When Matildas Fever took over the nation in 2023, and suddenly there wasn’t an Aussie who couldn’t name at least a few of the squad, it proved that the future of women’s sport is built on stories.
Now, the Women’s National Basketball League (WNBL) is chasing its own Matildas moment, and at SXSW Sydney, CEO Jennie Sager and basketball legend Lauren Jackson drilled in that the next frontier of growth for women’s sport all comes down to storytelling.
Ready To Rise
Earlier this year, the WNBL unveiled its re-imagined brand identity, Ready to Rise, marking a new chapter for Australia’s longest-running women’s league. With a stylised “W” transforming into a winged icon, the new look was designed to symbolise “power in motion,” where elegance meets intensity.
“The WNBL as we know it has been forged from a rich history and today, we enter a brand-new chapter of the league, one that is shaping the future of the game for our players, fans and clubs,” Sager said at the time.
Under her leadership, the league has already delivered a historic pay-parity deal and a repositioning that puts purpose and progress front and centre.
But a rebrand is just surface level unless it resonates and at SXSW, Sager made it clear that ‘Ready to Rise’ signals a whole new way of telling the league’s story.
Owning The Narrative
WNBL’s greatest opportunity, according to Sager, is connection and its something that has been missing in the women’s game for quite some time.
“People know our biggest athletes like Lauren Jackson or Kayla George, but dozens of others who are incredible are still unknown,” she said. “Some people can’t even name the teams in our league. We have to build an emotional connection between fans, athletes and teams, for fans of women’s sport, that connection is undoubly important.”
It’s an idea that flips the traditional sports-marketing playbook, but in practice is what keeps sports fans coming back to all leagues across the globe. Instead of selling performance – though the success of Aussie Basketball teams is hard to deny – the WNBL needs to sell personality.
“What happens a lot in sport is people rely on stats,” Sager said. “But that’s not what keeps fans coming back. You have to really get to know that athlete off the court.”
For Jackson, the shift toward athlete centric storytelling in sport represents progress she once couldn’t imagine.
“When I first started, we were actively made to be more feminine and not embrace who we are,” she recalled. “Now, the athletes have taken control, and people love it.”
She believes the women’s game shouldn’t copy the men’s. “Because we aren’t paid at the same rate, we play for different reasons. The distinction between women’s and men’s sport is really important. The women’s game is more mental, people come for a different reason, and that’s worth celebrating”.
While Jackson’s legacy looms large, she was quick to deflect the spotlight. “My success is long gone,” she said. “We have to focus on the kids coming through now. There are so many athletes that haven’t had the recognition they deserve.”
“I’ve been really fortunate to have so much spotlight and attention here, but it’s been to the detriment of the sport,” she admitted. “There are incredible players who just haven’t had the attention they deserve.”
Sager echoed the sentiment, adding that the imbalance between global and local coverage remains one of the WNBL’s biggest hurdles. “What inevitably happens is a journalist reaches out and says, ‘We want to do a story on the WNBL, can we talk to Lauren?’” she said. “And I have to remind people that Australia is providing more athletes to the WNBA than any other country”.
Even when those players dominate overseas, their stories often go untold at home. “They go to the US and they’re huge stars,” Sager said. “Then they come back here and wonder why no one wants to tell their story. The fans see it, we just need the media to see it.”
Breaking The Broadcast Barrier
In a fragmented attention economy, accessibility is everything. “Right now we’re in a really crowded space, streaming, social, traditional TV,” Sager said. “We have to make sure we can reach fans locally and globally.”
That means making basketball easy to find and impossible to ignore. “At this stage of the WNBL’s growth, we can’t afford to divide our audience. If that means sacrificing some other things to make it easier for people to find our games and content, that’s okay, because we’re in a rapid growth period,” she said.
Every game this season will air across Nine Now, Channel Nine and ESPN, a move Sager described as deliberate simplicity. “It’s very easy to say, and that matters,” she said. “We’re not at the stage where things should be stuck behind a paywall. The NFL can afford that, we can’t. Accessibility has to come before monetisation”.
Drawing on her 20 years in television, Sager argued that traditional broadcast metrics are outdated. “Networks are still using 20-year-old measurements to decide value,” she said. “You get trapped in this cycle, your ratings aren’t high enough, so you get a bad timeslot, which means fewer people can find you. Success doesn’t look the same as it did two decades ago, broadcasters need to catch up.”
“A lot of the big networks see women’s sport as a diversity box to tick, they give you a deal but bury you in a terrible slot. We need partners who see the real opportunity,” she said.
“One in five girls in Australia plays basketball. Who has the buying power in those households? Women. The mums of those girls. That’s your audience”.
The same bravery, Sager added, must carry through to commercial partnerships. “You can get stuck in a safe space, working with the same ten brands that sponsor every sport. We wanted to stop and ask: who do we want representing the league? Who will our athletes be proud to work with? Who can grow with us?”
Taking cues from the WNBA’s success with brands like Sephora and Fenty Beauty, the WNBL’s approach is to build partnerships that reflect its players’ identities. “Our athletes can be allowed to be women too, not just athletes,” Sager said. “They can be strong, glamorous, funny, whatever they want to be. And that’s exactly what we want to celebrate.”
With participation rising, Olympic success fresh in memory and a new brand era underway, women’s basketball is entering a defining chapter, and if SXSW Sydney proved anything, it’s that the athletes themselves will be the defining force behind what comes next.
