Women’s basketball back on the rise in the Northwest

Published 9:44 pm Thursday, April 14, 2016

Mark it down. The months of March and April of 2016 are when the sport of women’s basketball regained a position of prominence in the Puget Sound Region.

When, at 4:11 p.m. PDT Thursday afternoon, WNBA president Lisa Borders announced Breanna Stewart as the Seattle Storm’s selection with the first-overall pick of the WNBA draft, it was the final incantation in the resurrection of a sport that not so long ago found itself forgotten on a dusty shelf in the back of the local sports closet.

But like a family heirloom that was rediscovered while packing up for a move, women’s hoops will once again find its place on the living room mantle.

For those wishing for women’s basketball to succeed in the region, it’s hard to imagine a better boost than the month-long stretch that began with the University of Washington women’s basketball team’s unexpected march to the NCAA Women’s Final Four, then concluded with the Storm’s selection of Stewart, one of the most celebrated collegiate players of all time.

“I have high expectations for myself,” Stewart said Thursday during a conference call with local media. “Obviously you want to have an impact as soon as you can. I know that sometimes what you want isn’t going to happen. But my plan is to go to Seattle, help out in any way possible, and make a mark.”

That mark will extend beyond the court.

The local sports community has shown it will support women’s basketball when things are going well. During my 30-odd years of sports consciousness I remember those pockets of popularity.

The Chris Gobrecht years at Washington in the late 1980s are the first I recall, peaking with the 1989-90 team that, led by the frontcourt duo of Karen Deden and Amy Mickelson, finished 28-3 and reached the NCAA quarterfinals. There was another pinnacle in 2000-01, when the June Daugherty-coached Dawgs also advanced to the national quarterfinals behind the three-guard attack of Giuliana Mendiola, Megan Franza and Loree Payne.

Then when the Huskies drifted back into irrelevance in the mid-2000s, the Storm filled the void. The drafting of Lauren Jackson with the first-overall pick in 2001, followed by the addition of Sue Bird with the first-overall selection in 2002, formed the nucleus of a team that won WNBA titles in 2004 and 2010 and was in the playoffs every year between.

The popularity of those teams were evident by the attendance numbers. In 1990 the Huskies drew crowds of 8,170 and 7,392 to Hec Edmundson Pavilion for home games. From 2004-11 the Storm averaged more than 8,000 fans per contest.

But those numbers have fallen. The UW women’s basketball media guide lists the 25 largest crowds in school history through the 2014-15 season. None of those came since 2004, and the largest home crowd last season was just 3,447. Meanwhile, the Storm saw their attendance dip nearly 27 percent from a height of 8,906 per game in 2005 to 6,516 last season.

The reason for the decline in interest was the quality of play. The UW suffered through a disastrous four-year stretch from 2007-11, when the Tia Jackson-coached Huskies failed to win more than 13 games in a season. The Storm haven’t finished with a winning record since 2011, and Seattle missed the playoffs each of the past two seasons in a league where eight of the 12 teams advance to the postseason. These last few years have been the dark ages for Seattle-area women’s basketball.

But this all changes now.

Stewart is the most exciting player to enter the WNBA in a generation. She achieved unprecedented success in college at the University of Connecticut, leading the Huskies to four straight national championships and three times being named the Naismith College Player of the Year. The versatile 6-foot-4 forward can do it all as she scored inside, outside and upside down during her time at UConn. Seattle didn’t just win the draft lottery last September, this was the basketball Powerball sweepstakes. In Stewart and point guard Jewell Lloyd, the first-overall pick in the 2015 WNBA draft, the Storm have the makings of the new Jackson and Bird.

Add that to the direction the UW is headed. The Huskies are poised for big things under the tutelage of coach Mike Neighbors, who has everything pointed in the right direction. Washington also has stars Kelsey Plum and Chantel Osahor back next season as seniors, which should make the Huskies among the favorites in the Pac-12.

Let me conclude with an anecdote. The night of the national semifinal game against Syracuse my wife and I found ourselves in a pub in Eastsound on Orcas Island. The pub was populated largely by locals. Despite the rugged blue-collar feel to the patrons, all the television screens were tuned to the UW game. Young men sporting full beards and flannel shirts, who would have looked right at home on a fishing boat, were glued to the action.

When women’s basketball has captured the imagination of the lumbersexual set, you know it’s made the breakthrough.

Check out Nick Patterson’s Seattle Sidelines blog at http://www.heraldnet.com/seattlesidelines, and follow him on Twitter at @NickHPatterson.