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Unrivaled is transforming the professional sports ecosystem.
If you can find the sweet spot between an intimate kind of wow viewing experience and then do your tour stops to get the players in front of as many fans as possible.
The players were very, very fast to understand that the more Unrivaled grew, the better for them from every angle.
The more that they could participate in telling brand stories, the more their own story would be relevant.
That's Mickey Lawler, commissioner of professional three-on-three women's basketball league, Unrivaled.
Unrivaled was co-founded by WNBA stars Breonna Stewart and Nafisa Collier, and it's already making waves in just its second season, with sponsors from Sephora to Samsung and an active, engaged fan base in person and on TV.
Mickey became commissioner at Unrivaled after having run the Women's Tennis Association, the WTA, arguably the sports pioneer in elevating the women's game.
In today's episode, Mickey talks about the challenges and opportunities of a player-centric league like Unrivaled, how what worked in tennis does and doesn't carry over to basketball, and the lessons of managing a startup that's very much in the public eye by design.
So let's get to it.
I'm Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.
I'm Bob Safian.
I'm here with Mickey Lawler, Commissioner of Unrivaled, the professional three-on-three women's basketball league.
Mickey, thanks for joining us.
Thank you for having me, Bob.
It's very exciting to be here.
I first came upon Unrivaled last year around this time.
I'm a basketball fan, but other three on three leagues sort of didn't really connect for me.
But Unrivaled, like it grabbed my attention right away.
The format, the players, the model of playing in one location in Miami, adopting what the NBA did during the pandemic bubble.
It's fun.
You felt what I felt when I first heard about it.
I loved it from the start.
I could see it.
I could feel it.
And what's not to like about the name Unrivaled?
And the timing for the league when it came out was great.
I mean, it was just as sort of the Caitlin Clark mania was surging, although I know Caitlin hasn't competed on Rival, but women's leagues overall were accelerating, the WNBA, the NWSL.
How much did that timing matter for you?
Look, I've spent a lifetime working in professional sports and, in particular, in tennis, most of it in women's tennis.
And so I could see the momentum.
And you know, sometimes the world has a way of working in mysterious ways, because the timing was also perfect for me, having just retired from the WTA.
Were you into basketball before this?
I mean, your life was obviously tennis.
So that was where you were, your time and your energy was focused.
When you work in sports, it's your microcosm.
So I was very familiar with the opportunity of women's basketball.
And I always loved, like when my kids played sports.
Basketball was, you know, my favorite season because it's so much fun to watch, and i did play in high school bat very badly, but so basketball was not entirely foreign to me.
But you know, it's like you lived in san francisco and now you're moving to new york.
It's the same country but it's two very different cities.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, I mean, a part of Unrival's appeal for the players is financial.
WNBA salaries remain, you know, modest.
Players generally have to look for other paying gigs in the offseason.
It's why Brittany Griner went to Russia.
You're offering sort of an alternative to going overseas.
Your salary pool isn't enormous, but there are other benefits, including equity, right?
Like, this is part of the...
Part of the selling point to the players is the financial opportunity and I guess the vibe in Florida where Unrivaled happens.
As a professional athlete, when you are competing six months of the year, you need to have...
Another source of competition, income, yes, but also competition.
You need to stay sharp.
You need to stay in shape.
You need to keep working on your craft, on your game.
So both Brianna and Nafisa are mothers.
And for them, it was increasingly difficult to go overseas for three months.
And also for their own exposure, their own brand exposure in market.
So we looked at this as a way to really build the entire ecosystem of women's basketball and supporting what clearly is a very interesting league, which is the WNBA.
Yeah, I mean, you're separate from the WNBA, right?
But, as you say, you sort of travel in these concentric circles with players and media partners and sponsors.
How do you approach that relationship?
Well, we have...
54 WNBA players here in-house.
So our approach is to really deepen the focus on players, getting them into the public eye.
And so we hope that this is all very, very positive and good for the environment in which the WNBA operates.
So the relationship is complementarian.
You're deep into Unrivaled's second season.
The playoffs start February 28th, the end of the month.
The business of the league keeps evolving.
More sponsors, more facilities, more teams.
You added a one-on-one tournament midseason, took the league on the road to Philadelphia and the semifinals will be right near me at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn.
Yeah.
This sort of business roadmap...
How does it compare to your efforts growing the WTA?
Like, how much do you look at and focus on, like, what's the lowest hanging fruit?
What's easiest to get versus sort of long shot plans?
At the WTA, you have a structure where owners, tournaments, and players sit on the same board.
There is a 50-50 ownership.
