spirit of empowerment, and in the words of Shania Twain: ”let’s go girls!”
BOUNCE THEME MUSIC
ERIN: This is BOUNCE, The Valkyries First Season in the Bay. I'm Erin Lim.
You could’ve watched the All Star game on TV but there were many ways to engage in the event. One reporter brought it up with All Star Team and Minnesota Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve at a press conference.
REPORTER: I would say that two of the biggest sensations this All Star weekend are your players Courtney and Natisha. Have you been watching Studbudz – any of their live streaming?
REEVE [TALKS OVER END OF REPORTER’S QUESTION]: My son asked me to get them on Twitch so we could watch Studbudz.
ERIN: The Stud Budz are Lynx guards CourTney Williams and Natisha Hiedeman, and they began making content for the live streaming platform Twitch this season. Over All-Star weekend, the Stud Budz live streamed 72 consecutive hours as they met up with WNBA players at parties, at photo shoots, while they were asleep, and around the arena.
STUDBUDZ: And you’re doing a live feed, right? / Right now. We on there right now. / Right now. / Show the people his fit. / He’s on the stream. You on the stream. / Tell the people what you got on. / Yeah!
ERIN: The Stud Budz also caught up with WNBA legend Sue Bird and her partner, soccer star Megan Rapinoe after the 3-point competition
STUDBUDZ: Y’all see who that is. Y’all see who that is. Y’all see who’s here right now. Man, y’all so goddamn fly! Heard you all been outing people. You trying to out us?
ERIN: And as they received an e-scooter in their hotel room that they ordered from Doordash:
STUDBUDZ: Woooooow! That’s so tough. That’s us really doordashing a scooter, twin, like what’s wrong with us. What up? Doordashing a scooter insane, twin. Go twin! Who doordashes a scooter?
ERIN: These streams attracted a big following, some around 30,000 views but others close to half a million. ESPN’s Ari Chambers summed it up.
ARI CHAMBERS: I want to go back to Courtney and Natisha. As we heard the cheers on the court, “Pay them, pay them,” there’s a direct correlation between marketability and transparency, and having those parasocial relationships with your crowd. To enable fandom. And the reason why people were so locked in this weekend — the Stud Budz and their live stream had such a significant part of that. It’s fun, it’s funny, you get to laugh with them but there’s a serious business component with how they carry themselves online.
ERIN: Social media engagement with fans is big business for players across the league, including members of the Valkyries. And that’s what we’re focusing on in today’s feature for BOUNCE. Here’s reporter Kristi Coale with more.
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Story Transcript: How To Build A Brand
REPORTER: Golden State Valkyries guard Kate Martin is on an outdoor basketball court with another woman. It’s her mother, Jill, whom she challenges to a game of horse.
MOM: Okay, I’ll kick your butt.
KATE MARTIN: What? All right, let's do it.
REPORTER: This is a half-minute Instagram post, and it’s doing a lot of work. It’s giving Martin’s fans a window into her life by introducing us to her mom. It’s pitching a product – Ford trucks. And with more than 21 thousand likes, it’s also helping Martin build her own brand.
You may have heard of N.I.L. It stands for name, image, and likeness — in other words, those things that belong to a person, and these days, can be used by amateur athletes to make money.
SOUND OF MONTAGE NIL ADS
NIL 1: Livvy Dunne
NIL 2: Shedeur Sanders
NIL 3: Juju Watkins
REPORTER: It’s everywhere now, but it only started in 2019 through California legislation and then by the National Collegiate Athletic Association, or NCAA, in 2021. Like most young WNBA players today, Kate Martin got her start pitching products in college, at the University of Iowa.
KATE MARTIN: So, yeah, it was very interesting because I went from not even being able to accept a coupon to my favorite restaurant to then people wanting to give us free everything or like pay us for appearances X, Y, and Z. So it was definitely an adjustment.
REPORTER: And she says the opportunities leveled up when she turned pro.
2024 WNBA DRAFT: With the 18th pick in the 2024 WNBA draft, the Las Vegas Aces select Kate Martin, University of Iowa.
REPORTER: Martin was a surprise second round pick in 2024. She had only come to the draft to support the college teammate she played with in back-to-back national championship games.
MARTIN COLLEGE HIGHLIGHT: Clark going to take it, off the dribble, to the corner, Martin … connects!
ZENA KEITA: Kate Martin was part of that Iowa Hawkeyes team that performed so well with Caitlin Clark at the helm.
REPORTER: Zena Keita is a studio analyst for the Valkyries and host of The Athletic’s women’s basketball podcast, No Off Season.
KEITA: But if you look at how Kate Martin fit into that, she was really the engine behind that team. She was the grit. And so she had a community of people from Iowa, from the NCAA that liked her game and liked who and how she showed up. And that translated literally into her role in Vegas.
REPORTER: It’s also translated into Martin’s role on the Valkyries, who picked her up in the expansion draft.
GAME SOUND FROM: Kate Martin running. She drives. Kate Martin scores. Count it and a foul. And the Martinis are letting her hear it.
REPORTER: Yes, Martin supporters are called the Martinis. Keita says WNBA players have a strong link with their fans because they have always had to reach out to build grassroots support for the game. The Minnesota Lynx dancing the Electric Slide after home victories. The Valkyries’ conduct a Bay Area roll call at the Chase Center.
VALKYRIES ROLL CALL: Alright, alright, alright. We’re going to do a little bit of a roll call to see who’s in the building. Is the South Bay in the house? Make some noise!
REPORTER: Keita says these gestures implicitly tell fans …
KEITA: We're going to connect with you. We're going to engage with you on social media. We're going to stay after the game and sign the shoes and all the tickets and all of the above. We're still going to find a way to make ourselves accessible to you.
