Winning in the WNBA: Stay mad but stay FOCUSED!

Winning in the WNBA: Stay mad but stay FOCUSED!

Hey Boss!

I hope this newsletter finds you well.  Been a while since I wrote a blogpost from deep within my heart.  Not because everything else I do isn't from the heart but because I've been busy doing all of my multi-hyphenate "things" like being a CEO, creative director, brand influencer, mother, wife, volleyball/basketball-mom-driver, etc etc etc.  You catch my drift.  I've been busy being ME in all of its excitement, glory, and exhaustion and haven't been able to make too much time for deep thinking.

But today I felt really mad.

Maybe like you, I have recently taken up watching women's college basketball given all of the media hysteria and excitement around Iowa's Caitlin Clark, LSU's Angel Reese, South Carolina's Dawn Staley (Louis Vuitton Dawn), UConn's Paige Bueckers, and so many others in the last national's games.  I am part of a burgeoning group of 18.7 million viewers (peaking at 24 million) who tuned in to watch the final game between the SC Gamecocks and the Iowa's Hawkeyes!  In contrast, the men's D1 game averaged 14.82 million viewers.  This is pretty amazing and it's time that women's basketball gets its time in the sun.  

But we can't forget how FAR away from actual joy we are.

These three screenshots should explain what I am feeling at this moment and why I'm mad.  Really mad.  I'm well aware that we are not comparing apples to apples and that the WNBA and NBA have completely different business profiles but it still hurts to see this so glaringly.  It brought to home for me why Brittney Griner - player for the Phoenix Mercury, two-time Olympic gold medalist with the U.S. women's national basketball team, six-time WNBA All-Star - was away in Russia playing in the off-season before her unfortunate arrest in February 2022.

This table below illustrates the reasoning behind the relatively low wages of WNBA players vs NBA players.  Granted that many of the top women's basketball players will get NIL (name, likeness, and image) deals that will be in the millions but many of the hundreds of them will NOT.  So women's basketball has got to become a business that can sustainably support the league and its players.

That's where you and I come in.  The moral of my little rant today is that if you really want to support women's basketball, we have to actually support women's basketball.  We need to buy the jerseys, watch the games, attend the games, and pour money into the sport.  It's the only way to see women getting paid for the work they are doing on a level that is commensurate with their sacrifice and value brought to sports.  Bossy Cosmetics is currently thinking up ways we can be of support to the WNBA.

Until then, I invite you to enjoy some of the beauty, fashion, and fun of the latest WNBA draft!

Stay mad but stay focused, Boss!

aisha

 

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