Wnba Primed For Trouble

Now that the women’s Final Four is final, we turn our attention to the tenuous professional game, where two things are abundantly clear:

The Golden Age for women professional players is officially over.

The entire age of women’s professional basketball might be over if those involved don’t wise up.

The women who finished their collegiate careers in 1997 and 1998 may not have realized it at the time, but they were in a rare and enviable position. Just about any player with decent statistics associated with a good program ended up with a job in the WNBA or the ABL.

Kristin Folkl and Kate Starbird of Stanford had their choice of leagues. Even collegiate players of little impact - such as Stanford’s Heather Owen from Moscow, Idaho - were drafted.

But now college stars, such as Nicole Erickson of Duke and Kellie Jolly of Tennessee, don’t know if they have a future in professional ball.

The job opportunities have been slashed in half, thanks to the demise of the ABL. And college players will be competing with older, seasoned ABL players for the few jobs that are available.

The advice now is just the same as it was five or 10 years ago: Get that degree, look at Europe as an option.

Which brings us to the more ominous development. If the people running women’s professional basketball don’t get smarter, we may continue the backward trend and end up with no professional league at all. Negotiations are ongoing between the WNBA and its players’ union over how to absorb the unemployed ABL players before training camps open May 13 (the WNBA season is scheduled to open June 10).

The union wants to put a hard limit on the number of ABL players allowed into the league - only two per team. That means 24 of the 100 unemployed players would get jobs. The league, wisely, doesn’t want to impose any limits.

There are lot of problems with the union stance. First is the questionable legality of trying to limit the job prospects for unemployed ABL players. Then there’s the idiocy of an unestablished league getting involved in an ugly labor dispute in its third season. But the biggest problem is this: Where’s the common sense?

Everyone always knew the WNBA had much more of all the important ingredients - money, marketing, sponsors, contacts. Everything. But if you’re going to be a professional league, you have to play by professional rules. And that means talent wins over loyalty every time.

The WNBA players need to wake up and realize they’re not in a position to make demands.

The best players in one league. That was what the ABL originally hoped to be, but the WNBA ruined that. Now, there’s another chance to do this the right way.

Former Stanford star Jennifer Azzi still hasn’t decided what she’s going to do next and if her future includes the WNBA. She doesn’t have to worry - clearly she would be one of the ex-ABL players who would get a job in the WNBA.

But the issue troubles her. Azzi has been selling people on her sport for more than a decade. She realizes there is still a lot of selling to do.

“We still have a ways to go,” she said. “As a sport, women’s basketball needs to be smart from here on out.”

Or else all the gains of the past few years will be erased. And the ABL will have died in vain.