It's amazing how early on the timeline women's basketball is compared to the quality of play out there already. As far as major developments the men's game has really only had game/shot clock and 3-point line changes over the course of the last 80 years, whereas the women's game finally went to 5-on-5 in 1970-71 and a national college championship only starting in 1972.
The timeline is fascinating, and mirrors early decades of other professional sports pretty neatly. I went learning a bit more about how we ended up at the present, and the attempts to found a women's pro BB league have had as many false starts as the founding of women's pro soccer leagues (or, let's be honest, men's pro soccer leagues in the US, at least post 1930ish). It's not quite a collection of scoundrels starting and running these things, but certainly a bunch of naive and under-funded amateurish attempts (in the management, not the balling).
At the start, you've got the
WBL from 1978-1981, building on the introduction of women's college teams and the 1976 Olympic team, but prior to the introduction of the Womens NCAA tournament. They appeared to have decent traction getting butts in seats and keeping things organized, but money was the problem - in one case, the Minnesota team walked off the floor before a game in Chicago to protest unpaid salaries. And then: "Bill Byrne had founded the league hoping that the 1980 Summer Olympics would showcase the game's stars and bring media and public attention to women's basketball, but the United States-led boycott of the Moscow games only added to the league's misfortunes." The league's owners
pretty much ghosted the commissioner after the 1981 season.
You next had the WABA, whose name has been used 4 different times,
the first in 1984. That 1984 iteration didn't make it a full season - under-capitalized, like so many other failed ventures (the AAF last year being perhaps the most spectacular failures of capitalization). If you can't afford to let people know about the league and games and have a good time when they come, you can't afford to pay athletes.
The WBA then started as the first women's
summer league in 1992 (initially called the WWBA), and were the first commercially successful venture. They started with a barnstorming tour the first year, 6 teams X 15 games in 1993, expanded to 8 teams for 1994 and 1995 (all of them midwestern, Memphis to Minnesota). Were doing OK commercially, but then Fox Sports bought their media-company parent and dissolved the league. League founder Ned Mitchell
wrote a memoir, and claims that the NBA ultimately used most of his business plan that he pitched around back when founding the WBA.
Building on the 1995-1996 surge in popularity of women's basketball, particularly driven by the gold-medal run at the Atlanta Olympics, that fall of '96 you had the
ABL launch as a fall-to-winter pro league with 8-9 teams. Because they got a 6-month-earlier start than the WNBA, they managed to sign a majority of the 1996 women's national team (including Dawn Staley) and were a higher level of play than the WNBA in their 2.5 seasons. Like MLS, they were founded as a single-entity structure, designed to control costs, but they were ultimately under-capitalized and lost out to the better-funded marketing of the WNBA. They were the
Campus Network to the WNBA's Facebook. So maybe don't chalk this one up to bad management or strategy - they just got beat.
In 1997, the fall-to-winter
NWBL was founded - as a competitive amateur league (which is a pretty neat hack to avoid paying your players). In 2001 they went pro, and their status as an "offseason league" for the WNBA led them to host players like Sue Bird, Tamika Catchings and Sheryl Swoopes who didn't want to go to Russia or China for their offseasons. At their peak ~2004-2005 they seem to have had 8-10 teams, but folded entirely in 2007.
Which brings us to
the WNBA. Founded in early 1996 but not launching until summer 1997, that timeline gave them the ramp-up to find good owners, venues, coaches and lay early marketing relationships with some lead time. They also had the organizing force of David Stern behind them, as the NBA founded the league (today, only 5 of the 12 teams share ownership with an NBA team). For a while, the knock on them has been that they'd collapse without the NBA's support - certainly, Bill Simmons had no shortage of jokes at their expense, and I remember some cringe-worthy ones - but the brief example of the ABL suggests that the league would do fine today without any NBA support, even if they were paying market rates for their venue rentals and such. They just couldn't pay as much as Russian oligarchs, so there might be a little talent bleed.
There have been smaller regional leagues in the times before and since those larger-scale efforts. Another edition of WABA (sharing a name but not owners) formed in eastern PA in 2001 and played in 2002 (as WABA) and 2003-2004 (as the
WEBA), with teams from York PA and Harrisburg all the way to Wilmington DE, up to Reading and Schuylkill and Allentown, and New York and Brooklyn.
There are also semi-professional second-tier leagues that have risen and fallen (including the NWBL above, which was dramatically successful with its amateur / "showcase" model). The most notable is the WBDA (
Women's Basketball Development Association, formerly Women's Blue Chip Basketball League), which started in 2004, runs as a summer league, and today has over 30 teams. Many of its players are NCAA players or other pro-hopefuls who want year-round competition and training.
---
I don't know half as much about basketball history as most posters here, but one thing I do know is that the early days of men's pro basketball (30s-40s), and likewise pro football in the 20s and 30s, were absolutely
full of failed proto-leagues, with owners not paying their players, franchises moving, and all manner of unprofessional shenanigans. The most stable part of it were the company-teams, created to give some entertainment to the factory workers. Maybe the existence of earlier women's pro leagues in eastern Europe and China meant
fewer false starts here than would have happened otherwise. Either way, despite not being able to see a game, I occasionally check in on the
Attendance (flat) and
TV Viewership numbers (slightly positive). The appointment of a serious business executive, Cathy Engelbert, to run the league last year seemed a very positive move (if for nothing than someone of that stature being interested in the job).
Let's remember that the NBA, too, had some early over-expansion and contraction periods, even after the NBL-BAA merger to form the NBA in 1949. They went from 12 (1949) to 17 (1950) back down to 12 (1951), then 10 (1952), then 9 (1954), then 8 (1956). That they managed to survive those early days, get back on stable financial footing, improved their marketing abilities, and resumed expansion is something of a minor miracle. They went back up to 9 in 1962, 10 in 1967, 12 in 1968, 14 in 1969, then 17 in 1971... and from that point, nobody's really questioned their ongoing viability in the 50 years since. But those were some dark years for the league from 1951 to 1967 or so, except for Celtics and Lakers fans.
Where is the WNBA in that continuum? Well, they survived the initial contraction in the 2002-2003 span, and two more in 08-09, and have now been stable (with relocations) at 12 continuous franchises for over a decade. Maybe they're only a few years from emerging from that dark-ages period, and seeing a steady rise of interest and expansion.