"We Got Next" How the WNBA Was Founded in 1996

In the spring of 1996, a three-word slogan, a bronze-medal heartbreak, and a gold-medal miracle converged to create something the world of professional sports had never sustained before: a women's professional league built to last.

That was Val Ackerman, lawyer, former Virginia Cavaliers basketball player, and the woman who would become the first president of the Women's National Basketball Association, describing, with disarming candor, the founding logic behind one of the most consequential institutions in the history of American women's sports. There was no elaborate feasibility study, no multi-year market analysis. There was a feeling. There was a moment. And there was a game of basketball being played at a level that, for perhaps the first time, an entire nation had stopped to watch.

The story of how the WNBA came to exist on April 24, 1996, is a story about timing, political will, and cultural readiness.

The Bronze That Built a League

In the summer of 1994, the United States women's basketball team traveled to the World Championship in Sydney and came home with bronze. For a program accustomed to gold, it was humiliating. With the Atlanta Olympics just two years away, the U.S. Olympic Committee was not interested in a repeat. In 1995, USA Basketball hired Stanford's Tara VanDerveer, a three-time NCAA national champion coach, and committed to something unprecedented: a fully funded, eighteen-month national team residency program. The players would train together, travel together, and spend a year playing the rest of the world before a single Olympic game was contested.

The team assembled in Colorado Springs. It included Sheryl Swoopes, who had scored an NCAA-record 47 points in the 1993 national championship game and was considered among the finest players in the world. It included Lisa Leslie, the elegant, dominant Los Angeles center who had been quietly playing pro ball in Italy because there was nowhere to play at home. And it included Rebecca Lobo, the 22-year-old Connecticut Huskies star who had just led UConn to a perfect season and was, in the estimation of many, the most recognizable face of college women's basketball in America. Together, they would play 52 exhibition games across seven countries before the Olympics. They would go 52-0.

The stakes of that tour were not lost on the players. Dawn Staley, the Philadelphia-born guard who would go on to coach South Carolina to multiple national championships, understood exactly what was on the line. "We knew what was at stake," she has said of those months. "We knew there was a WNBA in waiting, there was the ABL in waiting. It was all depending on how successful we were as a team." Women's professional basketball's future in America, such as it was, was riding on twelve women from Colorado Springs to Sydney to Atlanta. If they lost, the argument that women's basketball could sustain a professional league — the essential argument — would be substantially harder to make.

April 24, 1996: The Day Three Words Changed Everything

The WNBA was officially founded on April 24, 1996, when the NBA Board of Governors approved the concept at a press conference that felt, by all accounts, like a coming-out party. Leslie, Swoopes, and Lobo were present. So was NBA Commissioner David Stern, the architect who had been quietly sketching the financial blueprint for a women's professional league since the early 1990s. The announcement was accompanied by a marketing slogan that has since achieved something close to mythological status in the annals of women's sports: "We Got Next."

The phrase was borrowed from pickup basketball culture. It was cocky. It was casual. It assumed that what was coming next was worth waiting for. In retrospect, it was also prophetic.

Stern spent years deflecting credit, insisting that Ackerman deserved the recognition, calling her his "navigator and guide as to how we were going to get this done." Ackerman, for her part, was equally generous in return. The WNBA was a collaboration born from individual ambition, and a cultural moment that, as Ackerman herself has suggested, no amount of data could have reliably predicted.

Ackerman was the right person at the right time. A four-year starter at Virginia, she had been among the school's first female athletes to receive an athletic scholarship in 1977. She earned a law degree from UCLA, joined the NBA as a staff attorney in 1988, and quietly rose through the ranks, becoming vice president of business affairs and one of David Stern's most trusted lieutenants. She spent years watching women's basketball at the highest level in college gymnasiums and overseas professional leagues. She believed that the moment for a professional league was overdue.

A League Built on NBC, a Basketball, and a Belief

The practical construction of the WNBA moved with unusual speed for an enterprise of its scale. Before a single player had been signed, the league had secured broadcast partnerships with NBC, ESPN, and Lifetime Television. The decision to schedule games in the summer was deliberate: the NBA's offseason meant the league's organizational infrastructure was available, arenas were largely free, and the sports calendar was comparatively quiet. The WNBA wouldn't compete with the NFL, the NBA, or Major League Baseball. It would own the summer.

Eight franchises were announced on October 30, 1996: the Charlotte Sting, Cleveland Rockers, Houston Comets, and New York Liberty in the Eastern Conference; and the Los Angeles Sparks, Phoenix Mercury, Sacramento Monarchs, and Utah Starzz in the Western Conference. Each team was affiliated with an NBA franchise, leveraging existing arenas, marketing departments, and fan bases. The logic was efficient, if also a little telling: the women's league would, at least at the outset, be tethered to the men's.

The first 16 players were allocated to teams in January 1997. The WNBA Draft, the first in the league's history, was held in April, with Tina Thompson of USC selected first overall by the Houston Comets. And on June 21, 1997, before a crowd of 14,284 at the Great Western Forum in Inglewood, California, the New York Liberty and the Los Angeles Sparks played the first official game in WNBA history. Val Ackerman presided over the ceremonial jump ball between Lisa Leslie and Kym Hampton. Leslie, 25, had just won Olympic gold. Hampton had spent twelve years playing professionally in Spain, Italy, France, and Japan, because, until that evening, there had been nowhere else for her to play.

The Competition That Didn't Survive, and the One That Did

The WNBA was not the only contender. The American Basketball League, a rival women's professional league founded with legitimate credentials, launched in the fall of 1996, several months before the WNBA's debut. The ABL paid higher salaries, scheduled its season in the winter to mimic the NBA's rhythm, and counted among its founders and supporters some of the most prominent figures in women's basketball. It was, by many early assessments, the more player-friendly option.

The WNBA had something the ABL couldn't replicate: the full institutional weight of the NBA. It had David Stern. It had network television contracts. It had the kind of marketing budget and corporate reach that no independent league could manufacture. The ABL folded in December 1998, during its third season. Many of its best players migrated to the WNBA, which absorbed the talent and emerged as the unambiguous home of women's professional basketball in the United States.

There are those who have argued, with some justification, that the WNBA's triumph over the ABL was less a matter of quality than power - that a better-structured, more player-equitable league was displaced by a wealthier, better-connected one. It is a debate that has never been fully resolved, and one that is still relevant in conversations around women's sports economics to this day.

The Marathon, Not the Sprint

The Houston Comets won the first four WNBA championships, led by the extraordinary Cynthia Cooper , a 34-year-old who had spent a decade playing in Europe and arrived in the league like a deferred revelation, winning two MVPs and four titles before retiring in 2000. Cooper's story told the story of an entire generation: supremely talented women who had played their best years in foreign leagues because there was no American stage worthy of them.

The WNBA that exists today, expanding to 18 teams, negotiating landmark collective bargaining agreements, drawing global audiences for players like A'ja Wilson and Paige Bueckers, watching franchise values approach and exceed $300 million, was not the league that Val Ackerman and David Stern sketched in the early 1990s. It is something larger. But Ackerman understood from the beginning that this was a multigenerational project.

On April 24, 1996, the NBA's board of governors approved a concept. Three words went up on a screen. A basketball player named Rebecca Lobo, 22 years old and freshly golden, smiled for the cameras. And the most durable women's professional sports league in American history quietly declared itself ready to begin.

It was, in retrospect, informed impulsiveness at its finest.

Full WNBA Timeline at The W Interactive