The Portland Power Still Put Up Women’s Basketball Wins Nearly 30 Years Later
The ‘failed’ ABL franchise’s GM Linda Weston guided generations of executives, while her players and coaches steered WNBA title runs and a Hall of Fame from the front office
As general manager of the Las Vegas Aces from 2022 through 2024, Natalie Williams re-signed core stars including Jackie Young, Chelsea Gray, and A’ja Wilson and won the first two of the franchise’s three WNBA titles. During Lin Dunn’s time as GM of the Indiana Fever during that same stretch, she was instrumental in drafting Lexie Hull, Aliyah Boston, and Caitlin Clark—who, together with Kelsey Mitchell, comprise the core of a now-annual playoff contender.
But before either of them held a seat in WNBA front offices, Williams and Dunn, the two Women’s Basketball Hall of Famers, made their professional debut with the Portland Power of the American Basketball League (ABL). For the entirety of the team’s three-year existence, their GM was Linda Weston.
Weston started her career in radio advertising in Eugene, Oregon—where she hosted a sports radio show twice a week—then spent 17 years in the tourism industry. She was serving as CEO of the Convention & Visitors Association of Lane County when the ABL’s founders contacted her in 1996 through the University of Oregon’s athletic department. Looking to capitalize on the success of the now Hall of Fame-enshrined, gold-medal-winning 1996 U.S. women’s national team, the ABL wanted a team in Portland and wanted Weston to serve as its general manager.
Though she realized at the time that the failure rate for new leagues, especially women’s leagues, was especially high, she often repeated her daughter’s response: “What’s the worst that could happen?” Fears of selling her home, moving to Portland, watching the league fail, and losing her job were greeted with “So?” She took the job, which was announced on the front page of Eugene’s Register-Guard newspaper, and decided that she didn’t want to look back 30 years later and wish she’d taken that leap of faith—even though she had only 90 days from her hiring to the start of the season to establish the team and sell it to fans.
With help from Weston, the Power stayed on in Portland from 1996 through 1998—averaging 4,200 to 5,500 fans per game in each of its three seasons—and many of its players and coaches alike moved into the WNBA. Weston, meanwhile, went directly from the Power to a 17-year career helping business founders as president of the Oregon Entrepreneurs’ Network. In 2017, she shifted her focus to executives as an advisor to the University of Oregon Executive MBA Program and through her Rapporto executive coaching practice.
Team sports help you to work as a team, help you work towards a goal, help you understand that if you make a commitment, you have to keep the commitment…why wouldn’t you want that for your daughters?
Linda Weston, former general manager, Portland Power
When consulting with both entrepreneur and executive clients, Weston asks her daughter’s Portland Power question: “What’s the worst that could happen?” It’s forced her clients to ask themselves even more difficult questions about who their customers are, whether or not there is a market for their product, and whether they should take great financial and personal risk before leaping into a position. Having very little infrastructure in place while launching the Power gave Weston some blunt answers to those questions, but also helped her reach solutions that she’s since shared with contacts throughout women’s sports—including members of the Seattle Storm’s training staff who wanted to start a business from scratch and received a referral from Dunn.
There’s an oft-cited 2013 study by Ernst & Young and espnW that found that 94% of women in executive positions played sports, with 52% having done so in college. But during a conversation with a women’s group during the 25th anniversary of Title IX in 1997, while she was still GM of the Power, Weston spelled out exactly why her team’s experience on the court would translate to the front office—and why, if they had sons playing team sports, they should encourage their daughters to do so as well.
“Team sports help you to work as a team, help you work towards a goal, help you understand that if you make a commitment, you have to keep the commitment…why wouldn’t you want that for your daughters?” Weston said. “All of that transfers to whatever they do in life: To go to work in a company, you have to operate as a team, you have to be there when you’re supposed to be there, if you make a commitment to a client or to someone else on your team, you have to keep that commitment.”
Starting at zero
The Portland Power produced the WNBA general managers of the 2020s because the Power’s ABL was already litigating many of the sticking points of the last WNBA collective bargaining agreement.
Weston said the ABL gave its players medical insurance year-round to help them avoid playing overseas and having their bodies break down quickly over back-to-back seasons. On the second day of training camp, the Power’s first coach—Greg Bruce, who was terminated amid a 5-17 start to the first season and replaced with Dunn—asked what the league’s policy on pregnancy was, and a call to the league office led to the conclusion that it didn’t have one.
