How has the growth of international play elevated women’s basketball?
Yahoo Sports' Caroline Fenton and women's basketball writer Cassandra Negley are joined by Courtney Cox, sports scholar and author of Double Crossover: Gender, Media and Politics in Global Basketball, who highlights the growth of international players in the WNBA as they look ahead to the FIBA Women's Basketball World Cup. Catch the full conversation on the "Hoops 360" podcast, and subscribe on Apple podcasts , Spotify , YouTube, or wherever you listen.
Video Transcript
What we're also seeing now is a lot of players from overseas to us are now playing in the WNBA.
We're seeing this boom of international talent, so that now that we're heading into the World Cup break, it feels like one of the first times where we know so many different players from other countries representing other countries.
I'm wondering if there's anything you wanna talk about there.
You're gonna see so many folks that you love, and you're gonna see really interesting-- I love the FIBA style of play.
And so you're gonna see a lot of players who have international experience, who've played overseas, able to really adapt their game in a way that it's really doesn't work the same way on the men's side because they don't have the same relationship to, to global labor when it comes to play-- having to go back and forth and translate your game, which is a lot of what my book is about, is how do you translate your game?
How do you translate your finances?
How do you understand yourself in this larger media ecosystem?
The other side of this, I'll say, and I-- just because of the LSU helmets there, they also create some sticky moments as we, are currently experiencing.
Yes.
And I think LSU women's basketball is also indicative of what this exchange of basketball also tells us in this moment.
It's not surprising.
It's Kim Mulkey.
What can we say?
But I think that one of the things I think is instructive is, where do these come into these larger geopolitical conversations?
I think it's also shows us kind of where we are as a people, where we are as a global kind of entity, and basketball's really great for that.
Soccer gets a lot of love.
Football gets a lot of love.
But I think basketball does a lot of that too in terms of both bringing us together in particular ways but also telling us what we're about.
And so I love, love that about this break, because it also kind of alerts people, kinda gives that tune-up before we get, to LA '28.
And so I love this kind of way that this season is kind of-- This season's giving us everything.
It's a little tapas platter of like, you want you wanna know where we are as a country, you wanna know how it's going globally.
Like, we're getting a little bit of everything happening in this space, and so I'm really excited about that.
And I love this new kind of moment where we're having W players, from other countries come over that didn't play in college, that are coming over internationally and being able to hold their own, which is really a testament to them, because that's no joke.
To make that transition from overseas Euroleague ball to W is not easy, and so it really speaks to the, the talents, of all these players
