Ball Really is Life – The Meteor

Salutations, Meteor readers,

Does anyone have the phone number for the Hague? I’d like to report Alex from Love is Blind and his dirty-ass beard for crimes against humanity.

In today’s newsletter, we’re digging into the importance of the WNBA’s contract battle. Plus, a title change for Kristi Noem and a concerning update on the progress of women and girls worldwide.

Wash your face, kids,

Shannon Melero

Ball is money: We find ourselves in a unique moment in the celestial Ball Is Life calendar.  Unrivaled has just crowned the Mist as this year’s champions, March Madness is ramping up, and the WNBA just released revenue-sharing payments for the 2025 season. All should be right with the world of women’s basketball. But there’s been a very large hitch in our collective giddyup: contract negotiations between the W and the players’ association.

It isn’t just fans and players who have to worry about whether or not the regular season will start on time in May. In a normal year, part of the excitement of March Madness is getting to witness the national debut of future WNBA stars. It was this very tournament that brought all of us the light of the world that is DiJonai Carrington and beloved big woman Kamilla Cardoso, among many others. But with a strike looming because of ongoing negotiations, we’re all nervously staring down the clock.

Scheduling concerns and rookie contracts aside, there’s also a larger discussion about pay equity playing out right in front of us, and much of it echoes the fight for fair compensation outside of sports. “Women athletes are such an open display of the issues that a lot of women face in society,” sports business journalist Aryanna Prasad tells The Meteor. “When it comes to pay equity, they’re very vocal, and they have huge platforms, and I think that’s what’s really powerful.” Women politicians are talking about these intersectional issues, she says, “but maybe not everyone is tuning in to C-SPAN. But athletes are centered in pop culture. Everyone has eyes on someone like Caitlin Clark.”

THE MIST CELEBRATING THEIR WIN AND THE KNOWLEDGE THAT THEY BROKE AN ATTENDANCE RECORD THIS YEAR. (VIA GETTY AIMGES) 

And players in the W have always shown a level of fearlessness when it comes to social justice. At the height of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, WNBA players were full-throatedly talking about racism on and off the court—fines be damned. “Women athletes are not afraid to be activists,” Prasad says, and the women of the W have taken that same approach to financial issues. Their willingness to be open about pay disparities, revenue sharing, and the behind-the-scenes work of getting a strong CBA provides a tangible blueprint for the grit, time, strategy, and solidarity required to achieve those goals.

In the case of the WNBA, the main sticking point of these negotiations has been a fairer revenue-sharing split, similar to the kind of revenue-sharing seen in the NBA. Prasad notes that in terms of league lifespan, the WNBA is still in its infancy at the age of 30 (I, too, am just a baby then, yes?), and the boom we’ve seen in the last three years has changed player expectations. “The league is becoming profitable, and it’s such an attractive investment; everyone is all in,” Prasad says. “The players see that…and understandably, they want their fair portion.”

  AND:

THE OVERNIGHT DEMOCRAT SENSATION (VIA GETTY IMAGES) 

Throughout Women’s History Month, we’ll be featuring women (or women’s movements) that aren’t on the typical media lists we see every March.

BLAND IN 2015, WALKING OVER THE EDMUND PETTIS BRIDGE IN SELMA, ALABAMA. (VIA GETTY IMAGES) 

Most narratives about the marches for voting rights in Selma, Alabama focus on men like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. or Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee cofounder Rep. John Lewis. But activist Jo Ann Bland (sometimes spelled Joanne Bland), who played a key role in the movement and passed away last month at the age of 72, actually grew up in the city and started fighting for civil rights as a young girl. One day, her grandmother told her she couldn’t sit at the counter at Carter’s Drugstore because she was Black. Gazing at the white kids licking ice cream cones, she recalled in an interview with the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2024, “I became a freedom fighter that day.”

She joined SNCC shortly afterwards, at just eight years old, and by the time she was 11, she once wrote, she had been arrested at least 13 times. That same year, she was one of the protesters who tried to cross the Edmund Pettus bridge on March 7, 1965, which would eventually be known as Bloody Sunday. The Voting Rights Act passed that August. That bridge is “sort of like Mecca,” Bland told NPR in 2022. “I had so many people tell me they didn’t realize the bridge was that small. That’s because the history is so huge, so huge.”

She remained committed to preserving that history until the end of her life, giving tours of Selma that she called “Journeys For the Soul” and, in 2021, establishing the city’s Foot Soldiers Park at the location where protesters gathered before their marches. “This is urgent, that we start to capture our own histories,” she said in the same NPR interview. “When we leave, those stories are gone. Who will tell the story?” Judging by the outpouring of remembrances since her death, we’d say a lot of people.

—Nona Willis Aronowitz