Locally, the Power had no marketing budget, no mobile phones, and no digital media—its office had one computer. The team sent players out to Portland schools to talk to kids, with ’96 Olympian and future Stanford assistant Katy Steding from nearby Lake Oswego showing up to class with a black eye after taking an elbow to the face while contesting a rebound, and future WNBA champ Sonja Henning also giving students her perspective as a practicing attorney—a title she holds to this day.
A bilingual office manager for the Power went to a largely Hispanic farming community in Woodburn, Oregon, with players and gave away tickets. A YMCA in a historically Black neighborhood in North Portland commended Power players for staying at their children’s camp for an entire day and handing out tickets when their counterparts at the NBA’s Portland Trail Blazers would only commit an hour.
Weston said that during Dunn’s time as coach, Dunn would enter any local golf tournament that would have her just to promote the team. When a team photographer took a photo of Weston’s mother at a game in a tie-dyed Power shirt, the team turned the image into a magnet containing the season’s home-game schedule.
The unconventional marketing was especially vital during the Power’s first season, when Weston was still scraping together a ticket manager, a game-day crew to compile stats, a broadcaster, and a script writer for the PA announcer—and putting $10,000 on a personal credit card to pay for a season-ticket ad campaign in The Oregonian. But Weston knew she and her team had made an impact the minute she saw how many people were waiting to buy walk-up tickets at Portland’s Veterans Memorial Coliseum.
“The line was so long we had to delay the start of the game by about a half an hour,” she said. “When the ticket manager buzzed me on the walkie-talkie and said, ‘I can’t see the end of the line,’ that’s when everybody knew this was awesome.”
People get paralyzed about making decisions…If you’re an athlete, you are accountable.
Linda Weston, former general manager, Portland Power
The next day, Oregonian columnist Steve Duin featured the team and called it a hit. Weston’s confidence had paid off, but so did her commitment to a growing number of Power staff and supporters.
“People get paralyzed about making decisions,” Weston said, remembering one of her entrepreneur clients who told her that he needed someone to hold him accountable. “If you’re an athlete, you are accountable: If you’re supposed to be working on your defense, you better be working on it. If you are supposed to be working on your three, you better be working on it. The great players don’t just go to practice. They spend hours, hours in the gym and are accountable for their behavior on and off the court.”
Both sides of the ball
When the league abruptly failed in the middle of the 1998-99 campaign, Weston became a symbol of both the Power’s potential and its shortcomings. While Weston was standing in line at a Portland Starbucks in December wearing a Columbia Sportswear winter jacket with the Power logo on it, the woman in front of her asked if she was with the team. Weston said she was the general manager, and the woman replied, “Well, I lost my season-ticket money.”
Weston thanked her for supporting the team and apologized for the loss of her money, but noted that “we all lost our jobs.” It clicked with the woman in line, but it provided part of the answer to “What’s the worst that could happen?”
As Weston began her career guiding entrepreneurs and executives, lessons from her Power days were already landing with members of her staff and team. Michelle Marciniak, the Power’s first guard and a member of Pat Summitt’s 1996 national championship team at Tennessee, now serves as CEO of the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame in Knoxville.
When Power players aren’t in the front office, they’re coaching. Dunn won a WNBA title with the Indiana Fever in 2012. Former player Delicia Milton-Jones is currently the head coach at Old Dominion. The Power’s last starting point guard, Elaine Powell, has coached at schools including Georgia Southern and served as an assistant with the Minnesota Lynx. Coquese Washington was head coach at Rutgers for four years before shifting to an assistant coaching position at SMU for this upcoming season. Charmin Smith is currently the head coach at Cal.
When the Portland Fire returned to the WNBA and held a launch party on the plaza outside the Moda Center in July 2025, Weston attended and ran into a woman wearing Natalie Williams’ Portland Power jersey. She tapped the woman on the shoulder and asked, “Can I take your picture? I was the GM, and I want to send this to Natalie.” A few feet away, another woman heard the conversation and approached Weston to say that Sheila Frost, the two-time national champion from Tennessee who spent two seasons with the Power, was her favorite player of all time. Weston told the fan she’d relay the message to Frost herself.
Nearly 28 years after the Power played their last game, their impact is still being felt throughout the business and culture of women’s sports. Through much of that span, Weston and the team she built have reminded fans and front offices alike that learning from early stumbles can lead to bigger wins later.
“I think you never know where it will pop up,” Weston said. “I talk to people on LinkedIn and they’ll say, ‘I used to take my daughter to those games’ or ‘my mom took me to those games,’ and that is a real powerful thing that people haven’t forgotten.”
What’s the worst that could happen?
Linda Weston, former general manager, Portland Power
