Rewriting the business of women’s basketball

MICKY LAWLER:  Unrivaled is transforming the professional sports ecosystem. You can find the sweet spot between an intimate, “wow” viewing experience and then do your tour stops to get the players in front of as many fans as possible. The players were very, very fast to understand that the more Unrivaled grew, the better for them from every angle. The more that they could participate in telling brand stories, the more their own story would be relevant.

BOB SAFIAN: That’s Micky Lawler, commissioner of professional 3-on-3 women’s basketball league, Unrivaled. Unrivaled was co-founded by WNBA Stars Breanna Stewart and Napheesa Collier, and it’s already making waves in just its second season, with sponsors from Sephora to Samsung, and an active engaged fan base in person and on TV. Micky became commissioner at Unrivaled after having run the Women’s Tennis Association, the WTA, arguably the sports pioneer in elevating the women’s game. In today’s episode, Micky talks about the challenges and opportunities of a player-centric league like Unrivaled, how what worked in tennis does and doesn’t carry over to basketball, and the lessons of managing a start-up that’s very much in the public eye by design. So let’s get to it. I’m Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.

[THEME MUSIC]

I’m Bob Safian. I’m here with Micky Lawler, commissioner of Unrivaled, the professional 3-on-3 women’s basketball league. Micky, thanks for joining us.

LAWLER: Thank you for having me, Bob. It’s very exciting to be here.

Copy LinkThe timing behind starting a 3-on-3 league

SAFIAN: I first came upon Unrivaled last year around this time. I’m a basketball fan, but other 3-on-3 leagues didn’t really connect for me. But Unrivaled, it grabbed my attention right away. The format, the players, the model of playing in one location in Miami, adopting what the WNBA did during the pandemic bubble, it’s fun.

LAWLER: You felt what I felt when I first heard about it. I loved it from the start. I could see it, I could feel it. And what’s not to like about the name, Unrivaled?

SAFIAN: And the timing for the league when it came out was great. It was just as the Caitlin Clark mania was surging, although I know Caitlin hasn’t competed on Unrivaled. But women’s leagues overall were accelerating, the WNBA, the NWSL. How much did that timing matter for you?

LAWLER: Look, I’ve spent a lifetime working in professional sports, and in particular in tennis, most of it in women’s tennis, and so I could see the momentum. And sometimes the world has a way of working in mysterious ways, because the timing was also perfect for me, having just retired from the WTA.

SAFIAN: Were you into basketball before this? I mean, your life was obviously tennis, so that was where your time and your energy was focused.

LAWLER: When you work in sports, it’s your microcosm, so I was very familiar with the opportunity of women’s basketball, and I always loved it.  When my kids played sports, basketball was my favorite season because it’s so much fun to watch. And I did play in high school, very badly, so basketball was not entirely foreign to me, but it’s like you lived in San Francisco and now you’re moving to New York. It’s the same country, but it’s two very different cities. Does that make sense?

Copy LinkThe value proposition of Unrivaled

SAFIAN: Yeah. Part of Unrivaled’s appeal for the players is financial. WNBA salaries remain modest. Players generally have to look for other paying gigs in the off-season. It’s why Brittney Griner went to Russia. You’re offering sort of an alternative to going overseas. Your salary pool isn’t enormous, but there are other benefits, including equity. This is part of the selling point to the players is the financial opportunity, and I guess the vibe in Florida where Unrivaled happens.

LAWLER: As a professional athlete, when you are competing six months of the year, you need to have another source of competition. Income, yes, but also competition. You need to stay sharp, you need to stay in shape, you need to keep working on your craft, on your game. So both Breanna and Napheesa are mothers, and for them it was increasingly difficult to go overseas for three months, and also for their own brand exposure in the market. So we looked at this as a way to really build the entire ecosystem of women’s basketball and support what clearly is a very interesting league, which is the WNBA.

SAFIAN: Yeah. You’re separate from the WNBA, right?

LAWLER: Yes. Yes.

SAFIAN: But as you say, you travel in these concentric circles with players and media partners and sponsors. How do you approach that relationship?

LAWLER: Well, we have 54 WNBA players here in-house, so our approach is to really deepen the focus on players, getting them into the public eye. And so, we hope that this is all very, very positive and good for the environment in which the WNBA operates. So the relationship is complimentary.

Copy LinkBuilding a player-centric model & lessons from the WTA

SAFIAN: You’re deep into Unrivaled’s second season. The playoffs start February 28th, the end of the month. The business of the league keeps evolving. More sponsors, more facilities, more teams. You added the 1-on-1 tournament mid-season, took the league on the road to Philadelphia, and the semi-finals will be right near me at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. This sort of business roadmap, how does it compare to your efforts growing the WTA? How much do you look at and focus on, what’s the lowest hanging fruit, what’s easiest to get versus long shot plans?

