Airdate: Friday, April 17 at 10 AM<\/p>\n
The 2026 WNBA season tips off next month. It\u2019s expected to see historic viewership and attendance, after last season\u2019s record-breaking run as the most-watched regular season in the history of the league. But even though this is the WNBA\u2019s historic 30th season, women have been playing basketball since long before 1996. Sports journalists Jordan Robinson and Emma Baccellieri set out to profile the female trailblazers who changed basketball history, like Denise Long Rife, the first woman drafted by an NBA team when she was recruited to the San Francisco Warriors in 1969, and Ora Washington, who in the 1930s became a star on her YMCA\u2019s all-Black basketball team after already winning \u201calmost every tennis trophy available to a Black woman in pre-war America.\u201d We\u2019ll celebrate the players and coaches who made women\u2019s basketball into the phenomenon it is today, and get a preview for the upcoming season, with Robinson and Baccellieri. Their new book is \u201cCourt Queens: Celebrate the Players, Teams, and History of Women\u2019s Basketball.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Airdate: Friday, April 17 at 10 AM The 2026 WNBA season tips off next month. It\u2019s expected to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":712086,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3724],"tags":[7],"class_list":{"0":"post-712085","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-basketball","8":"tag-basketball"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/116417062728686842","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/712085","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=712085"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/712085\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/712086"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=712085"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=712085"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=712085"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}