Entering league's 20th year, WNBA legend Weatherspoon proud of foundation she helped build
Teresa Weatherspoon’s career arc dovetails with that of the WNBA, now entering its 20th season.
Weatherspoon serves as Director of Player Development for the New York Liberty, an appropriate perch for the winner of the league’s first two Defensive Player of the Year Awards to mentor last season’s best defensive team in the league.
Weatherspoon remembers what it felt like in those first few moments of the league itself. And she, like many around the league, believe it’s only appropriate that a season in which the league is honoring legends and remembering its roots while working to expand its reach, the Liberty are the team who should be crowned champions.
“All I can do is smile,” Weatherspoon said. “I think that would be my answer. It would be amazing for this organization, it would be amazing for everyone who ever had the chance to play for this organization, and it would be great for the city of New York.”
And it goes without saying that what’s good for New York is good for the WNBA, with the prospect of a championship team in the league’s largest media market serving as a springboard for increased attendance, viewership and merchandise sales that new league president Lisa Borders has made a hallmark of her first-year goals.
Borders would not, however, endorse this as an explicit goal of the league, a reasonable stance for a woman who’s had to trade in her Atlanta Dream fandom from her pre-president days and become officially neutral.
“Well, it would be historic,” Borders said. “They’ve never done that, and this is a historic year for us. We’re in the 20th year, which is amazing by any standard. I think anytime you can lay down a historical marker, you get a boost out of that. In politics, we say you get a bump. So I absolutely think we’d get a bump out of an original team winning, whether that is New York, Los Angeles or Phoenix. Any one of those three would be helpful for the league.”
Weatherspoon knows well how far the league has come since the inaugural season in 1997. That is not to say she’s forgotten a moment of what it felt like.
“The practice facility,” Weatherspoon said when asked what the first memory of her first season was. “When we walked out there — it was at the Reebok Club. And we took a look out at who was watching us practice. And we were like, ‘That’s-that’s-that’s-that’s’ — we were in awe of these stars who were watching us. And I remember our coach calling a timeout and saying, ‘Remember, they’re watching you.’ And that got us on a roll. I remember that so well.
“And then we had the first game in the Forum. And the ride over there — nervous. Scared to death. Because there was that responsibility. Across the country, across the world. It was being televised. ‘We got next’. So we better show the world why ‘we got next’. We were very quiet on the bus, very quiet in the locker room. Because now it was time to perform.”
Weatherspoon’s fellow Liberty staff member, Katie Smith, didn’t enter the league until 1999. She made up for lost time, though, finishing a 15-year WNBA career fifth in league history in Win Shares. So it was with more than a little experience of both then and now that Smith answered the question, whether the legends of yesterday were every bit as good as the current crop of WNBA players.
“I think skill set, the players then could compete now,” Smith, now Associate head coach for the Liberty, said following a recent practice. “I think there are some who are bigger, more versatile. The bigs are more versatile, they were one-position back then, they’re multi-position now. I think it’s a faster game now. The skill level, the ball handling. But the older players, if they got in here, they would come in and wreck shop, too.”
Smith, too, sees the Liberty finally winning as an appropriate cap to the 20th year. But the larger goals of the league have been met already, according to Weatherspoon, no matter who ends the season on top.
“That’s the beauty of this thing,” Weatherspoon said. “Twenty years ago, people were asking whether this thing would last. And we, as the elite athletes, believed that it would. We wanted to make sure that those little eyes upon us got a chance to live the same dream that we are living. And that’s the beauty of it for us.”