The Golden State Valkyries want to set the standard for future WNBA expansion

Photo by Bryan Steffy/Getty Images for AT&T

The Valkyries are laying a team-building road map for WNBA expansion

The concept, and term, of team-building has become something of a tenet in basketball. Though it suggests construction, which takes time, the phenomena of team-building has turned more immediate. The urgency and meta-gamification of competitive seasons — poring over roster construction, rotations, match-up deficiencies — in order to win now versus playing the long game is how the term is contemporarily lobbed around by fans, and meted out by front offices. In modern sports, with sky-high skill levels and fan appetites, patience is a luxury a lot of franchises can’t afford.

But what does it mean to consider team-building at a granular level? A molecular level, almost? To bring a new team into a league via the Big Bang considerations of roster construction, team colors, name, down to the smaller, but no less important details of what a locker room looks like, where recovery treatments will be, what the pre-game concourse experience is like for fans? What are the ripple effects, the impact of a team on its surrounding community, and the impact it will have on the league it’s being launched into? And how does one toggle between it all?

“I mean, first and foremost, we wanna win,” Jess Smith, President of the Golden State Valkyries, chuckles. It’s 9 a.m. and Smith, over the phone, voice bright and tone unequivocal, has been up since 5 a.m.

Smith started her role on February 14th, a little over four months after the Valkyries — owned by Golden State Basketball, hemmed by Joe Lacob and Peter Gruber — were announced as the WNBA’s 13th franchise, and the first expansion team since 2008. Since then, she’s brought on two of the team’s initial founding partners in Chase Bank and the health care provider, Kaiser Permanente. She also hired the team’s inaugural GM, Ohemaa Nyanin, worked with Golden State Basketball to build the Valkyries stunning practice facility in Oakland and brand new locker room into the existing footprint of Chase Center, done a steady stream of media since the team identity was announced and now until Dec. 6, will be preparing for the team’s expansion draft.

As the first of four planned WNBA expansion teams the expectations for the Valkyries are high. There’s a standard to set in process for the teams rolling out behind them — so far, Toronto and Portland, with the fourth yet to be named — as much as there is for competitive and economic success, two key metrics sure to be examined to prove the veracity of W expansion, and the growing footprint of women’s sports. Plenty of pressure but then, Smith’s expectations may be highest of all.

“Not only do I know what’s happening in women’s sports, but specifically in the WNBA, I know what’s possible here,” Smith says, noting the success she had in driving the meteoric growth of Angel FC over the past four years — her job before Golden State Basketball came calling.

“Expectations are high because I know that with intention of building within the WNBA right now, and candidly, building through the Bay Area community, who the world looks to often to see how culture will shift, whether that’s how we’re going to treat people or how the world will innovate through technology, the opportunity is a big one,” Smith continues. “My expectations may be higher, but I think the world’s watching us.”

Team-building isn’t an innate skill. Even with instincts for chemistry on court or between a franchise and likeminded investing partners, there’s a development process. Many a team president, or GM, has learned the hard way that the runway for it isn’t endless, and can be abruptly clipped by ownership groups and pressure from fans. With stints in the MLB, NHL, and most recently her very successful tenure with Angel City FC, Smith has been honing her instincts in this world for years. She credits the men’s leagues she’s worked for adding to her confidence but most notably, the major lesson she learned when she left them.

“You have to really understand, what are the unique things bringing women’s sports to the forefront. And in fact, who is the audience? For so long in sports period, everyone’s been like, well, sports fans aren’t watching women’s sports,” Smith notes. “But it’s because you’ve been targeting the wrong audience. You’ve been assuming that it’s men’s sports fans, first of all, that are just not coming to women’s sports. And you also have not been building a product that women’s sports fans want to necessarily build around. They’ve been waiting for somebody to build something that they can support in a big way.”

When Smith was tasked with the growth of the fledgling Angel City, she didn’t only flip the script, she reimagined what it could be. She considers women’s sports a unique intersection for “sport, purpose, culture and building” and given that, the traditional metric of selling X tickets per game or season, in order not to lose money, felt stale. “We were like, well, what if we sell out stadiums?” Smith recalls, “What if we build something so powerful? What would that take?”

As with Angel City, Smith is not interested in replicating an existing formula for the Valkyries. The team’s closest tie to their market partner, the NBA’s Golden State Warriors, comes in the echo of their name. It’s worth noting that Valkyrie doesn’t just mean “female warrior”, in Old Norse it translates to “chooser of the slain”. Valkyries were said to guide only the most valiant of fallen warriors into Odin’s halls of Valhalla. Extremely tough.

Smith was adamant the Valkyries not borrow anything from their future roommates, including team colors and locker rooms. She understood the immediate peripheral optics of success the Valkyries stood to gain by adopting blue and gold. The Warriors are, after all, one of the most beloved and successful franchises in basketball — and globally known. But that was exactly the point, the Valkyries need to forge their own identity. Likewise with team space. The team will have their own dedicated, 31,800 square foot practice facilities in Downtown Oakland, and a brand new 6,800 square foot locker room on the other side of the Bay, in Chase Center.

It’s a detail that’s easy to glance over, but there are plenty of arenas (and ownership groups) where the expectation is for a women’s team to utilize an existing visiting team locker room.

