WOMEN IN SPORTS| MONSTER ALLEY| WRITING CHALLENGE
Remembering My Hometown WNBA Team on Women in Sports Day
The Sacramento Monarchs were a good and entertaining team to watch play basketball but folded way too soon
There were many things I wanted to say about this awesome observance on February 7th. I found the website for NGWSD if you want to read more about what they do to support women in sports and how you could help out. I decided that I was going to go nostalgic for this one.
I grew up in a major sports market for both the NBA and the WNBA for a long time. The Sacramento Kings came to town and have been there to this day since 1985 when I was three years old. And the WNBA had the Sacramento Monarchs. The Monarchs were one of the eight original WNBA teams in 1997 before they folded in 2009.
It was sad to see them go but I got to see their games for 12 seasons. In that time, they won the city’s only major sports championship and two conference championships. They had great players like Yolanda Griffith, Ticha Penicheiro, and Ruthie Bolton, plus many other players I can’t quite recall but got to watch at ARCO Arena, the Kings’ old stadium as well, over the years.
The WNBA in the early years wasn’t super profitable and still isn’t but I feel like a community gathered around the Monarchs and the fans diehard supported this team to the very end of their run. I remember even rooting for them in their off years when they weren’t that great.
It was a community event to watch the Monarchs play. They were also a team that I felt like I could happily support because of the prevalence of fans from the LGBTQ+ community even though I was still in the closet. I remember meeting some of the players at community events throughout their run in Sacramento. And thought that the women on the team were super inspirational to other young women basketball players in the area and gave them hope for playing in their own hometown.
Many of us were truly devastated to lose the Monarchs when they folded. There was a petition to bring the team back when they folded but around the same time, the bigger issue of trying to keep the men’s team from leaving seemed to be a bigger issue for the city. I feel like officials let that team die to focus on saving the Kings from leaving.
It’s sad but it shows how much further we still have to go to make the women’s game a much bigger deal than it is. To me, watching women’s basketball is entertaining in the fact that the fundamentals and skills seem to be more focused on than in the men’s game today. I’m not saying that the NBA isn’t talented but the WNBA should be praised for a lot of the same reasons the men’s game is praised for.
Now I see up-and-coming college stars like Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese and I remain optimistic for the future of women in sports and the WNBA as a whole. I wish one day that the women’s game gains more attention to at least approach the level of the men’s game.
Bringing back folded franchises would help with that as growing the game to more markets would help with exposure. I get that it’s a business but contracting teams doesn’t exactly incentivize fans to stay loyal. I’m sure there are still plenty of Sacramentans rooting for other WNBA teams these days but I’m sure they’d love to root for our hometown Monarchs again.