LAWLER: At the WTA, you have a structure where owners, tournaments, and players sit on the same board. There’s a 50/50 ownership. The players, they’re not contracted by the WTA, so they are self-employed and they have their own commercial rights. So the tour has to try to elevate the whole thing with limited assets, getting to a point that perfects the pressure on the players, not overstressing them, but you also have to answer to players number one to 250. And the number one is going to play many more matches. But in any case, it’s a lot to juggle.

Over here you’ve got a clean slate and you’re giving players real equity from the start. So the players were very, very fast to understand that the more Unrivaled grew, the better for them from every angle. The more that they could participate in telling brand stories, the more their own story would be relevant. So it’s completely different because you don’t have to argue about the value of social media like we did with the WTA many years ago. We need to change the media requirements from a post-match interview to giving some time to the social side. In tennis, that took a long time. Here it’s front and center.

SAFIAN: They want to be doing it.

LAWLER: They understand the holistic side to the business, that it’s not just about being a phenomenal basketball player. You have to be good at social. You have to serve the press, serve all your fans, create an environment that is community. If I had any doubt that this was going to work, well, that was quickly gone because of the intensity of the fans and the intimacy. Sephora Arena is a place where you come to be very happy and entertained, and you see just stellar performances. 

The players are aware that it’s a start-up, but they’re also aware that everything goes to serve them. We are highly, highly focused on making sure that they have everything that they need. Having two player founders in Breanna and Napheesa, we know they need a glam room. They need, of course, a weight room. They need training, and a very good training room and a training team. The best childcare. Saunas. Infrared for inflammation and recovery. I can’t do it justice.

SAFIAN: When you make a decision to have games in Philadelphia or in Brooklyn, say, beyond Miami, how much of that is about diversifying revenue, bigger arenas that you can sell more tickets in, versus exposure and brand and the footprint, the reputation of the league?

LAWLER: It’s all of the above. One of our investors, Wanda Sykes, she was the first one to say to me, “You need to come to Philadelphia.” And she and her team, the Philly Sisters, were tremendous in helping us and connecting us to the right people, to the venue, to Xfinity, to the government. So everybody was all-in. I remember seeing Michael Jordan’s last game at Xfinity Arena. That was the record. And I thought, “Okay, well, that’s great. We’re not going to break that.” Well, we did.

Copy LinkInnovation with new tournaments

SAFIAN: I loved the 1-on-1 tournament that happened.

LAWLER: Yeah.

SAFIAN: When you go to the players and you say, “Hey, what about doing a 1-on-1 tournament?” Are they like, “Oh, that’s great. We play 1-on-1 against each other all the time,” or are they like, “Oh, I don’t know. It’s more work for me”?

LAWLER: Both. You have the players that shy away from it a little bit, but once they play, they’re all-in. And it is, again, the crowd was so into it. The men talk about it, how much they would love it, and so we did it. And these women, they leave no stone unturned.  They fight—

SAFIAN: —Well, that was part of what I loved about it. They looked exhausted. You could physically see they’re not dogging this. Sometimes in an all-star game, you can tell the players are a little sort of – they’re in it.

LAWLER: Totally in. Personally, in year one I thought, “Oh my gosh, this is starting to look like a tennis tournament. Is this the right place?” But it has been a big success. Players love it.

SAFIAN: The start-up business model of Unrivaled requires literal sweat equity from the players, but of course, they do have a financial stake in the league as well. So how has Unrivaled built its fan base and its growing horde of sponsors? We’ll talk about that and more after the break. Stay with us.

[AD BREAK]

Before the break, Micky Lawler, commissioner of the Unrivaled basketball league, talked about what she’s applying from her time as president of the Women’s Tennis Association. Now she explains how Unrivaled is disrupting the sports ecosystem in the way it builds fans and engages with sponsors. Plus, a rapid fire round about rooting for players versus teams, what people most misunderstand about women’s sports versus men’s sports, and more. Let’s jump back in.

Copy LinkCreating fandom without traditional city affiliations

The construct of your teams not being connected to a city, because you’re all in Miami, that’s also a shift. Like, which team do you align to?

LAWLER: I was worried about that. I was worried if there’s no city, how do we build the fan base and have all these different social handles for the clubs, then for Unrivaled? Well, obviously the new generation knows this much better than I do because they were right. My fears are gone. And again, Bob, you need to come, because when you do come, you’ll see people have the Phantom shirts and the Breeze shirts and the Lunar Owls shirts, and right away that took off.

SAFIAN: Unrivaled gets a lot of attention online for the player’s tunnel looks, the outfits they wear when they show up to play. And I’m curious how important that sort of branding is, that off-court activity. You must have discussions about the pros and cons of playing up style when you were at the WTA also.