“Men’s teams never have to share a locker room,” Smith points out. “It’s a sacred place, 24 hours a day, 12 months a year, you can leave something in your locker and nobody’s gonna touch it. You wanna pop in in the offseason, you can, it’s yours, and there’s some feeling to that. That home, ownership, that’s really important.”

When it came time to decide where the Valkyries would spend their game days, Smith approached Golden State Basketball and laid out the options. There was the “norm”, using the visitors’ locker room, or they could invest and build — they chose to build.

Smith shouts out Donna Daniels, who oversees Chase Center, for identifying space within the arena to essentially demo and build back up again. The results include an expansive treatment area, a player lounge, spa-like showers and perfectly lit individual vanity booths. A feat in a facility that was already purpose-built just five years ago, and one meant to underscore Smith keywords when building the franchise: safe and celebrated.

“It’s not only a locker room, it’s a campus,” Smith says, outlining the facilities and how they were designed to prioritize a sense of togetherness. “It’s not just walking in, putting your bags down and then sitting in the one space in your chair. It was really important to us that you wanna be in Chase Center throughout the entirety of game day,” she continues, “you can be comfortable and rest and have an entire game day there to make sure that you can perform that evening. Not only that, but to have the significant branding with the Valkyries inside that building, making sure that they know that that’s their home in that significant of a way, was also a very big deal for us.”

There was competitive onus on the plans, too. Expansion teams have to hit the ground not just running, but in full sprint. In a league as concentrated and competitive as the W, athletes have spent years acclimatizing to one another — whether as teammates, rivals, or sometimes both. Playing styles, schemes, competitive tics, it all becomes shorthand. The Valkyries will need to work doubly hard to catch up and then, to win. Smith’s hope is that the investment in the team, from player facilities to fan experience, accelerates that process.

It’s clear that Smith excels in shifting her scope from macro to micro when team-building, even in the big, more brand-oriented aspects like establishing the Valkyries foundational partners. Investment in the team directly touches everything from equity stakes for its players to the neighboring communities the Valkyries will spend time in.

“I think the really interesting thing that’s happening in women’s sports right now is what actually gets us to the point where all of us wanna get, which is working towards pay equity and making sure these players can make more money, and these systems work, is building good business. We can’t steer away from that,” Smith stresses. “Being relentless with building a product that sells more merchandise, brings more consumers to the forefront, builds more partnership business, sells more tickets, that is actually what gets us to more equity in the system and draws more investment into the leagues,” she says.

“In women’s sports, you have to be both at the same time,” Smith says.

The Valkyries hired Ohemaa Nyanin as team GM in early May. Smith and Nyanin have been working side-by-side since then on most aspects of the team, though Nyanin’s role will soon zero in on filling out the Valkyries roster. The WNBA has set an expansion draft for December. Along with the best possible athletes, the Valkyries want to build their team with people who embrace the highly intentional motivations of the franchise.

“Ohemaa [Nyanin] and I are very close, and we talk about this often,” Smith says, when asked about differentiating brand-building from gem-building. “She’s really good about being honest about the culture versus the individual is a big deal. You can have both.”

Of the Valkyries learnings since their inception earlier this year, Smith isn’t gate-keeping. While striking a competitive balance, she acknowledges women’s sports as a unique collective, that allyship is essential for investment and growth to continue at speed. She’s in touch with Teresa Resch, president of the yet-to-be-named Toronto WNBA expansion team, and will do the same with the front office of Portland’s newly named expansion once they’ve been established. As Smith sees it, it’s their responsibility, not only in terms of creating the best team, with more opportunities and longevity for women athletes, but to continue capitalizing on the growth of women’s sports overall.

“I can’t help but be excited, mainly because you’re seeing those with the actual financial backing and decision-making opportunities begin to understand what’s happening, meaning this is here to stay and grow for perpetuity,” Smith says on not only the growth of women’s sports, but its sense of stability, now, within that growth. A big part of that stability is from fans and consumers, and she pinpoints a certain psychic sea change to the pandemic.

“Everybody was going through this moment in time thinking, who am I working for? What am I spending my money on? What am I actually doing?” Smith recalls, “Watching the Wubble, and WNBA leadership in that moment too, and realizing, ‘Wait a minute, when I watch, this increases. When I buy merchandise, this gets better. When I buy a ticket…’ — there’s an unlock of consumers that realize they have a hand in what is driving this.”

Stability from visibility. A concept that’s been frustratingly clear to fans of the W and people working within the space, like Smith, for a long time, and seems to finally have rooted within the minds of the executive class — including within media.

“The visibility, when we’re given the primetime markets, is very high. So media is now giving the primetime markets and being rewarded for that. So, they’re giving more of it in testing various sports — not just the WNBA and the NWSL,” Smith says.

The way Smith approaches team-building for the Valkyries, and the broader collective of expansion both in the WNBA and within women’s pro sports, is like engineering. She’s aware of the existing terrain and what’s been established on it in the past; she understands the materials needed to put it all together. But there’s an added urgency in understanding how underutilized that terrain really is.

“I remember specifically the WNBA being launched, being so excited about that as a young teenage girl. It’s come such a long way and I can’t,” Smith pauses, interrupts herself, “it’s time. It’s here and it’s not going anywhere. And in fact, it’s just speeding up, the pressure’s getting bigger. That’s a good thing.”

After all, what is team-building but aspirations powered by its champions — be them athletes, fans, front offices or stakeholders — all funneled into the particle accelerator of competition and emerging, fully-formed, as hope.