‘An incredible environment’: Team USA game bolsters Staley’s hope for WNBA contest
On a Wednesday night in the midst of football season, 3,022 people came out to Colonial Life Arena to watch what was essentially a glorified scrimmage for the U.S. women’s national basketball team, coached by USC’s Dawn Staley and featuring four past or current Gamecock players.
The crowd for the Red-White exhibition game, as the contest was called, certainly was far smaller than the ones South Carolina draws in its regular season, and it seemed to fall short of Staley’s hopes and expectations.
On Twitter before the game, Staley wrote that “ticket sales aren’t great but counting on lots of walk-ons.”
Afterward, she said, “it was a crowd in which we didn’t have a whole lot of time to market it as well as we could have. A lot of it was just social media, and a lot of our fans aren’t on social media.” The contest was announced July 18 and tickets went on sale a day later.
But Staley’s faith in the Gamecock fanbase and their appetite for elite women’s basketball still remained unshaken after the game, she said, and her desire to bring a WNBA game to Columbia is firm.
“I think if we continue to bring this caliber of product to Columbia, you’ll get twice as many. If we keep doing it, we’ll get maybe a sellout. We’re certainly going to try to keep bringing this type of talent to showcase our city, our program, our university, because when you’re the leader in attendance over the past four years, we’re doing something right,” Staley said.
The Gamecocks have drawn an average of 13,066 fans per home game over the past four seasons, leading the nation each year. The WNBA, meanwhile, has seen its attendance numbers sag to its lowest level since the league contracted to 12 teams (though some of that is due to franchises moving to smaller arenas), according to Her Hoop Stats.
Over the past five years, WNBA preseason games have averaged roughly 3,759 fans per contest, according to data compiled by Across The Timeline. While that number is higher than the crowd at CLA on Wednesday, Staley described Columbia as a growing market for women’s basketball and said she believes more USA Basketball and WNBA events in South Carolina will lead to more demand.
“It’s twofold. One is our fans get a chance to see our former players who thought they played their last game senior night or in the NCAA tournament, they get a chance to see them again, but they also get a chance to witness what women’s basketball is all about,” Staley said of the exhibition game’s impact. “We had Olympians in the building, we had WNBA All-Stars in the building. But they also got a chance to see our fans create an incredible environment and an incredible appreciation for women’s basketball. I wish that we could take the fans of our program and implant them all across the country and give women’s basketball the platform they deserve to have, on the collegiate level and the pro level and the Olympic level.”
South Carolina athletics director Ray Tanner has expressed support for a WNBA game at Colonial Life Arena, and the Las Vegas Aces, the WNBA team of Gamecock great A’ja Wilson, have also indicated they would be open to it. On Wednesday, former USC star Tiffany Mitchell, who plays for the WNBA’s Indiana Fever, said she would be thrilled to come back and play again.
“Anytime the opportunity presents itself, I would definitely want to be a part of that,” Mitchell said. “It’d be great, just for women’s basketball for sure.”