The world has not seen a new WNBA team since 2008—a lot has changed since then.
After 14 years as a 12-team league, and six years of consolidation before that, the WNBA is back on the growth path. The Golden State Valkyries tip off in May after establishing operations this past year, and in 2026, two additional franchises in Portland, Oregon, and Toronto will bring the league to 15 teams total.
Named Morning Consult's fastest growing brand of 2024, the WNBA launched its newest franchise in San Francisco, supported by the Bay Area's largesse and an NBA team that has been a gold standard for success since the current ownership took over in 2010. Six conference titles and four world championships later, the people responsible for helping to make Steph Curry a megastar and setting the NBA record for wins in a single season are setting their sights on women's hoops.
So far, they've developed a unique team name and logo and drafted 11 players in an event hosted by local stars, including rapper E-40. They've collected over 20,000 season ticket deposits and sold gear in all 50 U.S. states and over 70 countries. They've announced founding sponsorships with CarMax, JPMorgan Chase and Kaiser Permanente.
After the expansion draft this past December, they're taking part in January's free agency period and the WNBA Draft this April before their inaugural season begins in May.
This is how their executive team came together.
A Brand New Squad
The Golden State ownership group earned the bid for the newest WNBA expansion franchise through a competitive process and set out to make a mark in women's sports that was not just a female-friendly extension of the Warriors' brand. The league announced this expansion on October 5, 2023.
The team's first hire, President Jess Smith, joined in February 2024 from Angel City FC, an L.A.-based pro soccer team in the NWSL. She arrived with previous leadership experience in the front offices of Major League Soccer (MLS), National Hockey League (NHL) and Major League Baseball (MLB) teams. Despite having limited experience with basketball, Smith's time as an executive in a startup sports environment helped mold her for this position.
"We didn't have to follow a specific playbook," Smith told Newsweek, reflecting on her time with Angel City FC. "We were the first to build something uniquely for women's sports in a way that wasn't necessarily just trying to replicate men's sports."
As Smith—in partnership with Joe Lacob from the ownership group and Brandon Schneider, the Warriors' president and chief operating officer—made the first executive hires for the Valkyries, she said they were looking for expertise and grit but, most importantly, she was looking for good people who cared about the mission.
"I'm at a point in my career, having the opportunity to have worked with Angel City, where everyone's incredibly passionate about what we were building and why we were building it, where I really want to be part of great projects with good people that want to build something powerful," Smith explained. "This ownership group, they're relentless in that."
Smith found out that she was a candidate for her current job during a lunch meeting with Schneider, who she thought was just trying to learn more about women's sports in an informal meeting.
"He was like, 'You know, the position of president is open.' I was like, 'Yeah? I'll let you know if I know anybody,'" Smith shared with a laugh. Already a Bay Area resident, Smith's previous posts in MLS and MLB were with teams in San Jose and Oakland, respectively.
Smith also said she felt a strong connection to the culture at Golden State.
"The culture of this organization, basketball or not, is relentless pursuit of greatness and winning, but with great human beings. You only get one with the other. They understand that deeply," Smith said. In December, she was named Sports Business Journal's Best Hire in the publication's 2024 year-end awards.
The Valkyries' business plan includes a belief that good people following an earnest mission can accomplish something that is both fulfilling and remarkable.
"If you talk to any successful startup or business, that's always what the great leaders say: It's the people around them, it's the culture that they built. It was that people wanted to show up and building something different and were willing to put the energy and passion behind it," Smith said.
With all the success of the Golden State Warriors, the ownership's genuine interest in advancing professional women's sports helped convince Smith to take this job.
"In my initial conversation with Joe Lacob and Peter Guber, what I really thought was incredible was how curious they were about what we built at Angel City, versus, as some of the most prolific sports owners and success stories in sports in the world, thinking that they had that part figured out," Smith said. "That, to me, is really what let me know that this would be the right group to do it again in women's basketball."
