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The WNBA has exploded in popularity in recent years. Ticket sales and TV viewing keep climbing, and the league is expanding to new cities. But not all the attention has been positive. Two male players formerly in the NBA have declared their intent to get drafted into the league in a move many see as trolling. And there's been a worrying escalation in abuse and threats directed at players. One team is taking a novel approach to this by partnering with groups that specialize in national security. NPR's domestic extremism correspondent Odette Yousef reports.
UNIDENTIFIED DJ: Everybody, on your feet, out your seat, and let me hear you make some noise.
ODETTE YOUSEF, BYLINE: If you've been to a WNBA game, you know it's a vibe.
UNIDENTIFIED DJ: (Chanting) Let's go, Chicago. Let's go, Sky. Let's go, Sky. Let's go, Sky.
YOUSEF: That was definitely true at a Chicago Sky home game last month against the Connecticut Sun.
UNIDENTIFIED DJ: Louder.
YOUSEF: But on this particular night, along with the energetic fun of the sport and spectacle...
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YOUSEF: ...The Sky was trying something new.
UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER: The Chicago Sky welcomes PERIL as our community spotlight...
YOUSEF: The Sky was featuring a new partner called PERIL. That stands for the Polarization & Extremism Research & Innovation Lab, based at American University. PERIL describes its work as, quote, "preventing radicalization to violent extremism by strengthening community resilience." So why would a women's basketball team turn to specialists in violent extremism? Cynthia Miller-Idriss is PERIL's founder.
CYNTHIA MILLER-IDRISS: You know, the WNBA has had terrible instances of misogyny. They've had sex toys thrown on the court during games.
YOUSEF: Misogyny which at times has tipped into criminal behavior.
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #1: Breaking news right now, at 9:40, the first court hearing just wrapped up for the man accused of stalking Fever star Sophie Cunningham.
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #2: A surprise admission of guilt. A Texas man accused of stalking Indiana Fever star Caitlin Clark was in...
YOUSEF: Miller-Idriss says these instances of harassment and abuse are not one-offs. She says they're the result of normalized misogyny in our society. And she goes further than that. She says that treating gender-based abuse and harassment as one-offs or as private household issues puts the larger public at risk.
MILLER-IDRISS: Sixty percent of mass shooters in the U.S., going back to 1949, have a documented criminal history of domestic and intimate partner violence.
YOUSEF: Miller-Idriss' new book, "Man Up: The New Misogyny And The Rise Of Violent Extremism," delves into this link. She says the connection between gender-based violence and public violence is consistent and underresearched. PERIL's partnership with the Chicago Sky aims to get as far upstream of this problem as it can. The goal is to change cultural norms, to make even casual misogyny taboo by calling it out. At a table in a hallway behind stadium seats, PERIL staff engaged fans in discussions about calling out toxic rhetoric and harassment in women's sports. And at quarter breaks, this Sky's PA announcer throws trivia questions to randomly chosen audience members.
MILLER-IDRISS: A player gets the same negative message from lots of different accounts. What is it called A, B, C or D?
YOUSEF: It's a game, but with an educational twist.
MILLER-IDRISS: It is C. Congratulations. Thank you so much.
YOUSEF: One question quizzes the audience on dogpiling, an online abuse tactic where social media accounts overwhelm a target with negative messages. Nadia Rawlinson, the Sky's co-owner and chairman, says that keeping players mentally and physically safe relates directly to business.
NADIA RAWLINSON: I just want my players to think about their one mission, which is to be the most competitive, best player that they can when they come out to the court every night for a game.
YOUSEF: But the safety environment affects more than the players. Frankie de la Cretaz says it protects WNBA fans as well.
FRANKIE DE LA CRETAZ: After I attended my first WNBA game as a fan, I shifted my entire career because I loved the vibe at the games so much. It was the most positive sporting experience I'd ever had as a fan.
YOUSEF: De la Cretaz is an independent journalist who focuses on the intersection of sports and gender. Before that game in 2017, De la Cretaz was a men's sports reporter. They said they got hooked on covering the WNBA because of its unique diversity and inclusiveness. It was welcoming and fun. But De la Cretaz says that changed during the 2024 season. They felt it at a game where the Connecticut Sun and the Indiana Fever were facing off. De la Cretaz says some audience members were jeering Sun players in blatantly racist ways.
DE LA CRETAZ: And my partner and I are both white. We're queer and we're trans, but we're white. And it was so uncomfortable, we almost left early.
YOUSEF: That year, 2024, was a turning point for the WNBA in many ways. It was the rookie season for two of its biggest stars, Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese. De la Cretaz says a media-manufactured narrative of rivalry between the two helped launch the league to unprecedented popularity. But it also opened the floodgates for new WNBA fans and trolls, who came to exploit that narrative's racial dimensions.
Clark is white. Reese is Black. And with that came those who see a league of mostly Black, accomplished and powerful women athletes as a threat to a conservative cultural ideal. While the Chicago Sky is partnering with PERIL to create safety upstream, the team is also investing in downstream tools to identify and interrupt abuse before it spills into the real world. The team has hired Moonshot, a threat intelligence group that was started a decade ago to help governments fight terrorism. Elizabeth Neumann is Moonshot's chief strategy officer.
ELIZABETH NEUMANN: It says a lot that here we are, 10 years later, taking that same methodologies that we use to help governments counter terrorism and other targeted violence, and we are now having to apply it to sport entertainment.
YOUSEF: Neumann says the escalation in hostility against the WNBA in 2024 is also happening elsewhere. Moonshot worked with the U.S. Olympic Committee to protect Team USA athletes at the Paris 2024 and the Milano Cortina 2026 games. In just those two years, Moonshot documented a huge growth in online abuse and threats.
NEUMANN: Per athlete, we had seven times more threats of violence, five times more nonconsensual intimate imagery and two times as many credible threats escalated to law enforcement.
YOUSEF: The data that Moonshot's gathered from its monitoring of this issue are troubling. They show that women, especially Black women, are overwhelmingly receiving racist, sexualized abuse that targets them for their identities, not for their performance. The Chicago Sky's work with PERIL and Moonshot aims to address safety needs in ways that are both practical and holistic, immediate and long-term. Sky center Elizabeth Williams says maybe this experiment will yield useful insights outside the world of women's basketball.
ELIZABETH WILLIAMS: When it comes to online hate, you know, we're trying to put ourselves in a position where we know that it's not our problem, like, we didn't create this problem, but we want to find different solutions.
YOUSEF: Which is to say, haters are going to hate, but they don't have to ruin the game for everyone.
Odette Yousef, NPR News.
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