This Week in Women’s Basketball: AU is on the horizon

Ahead of the league’s fourth season, Athletes Unlimited has finalized its roster and rules. In the WNBA, the Indiana Fever announce a forthcoming new facility, while more teams fill out their coaching staffs.

As we are blessed with a bounty of women’s basketball, catch up on the announcements, honors and more that you might have missed over the past week:

Season four of AU is almost here

The fourth season of Athletes Unlimited begins Feb. 5 in Nashville. In anticipation, the league finalized the 40-player roster, which features a mix of returnees and newcomers.

Experienced WNBA assistant coaches Shelley Patterson (most recently of the Washington Mystics), Karima Christmas-Kelly (Indiana Fever), Austin Kelley (Fever) and Roneeka Hodges (Connecticut Sun) will act as AU’s facilitators, with Danielle Viglione (Los Angeles Sparks) returning for her third season as a player development coach. She’ll be joined by Ryan Sypkens as AU expands its player development opportunities for participants.

AU also announced a new captain selection process. For week one, the captains will be randomly selected from a lottery of returning players. For weeks two and three, the top-four performers for that week will be named captains for the following week. Previously, captaincies were awarded based on the cumulative leaderboard. For week four, however, the top-four players on the cumulative leaderboard will be the captains. Overall, this change should allow more players the opportunity to serve as captain over the course of the four-week season.

AU also announced its broadcast team for the 2025 season, with the Sheryl Swoopes and Cindy Brunson returning to the booth and Ari Chambers serving as the in-game reporter. Greg Mescall will also call games. All 24 games will be broadcast on platforms available nationwide. ESPN+ exclusively will air 10 games, while 14 games will be available concurrently on FanDuel Sports Network and through the WNBA App.

Is there room for another women’s basketball pro league?

On Thursday, Bloomberg reported that Maverick Carter, LeBron James’ business manager, is advising a group of investors angling to establish an international basketball league that would rival the NBA—and, possibly, the WNBA.

The group is aiming to raise $5 billion dollars, through private equity and sovereign wealth funds, to start a league featuring six men’s teams and six women’s teams. Other sources told Front Office Sports that, rather than rivaling the NBA and/or WNBA, the venture is interested in becoming “an F1 for basketball.”

Sources further explained to FOS that league would be inspired by “other recent shorter-season spectacles,” such as Unrivaled and Athletes Unlimited, and would plan to “play its games in eight cities and spend just two weeks in each city.” Singapore was cited on the list of destination cities.

If such a league materializes, it will be intriguing to see if notable American women’s basketball players are interested, or what the league does to pique players’ interest. CNBC has reported that the league would offer players equity. Such an ambitious initiative, surely, would seek the services of bigger name players whose desires for offseason opportunities currently are satisfied by Unrivaled or EuroLeague Women. Less high-profile players have access to two stable leagues in Athletes Unlimited and the WNBL.

Fever announce state-of-the-art facility

The Indiana Fever are the latest entrant in the WNBA sports performance facility arms race.

On the Thursday, the team announced that a $78 million, three-story and 108,000 square foot facility is coming to downtown Indianapolis. It is expected to be ready before the 2027 WNBA season.

The facility will feature the suite amenities that ambitious organization are now expected to provide for players, including two regulation-size courts, strength and conditioning equipment, hydrotherapy pools, a full-service kitchen, a hair and nail salon, a child care space, a content production studio and more. The resources not only are intended to give current Fever players the professional treatment they deserve, but also to help the organization become a destination franchise attractive to free agents.

Aliyah Boston, the No. 1 pick in the 2023 WNBA Draft who has helped ignite the organization’s rise, spoke to how the facility will complement the team’s culture, saying:

The Fever does so well at pouring into us and making us feel like the professional athletes that we are. It’s amazing to have your own space and say, “Hey this is our building.” It’s a blessing to play at Gainbridge, and we sell out every single night…And wow! We’re going to have our own practice facility….that’s pretty dope.

She also cheekily added, “All the free agents, you know where’s it at.”

Liberty, Wings, Sparks add assistant coaches

The New York Liberty, Dallas Wings and Los Angeles Sparks all announced assistant coaching hires last week.

In Brooklyn, Sonia Raman joins head coach Sandy Brondello’s bench, having spent the last five seasons (2020-24) as an assistant coach for the NBA’s Memphis Grizzlies after a 12-season tenure as the head coach at MIT (2008-20), where she was the winningest coach in the program’s history.

In Dallas, former WNBA player Camille Little Smith and Rose BC head coach Nola Henry will support new head coach Chris Koclanes in his first season at the helm. After a 13-year WNBA career, Smith served as a player development coach for the Wings in 2019; since 2022, she has been the head coach at Paul Quinn College. Henry, who currently is gaining first-time head coaching experience in Unrivaled, has spent five years working for WNBA teams, most recently as an assistant coach (2024) and player development coach (2023) for the Sparks under Wings general manger Curt Miller.

Out in LA, new head coach Lynne Roberts’ staff will feature a pair of assistants with WNBA experience in Nikki Blue and Zac Buncik. The interim head coach for the Phoenix Mercury during the latter portion of the 2023 WNBA season, Blue played five years in the WNBA (2006-10) out of UCLA before beginning a coaching career that has included several collegiate stops. She jumped to the WNBA sidelines as an assistant with the Mercury in 2022. Buncik has worked in the Wings organization since 2022, spending two seasons as a player development coach before serving as an assistant coach in 2024.

Congrats KP!

On Sunday, Kelsey Plum became the first women’s basketball player to have her jersey retired by the University of Washington, as her No. 10 was raised to the rafters during a halftime ceremony.

Over the course of her four years at Washington, Plum rewrote the scoring record books, not just for the program or for the Pac-12 but for all of Division I NCAA women’s basketball. At the time, her 57-point performance, achieved in Feb. 2017, was a sport record, as was her 3,527 career points.

Speaking to the crowd, Plum credited former Washington head coach Mike Neighbors for allowing her to blossom into bucket-getting phenom, saying:

Coach [Mike Neighbors] didn’t give me the green light; he gave me the freeway when I got here. It was just like, “We’re going to have you just fail until you’re better than everyone,” and that’s what happened. As a player, when your coach has that ultimate confidence in you, you go out there and there’s no fear.

Plum also signed off her speech with a inspirational message, sharing:

And last thing I’ll say, I’ve been reading a lot these days on imagination. And I think a lot of times when we get older, we sell ourselves short on what we can do in this life. And you know, the more I think about it, the more I think, “Wait a second, we can do anything we want.”

So I leave you with this. If you go home today, dream as big as you possibly can, because I promise you: anything, anything is possible. [I’m] just a kid from Poway. So with that being said, “Go Dawgs!”

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