LAWLER: When I was at the WTA, I envied that. Like, “Look at what the WNBA players are doing.” In tennis it was done at the player party, and every tournament has a player party. But the player parties, they were more private events. So I think glamming it up, it allows an athlete to show her individual style, just who she is, and you see somebody through a different light. She can walk the Sephora tunnel, she can kill it on the court. She’s everything.

Copy LinkHow Unrivaled is approaching sponsorships

SAFIAN: You mentioned the Sephora court, like watching the 1-on-1 tournament, and there were logos everywhere.

LAWLER: Yes. Sponsorships have gone, in my lifetime, very much from sponsorship to partnership. You can spend millions of dollars on advertising, traditional advertising. It just doesn’t work anymore. We tend to ask, the first question is, “What have you been told in the past that you couldn’t do in sports, and then let’s try to do that. Something that you wanted to do that you were told that was not possible.”

SAFIAN: What kind of things?

LAWLER: Samsung is our presenting partner, and they wanted ideas around, “How can we create authentic use of our products?” So what we did is, we placed Samsung phones around the court and we captured a few minutes of every second quarter, and we use that in our live transmission. That feed goes into the broadcast truck as if it were a regular television camera. So Sephora became the naming partner of our arena, so we built a big shopping bag in front of the arena. And the first time they saw it, “Oh my God, the Sephora shopping bag.”

SAFIAN: I’m going to try a rapid fire round. Is that okay?

LAWLER: Okay.

Copy LinkRapid fire round with Unrivaled’s Micky Lawler

SAFIAN: What have been the biggest surprises for you about the business of basketball compared to the business of tennis?

LAWLER: The fans. Fans are very different. Fans in basketball, they will tell you exactly what they think, how they feel. In tennis, it’s more quiet.

SAFIAN: Well, you’re not supposed to make noise, right, during play?

LAWLER: Right.

SAFIAN: Whereas in basketball, everyone’s trying to get in your head.

LAWLER: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don’t profess to know the whole business of basketball, but this Unrivaled, the beauty is we’re doing things differently. We’re becoming the new sports experience. It’s visual. It’s live. It’s complete freedom. In tennis, you don’t have that. Not yet anyway.

SAFIAN: Because it has such a heritage.

LAWLER: Yeah, it’s very hard to change the spots on a leopard, and this leopard had no spots yet.

SAFIAN: It sounds liberating for you.

LAWLER: It is liberating. Yeah, I was just going to say I pity the people that come after us, because we’re going to be the heritage ones that are sitting. We’re going to say, “No, no, you need to do it this way.”

SAFIAN: Is a sports business stronger if fans root for teams or root for players?

LAWLER: A player like Serena Williams or Maria Sharapova, those super champions, those iconic athletes, they drove the entire sport to a new level. And in women’s basketball it’s the same. So the athlete component is very important also in team sports.

SAFIAN: I don’t know if there are things that people misunderstand about women’s sports versus men’s sports.

LAWLER: An airplane with four engines is going to have more power than one with two, but the one with two can be equally beautiful and great to fly. It’s not a comparison of who has more muscle mass or more speed. Let’s really embrace our differences. I mean, being homogeneous is so uninteresting.

SAFIAN: So if you could add any three players to Unrivaled, who would you choose?

LAWLER: You want me to say Caitlin Clark. Obviously Caitlin Clark would be great to have.

SAFIAN: I don’t know that I want you to. I’m curious if you would. And I didn’t say one because I’m curious if there are other players who you’d want.

LAWLER: Yeah, I would like Coco Gauff to become a basketball player. I think she would be amazing. Nelly Korda to become a basketball player. I would like all the players to be part of Unrivaled. All the WNBA players.

SAFIAN: This has been great. What does Unrivaled represent in terms of the evolution of basketball and of women’s sports overall right now?

LAWLER: Unrivaled is transforming the professional sports ecosystem. It’s not only the 3-on-3 component on a full but compressed court. It’s also the scoring, the target score in the fourth quarter that keeps it very exciting. If you can find the sweet spot between an intimate, “wow” viewing experience and then do your tour stops to get the players in front of as many fans as possible, then that’s great.

SAFIAN: Well, Micky, thank you so much for doing this. I really appreciate it.

LAWLER: Thank you. We really appreciate it too.

SAFIAN: Micky is a good sport taking my question about adding players to Unrivaled, and playfully suggesting tennis star Coco Gauff and golfer Nelly Korda. We haven’t seen a crossover athlete quite like that yet, though the idea is fun, which is really Micky’s larger point, that Unrivaled is open to new unexpected formats and partnerships. Being a startup has its challenges and limitations, but having a clean slate, being a leopard without spots, as Micky puts it, that’s the mindset we all need if we’re going to win in today’s marketplace. I’m looking forward to seeing how Unrivaled shows up here in my hometown of Brooklyn for the league semifinals on March 2nd, a welcome highlight between the Olympics and March Madness. I’m Bob Safian, thanks for listening.