Women’s Basketball Can’t Retire Its Storied Past

Last year, RAJ Sports—the owners of the NWSL’s Portland Thorns and WNBA’s Portland Fire—and Nike held the first installment of an annual summit based in Portland, the Epicenter of Women’s Sports.

While the name and event were meant to promote conversation and progress around women’s sports, the title “Epicenter of Women’s Sports” may vary depending on where you were when you fell in love with the game. For those fortunate enough to have watched the 161 players who played for University of Tennessee Hall of Fame coach Pat Summitt or to have walked the floors of the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame, the epicenter might look like Knoxville.

If you spent a childhood taking backyard practice and playing travel softball hoping your college team (or national team in 2028) would one day play on the game’s biggest stage, the epicenter might be located in Oklahoma City. If you grew up with a poster of the World Cup-winning 1999 U.S. Women’s National Team on your wall and followed the championship careers of players from Mia Hamm and Kristine Lilly to Tobin Heath and Crystal Dunn (not to mention U.S. Soccer president Cindy Parlow Cone), the epicenter is Chapel Hill.

From 92,000 watching volleyball in Nebraska to 88 titles won by women at Stanford (the most championships by men or women anywhere in the U.S.), the center of great women’s sports stories isn’t any one place, but one that is closest to home. For Melanie Page, it was June 21, 1997, in front of a television with her mother in Laurel, Maryland, watching the New York Liberty defeat the Los Angeles Sparks 67-57 in the first-ever WNBA game.

From that point forward, I knew that basketball was an aspiration: It was something concrete that I could aspire to become.

Melanie Page, documentarian

Penny Toler, who played high school ball at St. Anthony in Washington, D.C., just 40 minutes from Page’s home, scored the first points in WNBA history. Page, a future documentarian, would ensure that people remembered Toler’s feat—and that other girls would know that basketball history was made by women who played in their backyard.

“From that point forward, I knew that basketball was an aspiration: It was something concrete that I could aspire to become,” Page said. “I obviously grew up and did not continue to pursue my WNBA dreams, but I’m getting back to the purity and the love of what really attached me to that childlike sentiment and point of view of seeing it to believe you can become it, and wanting the next generation to be able to have that to lean on.”

From the DMV to the W

Since that first game in 1997, the WNBA has grown from eight teams to 15—and will be 18 by 2030. With the addition of the expansion Toronto Tempo and Portland Fire this season, total attendance rose 20% to an all-time record 3.79 million from 2025 (up 3% without the new squads), while the league’s average attendance of 11,474 was also a record and a 5% uptick from last season.

League viewership, meanwhile, rose 17% on ESPN networks to 1.4 million, including 32% on ESPN (1.2 million) and 9% on ABC (1.6 million). CBS pulled in 1.28 million across 20 games, up 9% from last year, while new partner NBC drew 1.75 million per game. WNBA matchups also appeared on Ion (617,000 viewers on average), USA (543,000) and Amazon Prime (437,000).

After Toler scored those first points, talent from Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia continued leaving its mark on the league. In 2026 alone, Ursuline Academy and University of Delaware star-turned-Olympic gold medalist and two-time WNBA MVP Elena Delle Donne joined the late Nikki McCray-Penson, a 1996 U.S. Olympic team member and fellow Washington Mystics alum, as Basketball Hall of Fame inductees—with McCray-Penson being inducted with the ’96 Olympic team.

Whether it’s D.C.-raised WNBA champion Nikki Teasley from St. John’s Prep in Buckeystown, Maryland, Woodbridge, Virginia-raised two-time WNBA champ and current Toronto Tempo GM Monica Wright, ESPN WNBA announcer and former Georgetown standout Monica McNutt of Suitland, Maryland, or former Riverdale Baptist School and George Washington University standout-turned-WNBA Finals and All-Star MVP Jonquel Jones, Page kept an eye on the names from the DMV making an impact.

