Victories are not only something the WNBA can claim when it comes to its play on the court, but also off the court and inside the boardroom too.
The WNBA’s 20th season was also the first for new president Lisa Borders, who, of course, was influential in getting the league to expand to Atlanta. Multichannel News recently named the soon-to-be second year league president as co-Sports Brand Executive of the Year.
Borders is sharing the honor with Jamie Horowitz of Fox Sports One.
Mentioned in the article were the league’s gains in attendance, ratings, and social media awareness. She spoke on many topics, including where the league stands after 20 years, marketing, changes to the on-court play, social media awareness, and where the league can grow and evolve from this point.
We applaud the NBA, they’re part of our family, but we are the younger sibling in the family. And it takes time to grow and get your footing and walk briskly before you run. So, my response to people is, give us time to grow into the mature league that we know we’re going to grow into.
–Borders on the WNBA’s growth in comparison to the NBA’s
We did two things with the technical components of the game. One was changing the offensive rebounding clock to 14 seconds rather than 24 seconds. Clearly that paid off in terms of pace of the game, but if you look at our statistics – for field goals with number of points scored, field goal percentages, assists – we have some of the highest statistics ever in the history of our game during this season. The same thing is true when you look at the playoff format, with single elimination in the first two rounds.
–Borders on changes to on-court play and playoff format
Things that are working really, really well, like social media, we’re going to ramp them up. So not only will we share content about individual games and individual series of plays or individual series of games, now we will drill down further and begin to share information and content about our individual players.
–Borders on the league’s social media strategy going forward
(Original article: Multichannel News)
By: Akiem Bailum (@AkiemBailum on Twitter, Instagram)
