New Indiana Fever Blog

All: for those visitors who are fans of the Indiana Fever, you might want to check out Fever Week, the newest member of the blog family.

My dream: that every WNBA team has a dedicated fan blogger. And I suspect that it's going to happen soon.

Shalee Lehning Interviewed by K-Stated Blog

The K-Stated Blog asks Shalee Lehning a few questions:

Do you ever see yourself going into broadcasting now that you’re a coach?

Coaching was first and foremost, that has always been a dream of mine to get into coaching. I didn’t realize it would happen this early into my career, but broadcasting would probably be my second choice. At some time down the road, if I get out of coaching, broadcasting will definitely be an option.

Will you do any recruiting while you’re out [in Atlanta]?

Yeah, as much as I can. I’ll probably be out making a lot of phone calls and writing a lot of e-mails. For that stuff it doesn’t matter where I’m at. As far as going out and watching, I won’t be able to do that. They’ll just send somebody out in place of me. But at the same time I can do a lot of my work without being in Manhattan.

MaChelle Joseph of Georgia Tech better watch out. There's a new recruiter in town.

Sky Blog in the House!!

It looks like the Chicago Sky have a new fan blog. The author, Audrey, is a Sky season ticket holder and as she writes, "I’m just gonna start writing and we’ll just have to wait and see what this blog evolves into."

It looks...awesome. The layout is a pleasure to look at, the use of color is great and the wordpress platform adds a lot of zing. You need to go over and take a look. I'll definitely be following this, and I hope you do too.

Good Time Had at Detroit Shock Game

It looks like one family took the plunge, watched an WNBA game - and liked what they saw.

The Giftfully Simple Blog reports:

The game was amazing! I seriously thought (going into this) that I might be bored because I'm use to sitting through baseball games where I'm found having amazing conversations and missing half of the game.

That wasn't the case for the WNBA game at all. I was on the edge of my seat and the game seemed to fly by. Also, it was loud because the fans were so into the game...it was great!

Parents...great event to take your kids!They can scream, yell and jump around and no one is bothered. Loved it!

I looked at how much it would cost a family of four to attend a game including parking, the cheapest seats and a large soda and popcorn to enjoy during the game and it came out to be about $50...not bad for a fun filled evening with the family!

If that isn't a great advertisement, I don't know what is. And it's a great post after all the doom-and-gloom you hear sometimes from WNBA fans who have been poisoned by some acid-tongue in the media.

Angel in the Film Room

Angel McCoughtry blogs a nice long blog entry about adjusting to life in a higher league:

"...and when we got to D.C. they didn’t have our rooms ready, talking about they had some people check in the day before. We were like we had reservations so why the heck aren’t our rooms ready. So they put us in some basement, and we were all tired being up from two overtimes the day before, trying to prepare ourselves and focus. And me being a rookie, you know in college you really don’t have back-to-backs."


"For example, I had the ball when we played the Mystics and I tried to rip through on Alana Beard. I went to rip the ball through so I could take it to hole and she just took it right out of my hands.... It gets to me when I just give somebody else the ball like that. That gets to me. So I’ve been working extra hard. I’ve been watching film. I’m trying to be a student of the game. If you notice Kobe Bryant, he watches film, he studies himself, he does all of those things and those are the things I’m doing. I’m studying myself to see how I can get better. Because the only way I can help this team become better is by helping myself become better individually."

Keep working Angel, and keep watching that film.

Atlanta Dreaming of 2009 WNBA Title

Yep, it's a big dream, and we know it. But dreams can come tru. 2009 WNBA Draft Net looks at the 2009 Atlanta Dream and tries to do a little draft predicting as well.

Hola a Todos from Iziane Castro Marques

The blog bug has become an epidemic. Iziane Castro Marques has posted a new blog entry at Dream Diary - The Official Atlanta Dream Blog.

Visit the link, and say hello to Iziane in English, Portugese...or whatever your native language is!