Though Page started playing basketball when she was 6, won youth championships and was a starter at Elizabeth Seton High School into her senior year, a concussion sustained during a recruitment game took her basketball career off the table and forced a pivot to her second love—digital media. One-off programs in Philadelphia and at Georgetown led her to North Carolina A&T, where she and some friends founded production studio Major Motives—where she’d gain the production experience that led to work with LA Times Studios, Wasserman, Microsoft, and Ulta Beauty, but also caught the attention of ESPN Films and provided some of her first opportunities documenting women’s sports.

At the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, Page was living in Los Angeles, but went back to Maryland to be with her family. She’d helped tell stories about the 1971 Howard University national champion women’s soccer team, the 1983 Texas A&M all-walk-on kickoff team, and LSU’s walk-off home run in the 1996 College World Series, but at a time when boys’ and men’s basketball in her surrounding Prince George’s County was getting feature film treatment, Page wanted the same for women’s basketball in her region.

With COVID-19 keeping everyone in place, Page conducted nearly 60 interviews with DMV women’s basketball legends and architects, piecing together the four-part documentary “Can’t Retire From This.” Since 2024, the documentary has made its way through the festival circuit and has caught the attention of other corners of the country—which want their own women’s basketball legacy recognized. Leading up to the city’s first WNBA franchise in 2030, Philadelphia women’s basketball legends have pitched in and invested time and resources for a “Can’t Retire From This” Philly documentary.

“How do we get back to the love, purity, and commonality that made women’s basketball a safe space for me as a child, but also for everybody else that has been a fan for all these years?” Page asked. “How do I create a point of safety, a source of truth, of love, of purity, of all of the positive emotions that the game brings, that also can translate on and off the court for fandoms, players, and coaches?”

Looking to the rafters

Much as the WNBA has been surrounded by supporting U.S. women’s basketball leagues including Athletes Unlimited, Unrivaled, and Upshot—and their accompanying brand partners—the production collective that’s since become the Can’t Retire Project now finds itself with increased fan and brand interest.

“In 2020, 2021, people were not seeing how much growth opportunity there was and how overlooked the WNBA space was, and then all of a sudden everybody wants to get in,” Page said. “I think it’s not so much of a ‘I told you so’ type thing, but I also get to be more selective in where I’m putting my energy…doing as much as I can to stay true to myself and my childhood sentiments that really led me on this journey.”

In 2020, 2021, people were not seeing how much growth opportunity there was and how overlooked the WNBA space was, and then all of a sudden everybody wants to get in.

Melanie Page, documentarian

Page and her team have explored documentaries in other cities including Los Angeles just ahead of the 2028 Summer Olympics and Portland, Oregon, and held “Legacy Weekend” events amid the WNBA’s 30th anniversary, the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame induction ceremonies, and the 10th anniversary of Summitt’s death.

Concurrently, Page is working with the WNBA itself on its Year One series following rookies Olivia Miles, Raven Johnson, and Awa Fam—connecting their games to those of legends including Teasley, Ticha Penicheiro, and Amaya Valdemoro, while getting perspective on their development from coaching fixtures including Cheryl Reeve, Rebekah Brunson, Lindsay Whalen, and Briann January.

As “Can’t Retire From This” expands its reach throughout other centers of women’s basketball, Page sees the opportunity to draw in more perspectives and give new generations a chance to see their direct connection to basketball history. She wants girls who didn’t have the opportunity to see the first WNBA game to be able to learn about all of the history and opportunity that was created since, and she wants the legends like Toler, Teasley, and Wright to get their flowers while fans and brands still have the opportunity to share them.

“There’s a whole [women’s basketball] ecosystem that has been very disjointed, and as we’re seeing, becomes very divisive,” Page said. “‘Everyone watches women’s sports’ means everybody’s going to start watching and forming their own opinions, but we’re still remaining pure in ensuring that the legends that were doing this work that set these records that are currently being broken are getting that recognition, that amplification, and receiving the benefits from these brands because they’ve been trying to shatter this glass for years. This is the time.”