The players.
They're not contracted by the WTA, so they are self-employed and they have their own commercial rights.
So the tour has to try to to elevate the whole thing with limited assets, getting to a point that perfects the pressure on the players, not overstressing them.
But you also have to answer to players, number one to 250, and the number one is going to play many more matches.
But in any case, it's a lot to juggle.
Over here, you've got a clean slate. and you're giving players real equity from the start.
So the players were very, very fast to understand that the more unrivaled grew, the better for them from every angle.
The more that they could participate In telling brand stories, the more their own story would be relevant.
So it's completely different because you don't have to argue about the value of social media like we did with the WTA many years ago.
Like.
We need to change the media requirements from a post-match interview to giving some time to the social side.
I mean, in tennis, that took a long time.
Here, it's front and center.
They want to be doing it.
They understand the holistic side to the business, that it's not just about being a phenomenal basketball player.
You have to be good at social.
You have to serve the press, serve all your fans, create an environment that is community.
If I had any doubt that this was going to work well, that was quickly gone because the intensity of the fans and the intimacy Sephora Arena is a place where you come to be very happy and entertained and you see just stellar performances.
The players are aware that it's a startup, but they're also aware that every dollar goes to serve them.
So we are highly, highly focused on making sure that they have everything that they need.
So, you know, having to... player founders in Brianna and Nafisa.
We know they need a glam room.
They need, of course, a weight room.
They need training and a very good training room and a training team, the best.
Child care, saunas, infrared for inflammation and recovery.
They can't do it justice.
When you make a decision to have games in Philadelphia or in Brooklyn say, beyond Miami.
I mean, how much of that is about sort of diversifying revenue.
You know bigger arenas that you can sell more tickets in versus exposure and brand and you know the footprint, the reputation of the league.
It's all of the above.
One of our investors, Wanda Sykes.
She was the first one to say to me you know you need to come to Philadelphia.
And she and her team, the Philly sisters, were tremendous in helping us and connecting us to the right people, to the venue, to Xfinity, to the government.
So everybody was all in.
I mean, I remember seeing Michael Jordan's last game at Xfinity Arena.
That was the record.
And I thought, okay, well, You know, that's great.
We're not going to break that.
Well, we did.
I love the one-on-one tournament that happened.
Yeah.
When you go to the players and you say, hey, what about doing a one-on-one tournament?
Are they like, oh, that's great.
We play one-on-one against each other all the time.
Or are they like, oh, I don't know.
You know, like, it's more work for me.
Well, both.
You have the players that shy away from it a little bit, but once they play, they're all in.
And it is, again, the crowd was so into it.
And the men talk about it, how much they would love it.
And so, you know, we did it.
And these women...
They leave no stone unturned.
Well, that was part of what I loved about it.
They looked exhausted.
You could physically see, like, they are not dogging this.
Like sometimes you know in an all-star game you sort of can tell the players are a little sort of They're in it.
Totally in.
And it was... You know, I...
Personally, in year one, I thought, oh my gosh, this is starting to look like a tennis tournament.
Is this the right place?
But it has been a big success.
Players love it.
The startup business model of Unrivaled requires literal sweat equity from the players.
But of course, they do have a financial stake in the league as well.
So how has Unrivaled built its fan base and its growing horde of sponsors?
We'll talk about that and more after the break.
Stay with us.
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Before the break, Mickey Lawler, commissioner of the Unrivaled Basketball League, talked about what she's applying from her time as president of the Women's Tennis Association.
Now she explains how Unrivaled is disrupting the sports ecosystem in the way it builds fans and engages with sponsors.
Plus a rapid-fire round about rooting for players versus teams, what people most misunderstand about women's sports versus men's sports and more.
Let's jump back in.
The construct of your teams not being connected to a city, right, because you're all in Miami.
I mean, that's also, you know, a shift.
Like, which team do you ally to?
I was worried about that.
I was worried if there's no city, you know, how do we build the fan base?
And having all these different social handles for the clubs, then for Unrivaled.
Well, obviously the new generation knows this much better than I do because they were right.
My fears are gone and it is you know.
You come again, Bob.
You need to come because when you do come, you'll see people have the Phantom shirts and the Breeze shirts and the Lunar Owl shirts and right away that took off.
Unrivaled gets a lot of attention online for the players' tunnel looks, the outfits they wear when they show up to play.
And I'm curious how important that sort of branding is, you know, that kind of off-court activity.
I mean you must have discussions about the pros and cons of playing up style when you were at the WTA also.
When I was at the WTA, I envied that.