Mission Alignment, and a New Brand
After hiring Smith, the Valkyries filled key executive roles over marketing and ticketing with two leaders from the Warriors' front office who had been leaning into the WNBA expansion project: Kimberly Veale and Maria Valdehueza. They began to fill sales, marketing, communications and promotions teams with staffers who are passionate about community impact, women's basketball and establishing something new.
"Hiring's the most important thing that we did," Smith said. "The two most important things we worked on immediately were brand and people."
Veale and Valdehueza brought a combined 21 years of experience with the Warriors organization and decades of experience in their respective fields. In interviews with Newsweek, they each mentioned the opening of the Chase Center in 2019 and the pandemic-driven lockdowns shortly afterward as formative times in their careers. They also had developed tremendous expertise shaping one of the largest sports brands in the world.
But this career shift for the two found them looking at a blank slate, and that included the nickname and logo of the team, which was called "WNBA Golden State" at the time of its birth. The process to finalize the nickname and logo was led by Warriors' SVP of Marketing Amanda Chin and began right at the same time as the October 2023 announcement.
Veale, the Valkyries' SVP of marketing and communications, was Smith's first official hire in March 2024. As the vice president of corporate communications for the Warriors and director of PR and player relations for the WNBA's Seattle Storm before that, and a Bay Area native, she made sense for the Valkyries' front office for a lot of different reasons.
Veale's "passion is fairly unmatched," Smith said. "That background and being able to know that this can be better, and we can operate in this way for women's sports... She's a tremendous asset to our team."
In an interview with Newsweek, Veale shared that the thing that gets her out of bed is "figuring out the business of the WNBA, seeing it really find success over the last couple of years and knowing that there is immense opportunity still to be explored around the corner."
Veale said it was an easy decision to say yes when Smith approached her about joining the Valkyries.
"When you look at the trajectory of women's sports…and what Smith was able to do with Angel City, she talks a lot about the coexistence of mission and capital and how that can apply to the women's sports space," Veale said. In 2023, Angel City FC earned industrywide recognition from Virginia Commonwealth University for its role in driving social change.
"Our faculty and students witnessed the passion and vision of Angel City during our visit to their team headquarters," Carrie LeCrom, executive director of VCU's Center for Sport Leadership, wrote in the award announcement. "We have followed their work on and off the field and have been inspired by their fierce commitment to impact their community through a variety of outreach initiatives. We considered other worthy sports professionals for this award but Angel City FC was the unanimous choice."
Veale said she witnessed the potential for a WNBA team's community impact in her six years with the Seattle Storm, a championship-winning team during that time.
"Growing up in the Bay Area, playing basketball in the Bay Area and having the opportunity to do that with this franchise and this ownership group in my hometown is incredibly special to me," she said.
Valdehueza joined the Valkyries as senior vice president, ticketing and events after 15 years with the Warriors. She was officially announced in June 2024, but as a Warriors executive, she had been involved with the WNBA expansion effort since its inception, or even its conception, including sitting on a task force that began looking into this idea several years ago.
"There was a lot of work that had gotten done to just get ready for this moment," Valdehueza said. After the task force, the Golden State interest group had to put together a thoroughly researched bid and beat out multiple cities for the first WNBA expansion franchise since 2008.
Veale described it as "a small group of folks, behind the scenes, working on what [a Golden State women's basketball team] would look like."
"We knew for many years that this community, this market was excited and really was demanding a team," she added.
Now that the franchise was established, it still needed a name and a logo. At an early stage of the process, they solicited readers of the San Francisco Chronicle for suggestions. Nearly a quarter of respondents wrote in Valkyries, a response that Smith and other team executives said they couldn't ignore.
Veale shared that they even considered moving away from the Golden State name for the location, though they decided to keep it the same. With Valkyries, she said they were "gravitating toward the strength and the confidence and the boldness, the edginess, the rebellious nature of the story of the modern interpretation of the Valkyrie."
The Valkyries' branding had many interpretations, and was not highly recognizable, so one of Veale's first tasks was providing in-depth information about the branding and the reasoning behind the naming, colors and logos.
"We knew it was a bold name. We knew that there was going to be a fair amount of education that went into what a Valkyrie is. There were certainly segments of fans that knew it from Norse mythology, or knew it from more recent pop culture in Marvel comic books, and then a group of people that were like, 'Huh?'"