REPORTER: And the work has paid off. A comparison of Google search data from 2024 to prior years found interest in the WNBA increased by more than 300 percent. The study attributed this explosion to the arrival of the current generation of players. The Athletic’s Ben Pickman said on the No Offseason podcast that not all of this gain in attention can be attributed solely to the phenomenon of Caitlin Clark …
BEN PICKMAN: But, the kind of buzz she has helped to create has obviously helped increase the value not just of the W but the ecosystem in general.
REPORTER: That ecosystem has blossomed in this past year, starting with the first Nike Superbowl ad in nearly 3 decades.
NIKE AD SUPERBOWL: You can’t be demanding … You can’t be relentless … You can’t put yourself first … So put yourself first …
REPORTER: This one-minute spot features 9 women athletes — and four of them are basketball players. WNBA stars CAITLIN Clark, A’ja Wilson, and Sabrina Ionescu along with USC star Juju Watkins.
NIKE AD: So win …
REPORTER: The ad doesn’t tell viewers who the athletes are — it assumes we already know them. That was not the case in the early days of the W. When the league first started, players, officials, and brands like Nike were just trying to get the WNBA into the public consciousness. Like this 1998 ad featuring three little girls approaching one of the league’s O.G.’s.
GIRL: You’re Lisa Leslie. Center. LA Sparks.
LISA LESLIE: Yeah.
GIRL: New York is going to shut you down. Unless.
LISA LESLIE: New York’s going to what?
REPORTER: Today, the W is much more in the public consciousness and influencers like the Chicago Sky’s Angel Reese are all over with ads like this one, which actually features now-Hall-of-Famer Lisa Leslie.
ANGEL REESE: Hey Leese … what you got in the bag?
LISA LESLIE: A barbeque QPC from McDonald’s
ANGEL REESE: Oh, you mean the Angel Reese Special.
REPORTER: These high-profile deals make WNBA stars much more money than they’re paid to play basketball. We don’t know the exact details of Reese’s McDonald’s contract. But we do know that Caitlin Clark signed an 8-year, 28 million dollar deal with Nike earlier this year. Meanwhile, her salary to play for the Indiana Fever this season is just over $78,000.
KEITA: It is surreal how much basically becoming an influencer on the side, right?
REPORTER: Again, Zena Keita.
KEITA: Being able to have that as a side venture has helped supplement a lot of these players’ salaries.
REPORTER: Social media has played a big role in making this pathway possible. The number of followers a player has means the reach they have to companies. Among the league’s stars, Reese has the most followers on Instagram with more than 5 million. Next is Clark with 3.6 million, followed by Dallas Wings’ rookie Paige Beuckers with 2.8 million. All of them really gained their fame in college, with the growth of NIL and media attention.
KEITA: You know, we think about Angel Reese, she’s going to be on the NBA 2K 26 cover.
REPORTER: Keita talked about the best-selling basketball video game on the No Offseason Podcast.
KEITA: Right, this is another player whose market value has just exploded the marketplace. And when you think about all of the dollars to be had, in the marketplace, I think the number one people that are willing to spend money are the brands. … the brands really have this job of pushing this forth and really pushing this consumerism tied to these players. So how are companies, endorsements putting a number on, let’s start with Caitlin, but these players’ values overall?
REPORTER: Co-hosts Ben Pickman and Sabrina Merchant estimated Caitlin Clark’s value to the WNBA to be at around $1 billion.
Data on how female players can impact brands is emerging. Women’s sports consulting firm Wasserman Collective worked with the Royal Bank of Canada on a 2023 study on the economy of women’s athletics. It noted how women athletes drive twice the amount of fan engagement on social media as do male athletes. More importantly, the vast majority of women’s sports fans are heavily influenced by athletes, teams, and leagues and are twice as likely as men’s sports fans to recall brands they’ve seen. Keita says these tendencies translate into marketability.
ZENA KEITA: Now you’re getting more brands that are seeing the positive and the economic benefit of being associated with these players. So maybe a brand that might have been doing one-off deals with players and had been interested in engaging with certain types of players and only had an exposure to one or more players through their brand partnerships now sees, “Oh, there’s an entire league full of these type of influencers that we can tap into.”
REPORTER: That would include Valkyries forward Monique Billings.
MONIQUE BILLINGS ON IG: What’s up you all - i’m so excited. I’m collabing with my favorite place to shop, the real real. We’re getting a tunnel fit for game day … let’s get to it.
REPORTER: Fashion is a huge part of the WNBA, with game-day broadcasts featuring players in their “tunnel fit” — the clothing they wear on their walk from the arena entrance to the locker room. In this Instagram post, Billings blows a kiss to the camera before picking up shoes, skirts, and blouses, trying on bracelets, and accessorizing …
MONIQUE BILLINGS ON IG: Anytime I’m in the tunnel, I need a fly pair of glasses.
SOUND FROM VALKYRIES PRACTICE
REPORTER: Billings has the second-most Instagram followers on the Valkyries, behind Kate Martin. So they’re first team influencers. But neither one is usually in the starting lineup — suggesting that making marketing money is more about persona than play.
MONIQUE BILLINGS: I love it! I love being able to show myself outside of just being a basketball player. I think that’s really cool. Fans like to see personalities, like they like to see what we do on the court, but we’re so much more than just basketball players, just athletes. So I think it’s awesome. … I’m just so grateful for brands wanting to invest in us as women.
REPORTER: That investment in women is paying off, thanks to the WNBA and other high-level basketball. These have been the launchpad that’s lifted players onto the marketing scene — and given more women a chance at a sustainable career.