Regarding Mechelle Voepel

When I began checking my weblinks this morning, the Women's Hoops Blog alerted me to some shocking news: Mechelle Voepel is no longer at the Kansas City Star.

Cutbacks, so they say.

Hopefully, Voepel will still be at ESPN. ESPN still supports Voepel's columns on women's basketball. It would be a shame for Voepel not to have the bigger platform that she deserves.

I hate to change the subject, but I have to write a few things about myself. I've not been following women's basketball for very long. Oh, I was certainly interested in reading about it now and then but I didn't so much follow it as pay attention to it. I knew that Tennessee won lots of championships and that some teams were very good and others not so good.

I began following the sport when the Atlanta Dream came to town. I've always been a big believer in supporting the hometown team. I felt that the WNBA was a worthwhile enterprise and deserved some support, and I dipped my toe into the big blogging pool and began looking for information and reading the papers for information about my beloved Dream and all matters women's basketball.

This process of discovery was illuminating. It didn't exactly transform me into an acolyte of Andrea Dworkin, but it taught me a lot of unpleasant truths.

One of the truths I was taught is that a lot of men have a passionate hatred of women's sports. Despite their protestations to the contrary, it seems that their anger is based on gender. Their hatred of women's sports has a lot to do with their hatred of women, period.

I began reading the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Sports Illustrated with a critical eye. I began to play a game whenever I crossed a copy of the AJC - "guess the percentage". This cruel game involved picking out how much space on the AJC's sports page would be devoted to women's sports. I could win that game by guessing a number in the low single digits - some days, in the very low single digits. I think one day the percentage was actually 0.1 percent.

(The arguments go that women's sports aren't popular, therefore they don't deserve space. Why aren't they popular? Because they go unnoticed. Why do they go unnoticed? Because no print space is devoted to them.)

Sports Illustrated? Not much better. You can still win with that single-digit percentage guess. Except, of course, with the swimsuit issue.

In short, women's sports is invisible in a lot of quarters. The words "toil under obscurity" come to mind. And there are a lot of forces that want to keep it that way.

Writers like Mechelle Voepel are a light in the darkness. Intelligent sports commentary about a sport I like. And now, the Kansas City Star just put out the light.

"Cutbacks". Like a knife.

Women's Hoops Blog argues that we should e-mail the Kansas City Star to let them know our displeasure. I always felt a little hypocritical in doing that. Not only did I never read the KC Star, I never had the opportunity to read it. Writing a very prim and proper "you suck" missive doesn't make sense to me. What am I going to do, threaten to stop buying a paper I never read in the first place?

Think about it this way, though. Maybe the reason the Kansas City Star doesn't make any money is because they report about the same old boring garbage that other sports papers report about. Some pieces on the big three pro sports. College sports. Guy sports. A few columns of bloviating. And some advertisements.

And now, one less reason for women (and men) to read the sports page. One less reason to pick up a copy of the Kansas City Star.

(I ran out of reasons to buy an Atlanta Journal-Constitution.)

Maybe you should let the Kansas City Star know about the consequences of their decision. I just did. As for me, I have a new blog to read.

A Coach's Inspiration

There's a new "blogger" at the Atlanta Dream site, and you'd never guess who it is.

Coach Marynell Meadors tells the story of her mother's fight against breast cancer. Definitely worth reading.

Did Houston's Early Dominance Hurt the WNBA?

While netscouring, I found an interesting opinion about the WNBA found in a blog about NASCAR, of all things. As Julie Bork says it....

Let me explain:

How many people remember when the WNBA was emerging a couple of years ago? It had a great start and there was lots of interest, and there were many basketball stadiums that were built and remodeled to accommodate a national women’s team. So what happened? The Houston Comets dominated the first five years of the sport, and people lost interest. So you say what about those people from Houston, they did not loose interest, right? WRONG! The ticket sales declined to almost nothing even in the Comets home town. You can hardly give the tickets away for free now. I am from Houston, and I lost interest too.

There's no way to prove that hypothesis, of course. But it's a very interesting one.