You know, like, look at what the W—
WNBA players are doing in tennis.
It was done at the player party and every tournament has a player party, but the player parties they were more private events.
So I think glamming it up it allows an athlete to show her individual style, her.
You know just who she is.
And you see somebody through a different light.
She can walk the Sephora tunnel.
She can kill it on the court.
She's everything.
You mentioned the Sephora court, like watching the one-on-one tournament.
There were logos everywhere.
Yes.
Sponsorship have gone in my lifetime from, you know, very much from sponsorship to partnership.
You can spend millions of dollars on advertising, traditional advertising.
It just doesn't work anymore.
We tend to ask.
The first question is What have you been told in the past that you couldn't do in sports?
And then let's try to do that.
You know, something that you wanted to do that you were told that was not possible.
What kind of things?
So Samsung is our presenting partner.
And...
They wanted ideas around how can we create authentic use of our products.
So what we did is we placed Samsung phones around the court and we captured a few minutes of every second quarter.
And we use that in our live transmission.
So that feed goes into the broadcast truck as if it were a, you know, regular television camera.
So Sephora became our, the naming partner of our arena.
So we built a big shopping bag in front of the arena.
And, you know, the first time they saw it, oh my God, the Sephora shopping bag.
I'm going to try a rapid fire round.
Is that okay?
Okay.
What have been the biggest surprises for you about the business of basketball compared to the business of tennis?
The fans.
Fans are very different.
Fans in basketball, they will tell you exactly what they think, how they feel.
In tennis, it's more quiet.
Well, you're not supposed to make noise, right?
During play.
Whereas in basketball, you know, everyone's trying to get in your head.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You know I don't profess to know the whole business of basketball, but this unrivaled.
The beauty is.
We're doing things differently.
We're becoming the new sports experience.
You know, it's visual, it's live.
It's complete freedom.
In tennis, you don't have that.
Not yet, anyway.
Because it has such a heritage.
Yeah, it's very hard to change the spots on a leopard.
And this leopard had no spots yet.
Hmm.
It sounds liberating for you.
It is liberating.
Yeah, I was just going to say I pity the people that come after us, because we're going to be the heritage ones that are sitting.
We're going to say, no, no, you need to do it this way.
Is a sports business stronger if fans root for teams or root for players?
A player like Serena Williams or Maria Sharapova.
Those super champions, those iconic athletes.
They drove the entire sport to a new level.
And in women's basketball, it's the same.
So the athlete component is very important, also in team sports.
I don't know if there are things that people misunderstand about women's sports versus men's sports.
An airplane with four engines is going to have more power than one with two, but the one with two can be equally beautiful and great to fly.
It's not a comparison of who has more muscle mass or more speed.
Let's really embrace our differences.
I mean, being homogeneous is so uninteresting.
So if you could add any three players to Unrivaled, who would you choose?
You want me to say Caitlin Clark?
Obviously, Caitlin Clark would be great to have.
I don't know that I want you to.
I just I'm curious if you would.
You know, and I didn't say one because I'm curious if there are other players who you'd want
Yeah, I would like Coco Gauff to become a basketball player.
I think she would be amazing.
Nellie Korda to become a basketball player.
I would like all the players to be part of Unrivaled, all the WNBA players.
So this has been great.
What does Unrivaled represent in terms of the evolution of basketball and of women's sports overall right now?
Unrivaled is transforming the professional sports ecosystem.
It's not only the three-on-three component, you know, on a full but compressed court.
It's also the scoring, the target score in the fourth quarter that keeps it very exciting.
If you can find the sweet spot between an intimate kind of wow moment viewing experience and then do your tour stops to get the players in front of as many fans as possible, then that's great.
Well, Miki, thank you so much for doing this.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you.
We really appreciate it too.
Mickey is a good sport.
Taking my question about adding players to Unrivaled and playfully suggesting tennis star Coco Gauff and golfer Nelly Korda.
We haven't seen a crossover athlete quite like that yet, though the idea is fun.
Which is really Mickey's larger point, that Unrivaled is open to new, unexpected formats and partnerships.
Being a startup has its challenges and limitations, but having a clean slate being a leopard without spots, as Mickey puts it that's the mindset we all need if we're going to win in today's marketplace.
I'm looking forward to seeing how Unrivaled shows up here in my hometown of Brooklyn for the league semifinals on March 2nd.
A welcome highlight between the Olympics and March Madness.
I'm Bob Safian.
Thanks for listening.
We were awarded this incredible contract to put on an event for 2,000 people.
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Rapid Response is a Wait What original.
I'm Bob Safian.
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