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Michael Voepel, ESPN.com
The Virginia ladies’s basketball staff is getting what the varsity calls a “multi-year transformational reward” from entrepreneur and philanthropist Alexis Ohanian.
Ohanian, who’s married to tennis legend Serena Williams and is among the founding management homeowners within the Angel City FC staff within the NWSL, has a historical past of assist for and funding in ladies’s athletics. He can be an alumnus of the University of Virginia, graduating in 2005.
The particular greenback quantity of the reward was not launched, however it’s the largest within the historical past of the Virginia ladies’s basketball program. It will permit this system to be “a premier vacation spot for feminine student-athletes whereas addressing the monetary and aggressive calls for of this new period of school athletics,” the varsity stated.
“Starting Angel City and seeing the wave of funding in ladies’s sports activities actually has been inspiring,” Ohanian advised ESPN. “Women’s basketball has popped up consistently on my radar, and plenty of of us have been asking me about it.
“It’s my alma mater. I’m in New York quite a bit for work and I stay in Florida, so Charlottesville is a simple cease in between, so I’ll be catching fairly just a few video games.”
Ohanian has been bullish on the potential of girls’s sports activities for a number of years. He factors out that as not too long ago as 2019, it price roughly $1 million to purchase an growth staff within the NWSL. Contrast that to controlling stake in Angel City FC being bought in July to Willow Bay and Bob Iger, CEO of the Walt Disney Company, at a $250 million valuation.
“There was an under-investment in ladies’s sports activities, but in addition a mindset that it was not about excellence or enterprise returns, it was about ‘charity,’ ” Ohanian stated. “The curse of these low expectations actually hampered the expansion.”
He stated he was notably bothered seeing the “weight room debacle” revealed on social media by then-Oregon participant Sedona Prince in the course of the 2021 NCAA ladies’s basketball match held in a COVID-19 “bubble” in San Antonio. Prince confirmed how the ladies had just a few small stacks of weights at their NCAA match, in comparison with an unlimited weight room for the lads at their match in Indianapolis
“I used to be like, ‘This is senseless to me,’ ” stated Ohanian, who was important about it on social media on the time. “And the unhappy factor is, the expertise had been there within the ladies’s recreation. And for those who regarded on the Internet, at locations like Instagram, on the follower counts, the curiosity was there. This stated to me that the ladies simply wanted extra funding and promotion.”
Virginia coach Amaka Agugua-Hamilton stated she first heard of Ohanian’s curiosity from Cavaliers athletic director Carla Willams. Then Ohanian got here to the Cavaliers’ season-opener at John Paul Jones Arena in Charlottesville on Nov. 4 towards American and was impressed with the environment.
“I’m simply actually grateful he believes in his alma mater and our athletic division,” Agugua-Hamilton advised ESPN. “He believes in Carla, me, and the gamers.
“This is game-changing for us. The objective of the reward is to assist permit us to recruit and retain student-athletes and put ourselves in place to be an elite staff. We’ve been elite earlier than. We’re nonetheless going to function with excessive integrity, do issues the proper manner. But this enables us the monetary means to sort of degree the taking part in subject.”
Virginia stated the reward will assist handle the modern-day monetary calls for in school sports activities, as colleges navigate the switch portal, convention realignment, and the House vs. NCAA lawsuit, which might permit establishments to share income with student-athletes.
Virginia was one of many prime ladies’s packages within the nation below coach Debbie Ryan from the late Nineteen Eighties into the Nineteen Nineties, and made 20 consecutive NCAA match appearances from 1984-2003. That interval was highlighted by three consecutive journeys to the ladies’s Final Four in 1990-’91-’92. Those Cavalier groups have been led by level guard Dawn Staley, who’s now head coach of South Carolina and has received three nationwide championships with the Gamecocks.
Agugua-Hamilton stated Staley is a job mannequin and assist for her as a coach. Now in her third season main Virginia, Agugua-Hamilton believes the Cavaliers, 6-5, can return to upper-tier standing after making only one NCAA match look since 2010.
“We’re coping with some accidents and attempting to get folks again, however we’ll flip issues round this season,” she stated. “I all the time say progress is a course of, and this reward will assist with that now and long-term.”
Ohanian additionally hopes it conjures up extra alumni to assist the ladies’s sports activities packages at their colleges and companies to spend money on ladies’s athletics.
“Look, I’m fairly a groupie of girls’s sports activities, and I’m proud to be that,” he stated. “Yes, I’ve two daughters, and I need them to have nice position fashions. But that is not all that is. I like believing in issues when perhaps not as many different folks do. I believe it is why I’ve had success in my life as an early-stage investor.
“You see right this moment’s ladies’s athletes are hungry, they’re motivated. People are realizing why ladies’s sports activities are so compelling and price funding. It makes enterprise sense.”
