The Unrivaled Basketball League showed us what happens when the best interests of players, fans and investors are prioritized. These past few months of Unrivaled Basketball have been nothing short of pure joy to witness.
The Unrivaled Basketball League, a 3-on-3 professional women’s basketball league, kicked off its inaugural season in January 2025 and ended on March 17.
Founded by two Olympians and WNBA stars, Napheesa Collier and Breanna Stewart, the league sought to create an innovative style of play, featuring six clubs during a nine-week season.
The six clubs comprised some of the top professional talent and a 1-on-1 mid-season tournament with a cash prize pool of $350k made for a more than entertaining season.
Within just nine weeks, there was much to applaud this league for. Upon its first announcement, many were intrigued and eager to see where their favorite player would end up. The clubs, sporting amusing names like “Vinyl,” “Laces,” or “Rose,” featured some of the top professional talent and popular players in the WNBA, like Sabrina Lonescu, Chelsea Gray, Rickea Jackson, Skylar Diggins-Smith and many more.
With the help of crafty social media teams, dropping exclusive content like facility tours, team bonding challenges and interviews and game coverage by legends like Lisa Leslie, Unrivaled was able to garner media attention almost immediately.
By the end of the season, they were up to nearly 590 million media impressions and constant social media growth over the course of the season, statistics that they announced at the close of the season.
The league brought in over $35 million dollars in investment rounds from holistic supporters of women’s basketball, including Coco Gauff, Steph Curry, Michael Phelps, Dawn Staley and plenty more, exceeding their askings in the process.
This was topped off with a six-year broadcast deal with TNT Sports and over 20 corporate partnerships, including Sprite, Body Armour and Sephora U.S., just to name a few.
Little details like having an official beauty sponsor in Sephora and showcasing a pregame makeup routine from Angel Reese and Dijonai Carrington, to having on-site childcare for the moms of the league, showed that the minds behind Unrivaled have their finger on the pulse of what their players fans are impressed by, on and off the court.
In addition to the constant social media activity circulating each club on TikTok and Instagram, the league also managed to address some points of tension in other leagues, such as WNBA disparity, salary and convenience.
Earlier in the 2024-2025 season, it was revealed that many of the WNBA’s teams have very different experiences when it comes to facilities, resources, etc. During the most recent season, a post on X revealed the Connecticut Sun practiced at a local recreation center, while other franchises like the Indiana Fever or the Las Vegas Aces were slated to occupy fully equipped facilities.
Granted, the size of this Unrivaled league, having only six teams and one arena, made this plausible, but it deserves praise nonetheless. The closeness of the teams opened doors for content across teams, as well as a better, more in-depth look at where these players were putting in their work. The experience was immersive for fans and appeared pleasing to players.
This wasn’t the only professional discrepancy Unrivaled was able to address. In an X post following the Rose Basketball Club Championship Win, Chicago Sky Forward joked that her championship prize money ($50,000) was “a little more than half” of her rookie salary with the WNBA. The $220,000 Unrivaled average salary approached the highest salaries of the WNBA and gave each inaugural player equity in the league.
“A league owned by players, every Unrivaled athlete participating in the inaugural season has equity and a vested interest in its success,” Unrivaled states on their website. This was proof, if nothing else, that a league owned and operated by its athletes can make the best calls and decisions to grow the game.
Finally, this league managed to solve an age-old professional basketball problem. When the season is over, where are the women in the mainstream professional league supposed to go?
It is a common theme for WNBA players to use that off-season time to play overseas in professional leagues to stay practiced and paid, but some of them are not keen on shipping out to another country for months at a time.
A key objective for Unrivaled was to give some players a place to land in the off-season here in the U.S. Other U.S.-based leagues such as Athletes Unlimited exist with a similar draw, but Unrivaled took the crown this year.
Unrivaled took place entirely in Miami, with all of the teams sharing one facility full of new equipment for practice and recovery. Additionally, the games were streamed on a consistent schedule on TNT or TrueTV, giving fans the ease of consistency when it came to tuning into their favorite club.
Unrivaled managed to prove a major point in professional sports. They served a master class, all while keeping the same fiery and competitive spirit of any other sports league.
Every business deserves the chance to grow for its players and fans, and perhaps this fresh and thrilling Unrivaled league was just the push that the WNBA needed to set potential plans in motion to meet their players’ needs.
With the WNBA collective bargaining agreement (CBA) on the line this upcoming season, as the Women’s National Basketball Players Association (WNBPA) opted out 2 years before its 2027 expiration date, it raises a question: What difficulties of compensation, salary caps, safety and more are going to be addressed? Moreover, how are players and fans going to adjust, react and combat the conclusion of the negotiation?
The pace of growth that this sport is experiencing is exciting, to say the least, and it should only motivate every program, league and business to do better when it comes to supporting and encouraging their athletes to have the best careers possible.
The satisfaction and development of players and teams can’t always happen without systems in place to nourish them. The Unrivaled Basketball League was able to set an incredible tone.
Copy edited by Anijah Franklin
