To build a WNBA team from scratch, the Golden State Valkyries looked for people with an ‘entrepreneurial mindset'
- Fresh start. The 2025 WNBA draft is today, and choosing players for the first time in a collegiate draft will be the Golden State Valkyries, the new expansion team starting play this season. It's one of the only things the Valkyries are doing traditionally. The Bay Area-based team sold 10,000 season tickets—the first team in the league to do so. They signed a multi-year deal with Sephora, including naming rights for the team's Oakland practice center, which will feature Sephora branding and products throughout its courts, locker room, and player lounge.
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It's been both harder and easier to achieve those milestones as a team building from scratch—the first to do so since 2008.
Valkyries GM Ohemaa Nyanin has seen the difference between a rebuild and a fresh start in action; she came to the Valkyries from the New York Liberty, an original WNBA franchise that was rescued from a near-death in 2019. "Recreating 'What is Liberty basketball now?' was really hard because people just wanted to see what they knew," she says. "The difference here is we are creating what we want people to know. What is Valkyries basketball? We're taking our sweet time to define that, because once you define it—coming from experience—it's really hard to change it."
Golden State Valkyries General Manager Ohemaa Nyanin, left, announces their new head coach Natalie Nakase, formerly a first assistant coach with the 2-time WNBA Champions, the Las Vegas Aces, at Chase Center in San Francisco on Thursday, October 10, 2024. Nakase joined the Aces in February 2022 to help head coach Beck Hammon led their team to back-to-back WNBA championships in 2022 and 2023 as well as the 2022 Commissioner's Cup title. Nakase is the first Asian coach to lead a WNBA team. (Photo by Yalonda M. James/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)
Rather than focusing solely on basketball or business skills in hiring, Nyanin says her top priorities have been finding people with an entrepreneurial mindset and aptitude for problem-solving—although those skills have some overlap with the grit required in sports. "To be an entrepreneur is to create, to either thrive or fail, and regardless of the results, continue," she says.
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On the business side, president Jess Smith has been thinking equally creatively (see: that Sephora deal, plus another new one with United Airlines). Last year, she told me she was thinking about how the team can be bigger than basketball. Before the team had players, it had violet t-shirts and a partnership with the sports media brand Togethxr. Smith was considering a podcast. "What do those moments feel like when our brand is bigger than sport?" Smith said.
The Valkyries drafted most of their roster through an expansion draft in December, and with today's collegiate draft (featuring projected No. 1 draft pick Paige Bueckers, who is expected to go to the Dallas Wings) will fill out the team. And they haven't had to build everything from zero—the team has the same owners as the NBA's Golden State Warriors.
Nyanin and Valkyries coach Natalie Nakase know what they don't want to replicate: "treating athletes as just athletes," and not full people, is the worst habit they've seen elsewhere, Nyanin says.
"We can write our own story now, right?" Nyanin says. "We don't have to inherit anything."
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Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
The Most Powerful Women Daily newsletter is Fortune's daily briefing for and about the women leading the business world. Today's edition was curated by Nina Ajemian. Subscribe here.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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