When the WNBA debuted in 1996, I was 10 and already a sports fanatic.
Outside of school and playing with my friends until my mom came home, sports was the only other thing I did with deep passion. No one besides the boys whom I traded baseball and football cards with knew how much I loved sports.
Any sport really, because my primetime network television choice was always whatever sport was on at that time of the year. NBA, NFL, MLB, Wimbledon, it didn’t matter. I loved the Olympics and had heard about how good the women’s national basketball team was, but I’d never seen any of the players play an entire season. So when NBC promos dropped hyping a new women’s league, I was glad that women would finally have a real league of their own. Back then the running measure of success was whether or not a woman could make it in a men’s league of their respective sport.
Now we had our own, and we didn’t have to measure ourselves against other men to prove our talent. The women played a smarter, faster game that looked for openings for everyone on the court. If you were a fan in love with the technical aspects of play, the women’s game was for you. I watched every televised game, usually on Saturdays.
The closest team to my city was Houston, and it didn’t take long for it to become clear that they had an unstoppable core group. I was so emotionally invested in the Comets dynasty. I remember crying when Kim Perrot died because after two years it felt like losing a family member. The subsequent title run in her honor is the kind of heart-filled sports stories that are hard to come by.
The next few years after Houston’s dominance, the league contracted and expanded as teams were sold, relocated, or folded altogether when new owners couldn’t be found. Popularity waned as the league struggled to find stable leadership and dedicated media coverage. ESPN and other network sports broadcasts weren’t dedicating a lot of air to talk about the league, and league merch wasn’t readily accessible to me in the Dallas area, so there was no one to share the love or fandom with.
By then I was all in with basketball in real life. I got cut from my freshman high school team but the varsity girls’ coach recruited me to be the varsity manager. While I was no longer on the court, I was still part of a team and getting the experience of dedicating all of your time to a sport that gives so much back to players who are committed to growth and improvement. I’d done a few journalism programs in high school, so when I got to college, I headed straight to the newspaper, and within a year I was a sports reporter.
I knew that I could spend my life on a sports beat covering local teams in a metro area, or do national coverage for one team. I’d get to experience the sport in a new way, still in the environment of a team and its players, but this time building relationships and gaining trust so that I could report with heart and a courtside seat to all the greatest moments in sport history. And then, during the summer, I could go on adventures and travel the world with my family.
I wanted to be at ESPN by 26, a reasonable goal if I could stay on the path. I got a small gig at The Dallas Morning News, answering phones on Friday nights after high school football games. Stringers, what they called guys who were white collar guys during the day but at night were lucky enough to sit in a pressbox at night, would call in box scores for the paper to publish the next morning.
They worked my dream job for fun.
When a job opened up on the sports desk, I applied and did the tryout assignment, which involved writing and software I had used and done before. I showed up to the workroom as the only black woman there, and I was very confident because I knew how to do that job. I’d been doing it for years at that point. But I didn’t get the call.
By graduation the industry at large had tanked. Most of the journalism jobs were out of the area or out of state, and most of those gigs didn’t pay enough to get you a decent place to stay. I didn’t have a car or direct connections to a gig despite being the editor of one of the country’s best college newspapers. So I went to find work on my own and eventually got into copywriting. I was actually at that job when I got the call to join Rebellious, and I’ve made no secret that independent media is the only thing anchoring me to journalism.
Sports journalism has always been harder for women, especially black women, and we didn’t have the plethora of representation options that we have now back when I was a kid. (We had Pam Oliver at Fox Sports, and that was pretty much it.) I’m also queer and masculine presenting, and so I can be honest and say that part of me didn’t believe that it was possible for someone like me to anchor an afternoon SportsCenter segment or call a live game. In college, I started seeking out black women sports reporters and they were out there, dotted across the country’s metro papers, but most of them weren’t physically visible.
This watershed moment for women’s sports that we’ve been in the past few years has done wonders for the world and all of the little girls who get to grow up watching players and professionals they can idolize and emulate if their dream just happens to be covering an NCAA Championship game or All-Star Weekend. I’m so happy to see so many black women stepping into the space with their own style and skill sets and strong voices. But I can’t help but feel that, for the millennials that watched the league at its inception, we missed our moment.
I know that you can still do anything, and the barrier to entry is easier than ever, but being an influencer type has never really been me. I’m a writer at heart, and even when I was a kid I balked at the idea that we must get in front of a camera to succeed. If I’m going to report on sports, I’m going to do it the only way I know how – rebelliously.