They were even intentional about the color selection, and excited to use a unique color in addition to a nickname that had not yet been used in major professional sports.
"We took a really big swing with the name," Veale said. "We wanted to create a brand that was ownable. That was why we landed on the Valkyries' violet color as our core color. No other professional sports team uses it. We certainly wanted to stand out across the WNBA and across Bay Area sports, and we checked both of those boxes."
Veale noted that she is already seeing Valkyries gear when she goes out for errands and receives comments when she wears her gear out, and that's part of the growing excitement as well. After the logo and branding release, members of the Warriors basketball team, such as head coach Steve Kerr and stars Draymond Green and Curry, have been sporting Valkyries gear in public appearances, including pregame warmups and postgame press conferences.
"To see that kind of support, from Draymond Green wearing our jersey during the game and Steph walking in with our secondary logo, those are things of dreams to see that kind of synergy," Valdehueza said.
Valdehueza's team is responsible for converting the 20,000 season ticket deposits into season ticket sales, and for making sure that the Chase Center is full for Game 1, which is in May, but also for Game 2, when the confetti goes away and they have a team to promote. She shared that they're calling first-year season ticket holders their "founding guard," in line with the Valkyries' branding.
"If we talk about building a culture for the Valkyries, what does it really mean to be part of the founding guard? How do we show up in a way that resonates with this community, that they can feel a connection to, that's authentic to them? Going back to every single one of the people that work for the Valkyries, and asking them, 'What are your touch points in the community? Talk to me about somebody you met at an event recently, and what's important to them.' Getting 360 feedback from everyone in the company is super important," Valdehueza said.
She added that she expects a full arena for the first game, and Veale said she thinks a lengthy sellout streak, similar to the one achieved with the Warriors, is possible.
"We're really excited to set new bars and show what is capable in this market. But at the end of the day, we've always known that the Bay is going to be the best place for a WNBA team. So I don't know that there was a number we had in mind, but it's definitely just overwhelming to see the support and to see people every day," Valdehueza said. "We can't wait to put our own spin on it."
Building From the Ground Up
After landing on a new name and logos and unveiling their uniforms in May 2024, the Valkyries announced the addition of General Manager Ohemaa Nyanin later that month. The new GM added VP of Basketball Operations Vanja Cernivec in July and announced head coach Natalie Nakase in October, and then set out to make the first on-court hires in the December 6 expansion draft.
In sit-down interviews with Newsweek, Nyanin and Nakase emphasized the push for finding good people, even with the high stakes of their competitive jobs.
"I feel like we're all really good human beings, genuine human beings," Nakase said. "I care about our players. For me, that's the number one thing. Every coach that's going to be a part of my staff, they have to have a genuine care for people, because when you know your coach has your back and they're going to be there for your low moments…that's gonna be one of the keys of my hiring."
Working in sports is always a different journey every day, but that's especially true for an expansion franchise.
"Every day is different. 'Other duties, as assigned' is kind of at the forefront of our minds," Nyanin explained, thinking about the common line in a job description. "The three of us, Vanja, Natalie and myself, really just focused on how to kind of just embrace whatever was in front of us."
She added this included learning Microsoft Excel, watching a lot of film and having collaborative, sometimes impassioned, discussions about how to value the players and other opportunities available to them.
"One of the things that I learned in witnessing the Golden State Warriors draft this year is, 'If you have something to say, are you willing to stand on the table and say it?'" Nyanin said, explaining a core philosophy that she's developed through the expansion draft that she'll be taking into free agency and the college draft in April. "Who's willing to stand on the table for this player?"
Nyanin, who joined from the New York Liberty, the team that just cut down the nets as the 2024 WNBA champions, found out from her mentor and manager with the Liberty at the time that Golden State was interested: "Jonathan Kolb, my former boss, confidant, bestie human in creating the New York Liberty, gave me a call and said, 'Golden State is interested in talking to you for their GM role, and I think you should take [it].'"
