Go Valkyries

Fake watches, season tickets, community

My wife has had some harebrained ideas over the years. She painted one of our living room walls red. She suggested I quit my lawyer job and become a stay-at-home dad. And, going back even farther, she decided to marry this fake Tag Heuer watch wearing, sweaty bowler.

All of these ideas turned out to be magnificent. Our red accent wall was the stuff of interior decor legends. My stay-at-home daddiness made our family life manageable and her corporate career noteworthy. And while that watch eventually turned my wrist green, our marriage has been 100% legit.

So when Amy suggested we buy season tickets to the new WNBA franchise in San Francisco, I was cautious. Was this a red wall decision or more like the time she suggested we karaoke “Islands in the Stream” by Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers? (Seriously, that song is awful and, even worse, it lasts 20 minutes. It’s the karaoke version of watching an old person eat soup.)

Actually she didn’t “suggest” anything. One day last fall she told me she was buying tickets to the Valkyries, a new team that would play its games in the shiny Chase Center in San Francisco. Then she went nuts and bought good seats for the season. Really good seats.

After seeing the cost of the seats, I almost balked. Fake Tag Heuer wearers do NOT spend extraordinary sums on frivolous sports tickets. And for a team that was supposed to lose most of its games?

But Amy had a point. This was a brand new women’s basketball team in our market. They may suck for a while, but we support lots of things that suck. I’m looking at you Joker Part 2! More like “Folie à Don’t”. It would be terrible if they started the Valkyries and the fan base sighed and said, “Meh.”

And women’s sports is having a moment. 1.3 billion people watched women’s events at the Paris Olympics, and even more watched the last Women’s World Cup (soccer). The “Caitlin Clark Effect” rewrote the viewership records for college basketball and is now doing the same for the WNBA. More games are on TV, more people are in the stands, and more revenue is flowing into women’s sports. And we wanted to ride the wave!

Amy bought our seats and we have been going to games.

Amazing! Valkyries games have been some of the coolest sporting events I’ve ever been to. The vibe is over the top, combining the “free-to-be-me” esthetic of a pride parade and the positivity of a Muppets concert. The arena is filled with lavender-bedazzled outfits as people are spending lots of their free time creating one-of-a-kind Valkyries outfits. Think Liberace, except more purple-r.

The diversity of the fan base is bonkers. Instead of the tech bros that have seemed to have taken over the Bay Area sports scene, Valkyries fans do not fit any mold. Every skin color imaginable. Every body shape imaginable. Young. Old. Rich. Nearly rich. Recently, not-poor. And there are more varieties of genders and sexual orientations than there are condiment stands.

The crowd is as amped as it is diverse. We cheer when the players step onto the court. We cheer whenever players do anything on the court. And if one of our Vals does something big, like block a shot or make a three-pointer, the place erupts loud enough for your smart watch to fear for your eardrums. We typically hit 120 decibels a few times a game, which is as loud as thunderclap or an entire audience booing a lackluster performance of “Islands in the Stream.”

We cheer the coach, Natalie Nakase, the first Asian-American head coach in league history. We cheer the assistant coaches, team doctors and the statisticians who sit court side. We cheer offense. We cheer defense. We cheer timeouts. We are here for all of it.

The players are fun to root for. Most of the players were told they were expendable by their former teams and drafted by the Valkyries in an expansion draft. They have a chip on their shoulder and work their asses off. This is way better than having an ass on their shoulder and working their chips off. They hustle, scrap and play tough defense. They’re honey badgers in the best sense of the words.

And then there’s Kaitlyn Chen. She’s the first player of Taiwanese descent to ever play in the WNBA, and her smaller frame and beastly work ethic have made her super-popular. Whatever the “Caitlin Clark effect” has done for women’s basketball on a large scale, it is dwarfed by the “Kaitlyn Chen Effect.” Her name is met with one of the largest cheers during pregame introductions. And when she gets in the game, cover your ears. The diminutive woman next to me spilled my beer a few weeks back from jumping up and down after Chen made a tough layup. Think about that. A basket by a bench player made the woman next to me so excited that she spilled my beer. I swear, if Kaitlyn told the crowd that we were gonna streak the quad after the game, San Francisco would drown in a sea of boobs.

The relentless positivity on display at the games isn’t even limited to our team. It’s quite common for the star players on other teams to get loud ovations during the pre-game introductions. At first, I wanted to boo, because how dare they have the audacity to come into our house (affectionately nicknamed, Ballhalla) and play our team. But that is classic tech bro nonsense. If you’re trying to build a league and create positive momentum for the sport, why wouldn’t you recognize the best of the best?

The early returns suggest that Valkyries are on to something. They have sold out every game and lead the league in attendance. The franchise is already worth 500 million dollars, making it the most valuable women’s sports franchise in the world. And the team’s color, lavender, was just named “Color of the Year” by Amazing Shades magazine. All in the first season. Awesome.

And how are they doing? Great question! The team is way overperforming. They were expected to win a grand total of 7 games this season, and they have 11 wins already. They sit in 9th place in the league and have a real shot at making the playoffs. It is a best case scenario. Imagine going to a karaoke bar to have some fun and then finding out you’ve made the short list to get on American Idol. Just don’t plan on doing it with “Islands in the Stream.” Something pluckier. Maybe “You’re the One That I Want?” from Grease? That’s how well this season is going.

The team may continue to do well, or things may get tougher for them. But it won’t matter. We are having an absolute blast building something with 18,000+ new friends every game. Another great call Amy! Now I need to apply another coat of antibiotic to that wrist…