Nyanin described the interview process for the Valkyries' GM job as "really intense." Since it was her first time interviewing for a GM role, she said she wasn't getting her hopes up. Veale confirmed that they "put her through the ringer," as they did all GM finalist candidates.
When she got the offer, Nyanin said she felt compelled to accept because of how rare the opportunity was.
"It's an opportunity to leave good people and go work with good people. It's an opportunity to put all of the philosophies that I've had in an assistant role to work and see if all of my own philosophies, along with the philosophies of the people that I hire, can come to fruition and end up in winning championships," she said.
Five years earlier, Nyanin joined her now-former boss Kolb on the Liberty with the dream of turning the struggling franchise around and bringing a championship to New York City, "specifically Brooklyn," she added.
That mission was accomplished in October of this past year, though Nyanin had joined the Valkyries at that point.
From her previous post, Nyanin said she learned about doing whatever it takes to succeed and elevating the people around you, because success is driven by strong work partnerships.
"I learned so much from all the hard tasks that [Kolb] and I had to do together. We talk about it still. 'Can you believe when…?'" she shared. "Now we can say that we're peers in this journey of continuing to elevate the WNBA. The relationships matter more than kind of everything else."
A former basketball player at American University in Washington, D.C., and a district-area nonprofit employee at one point, Nyanin moved into the sports world in 2015 in a post with USA Basketball. She spent four years at USA Basketball HQ in Colorado Springs before joining the Liberty in 2019. She added Cernivec as her first basketball operations hire for the Valkyries, valuing her global experience as the GM of the recently crowned Euro Cup champion London Lions.
"People are a product of their experiences, and my experience is very different than Vanja's," Nyanin said.
"Then the both of us tackled pretty much every other hire, from an equipment manager to a head coach to scouts and everything in between, and the one thing we talk a lot about is empathy," she added.
With a first-time GM and a president from outside of basketball, the Valkyries have not been afraid to break the mold. Their decision to hire Nakase means they'll have a first-time GM and head coach as they seek to meet Lacob's expectation of winning a championship in five years. To their credit, Nakase and Nyanin have been part of the past three WNBA championship teams.
At 44 years old, Nakase is the second-youngest female coach in the league and one of two to have played women's college basketball this century. She was a walk-on at UCLA who eventually earned the starting point guard job and an all-conference honorable mention nod. She joined the Valkyries after three seasons as an assistant coach with the Las Vegas Aces, winners of the 2022 and 2023 WNBA championships. Nakase had previously interviewed for other head-coaching jobs, but had not landed on the right one before the Valkyries.
The Aces are led by Becky Hammon, who was the second woman ever to be an assistant coach in the NBA when she joined the legendary Gregg Popovich's staff in 2014. Nakase had spent time as an assistant coach in the NBA with the Los Angeles Clippers' organization for five years before her time with Hammon and the Aces.
"[Hammon] was all about opening her heart. I felt that in our first phone call conversation. Prior to that, I didn't know her very well. [In the NBA], we kind of always gave each other a fist bump and respect," Nakase said. "When I got the call, she asked me a really great question, which I didn't get asked as many times as I had on other interviews. She said, 'How are you doing as a person?' And my heart melted."
Nakase shared that she lost her father that year, and Hammon's concern for her individually, despite being part of a highly competitive team, helped define the culture that she hopes to build with the Valkyries.
"Winning a championship, you definitely build a bond where it's kind of like a blood transfusion, because you become family instantly," she said.
Like all of her colleagues, Nakase holds high hopes for the future of their league and potential for its success launching a new team in San Francisco. As a California native herself, this is a homecoming of sorts for her, though she's from the L.A.-area.
"I've worked with the NBA, but now working with these women in the W, they deserve the best, because they can compete at a high level," she said. "More importantly, I think they care about being a great role model. Anytime people talk to these athletes, they always talk about giving back, right? And how they can be impactful to their community, and I think that needs to be shared more. We're putting all these great players, in the limelight, and they're not afraid to tell their story and share their story, because they really want to help impact the world. So it's time. We're going to take off and then keep it moving."
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