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Michael Voepel, ESPN.com
The Virginia ladies’s basketball workforce is getting what the college calls a “multi-year transformational present” from entrepreneur and philanthropist Alexis Ohanian.
Ohanian, who’s married to tennis legend Serena Williams and is without doubt one of the founding management homeowners within the Angel Metropolis FC workforce within the NWSL, has a historical past of help for and funding in ladies’s athletics. He’s additionally an alumnus of the College of Virginia, graduating in 2005.
The particular greenback quantity of the present was not launched, however it’s the largest within the historical past of the Virginia ladies’s basketball program. It should 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 faculty athletics,” the college mentioned.
“Beginning Angel Metropolis and seeing the wave of funding in ladies’s sports activities actually has been inspiring,” Ohanian instructed ESPN. “Girls’s basketball has popped up consistently on my radar, and plenty of people have been asking me about it.
“It is my alma mater. I’m in New York loads for work and I reside in Florida, so Charlottesville is a simple cease in between, so I will be catching fairly a number of video games.”
Ohanian has been bullish on the potential of girls’s sports activities for a number of years. He factors out that as lately as 2019, it value roughly $1 million to purchase an growth workforce within the NWSL. Distinction that to controlling stake in Angel Metropolis FC being sold in July to Willow Bay and Bob Iger, CEO of the Walt Disney Firm, at a $250 million valuation.
“There was an under-investment in ladies’s sports activities, but additionally a mindset that it was not about excellence or enterprise returns, it was about ‘charity,’ ” Ohanian mentioned. “The curse of these low expectations actually hampered the expansion.”
He mentioned he was notably bothered seeing the “weight room debacle” revealed on social media by then-Oregon participant Sedona Prince through the 2021 NCAA ladies’s basketball match held in a COVID-19 “bubble” in San Antonio. Prince confirmed how the ladies had a number of small stacks of weights at their NCAA match, in comparison with an enormous weight room for the lads at their match in Indianapolis
“I used to be like, ‘This is unnecessary to me,’ ” mentioned Ohanian, who was essential about it on social media on the time. “And the unhappy factor is, the expertise had been there within the ladies’s sport. And when you appeared on the Web, at locations like Instagram, on the follower counts, the curiosity was there. This mentioned to me that the ladies simply wanted extra funding and promotion.”
Virginia coach Amaka Agugua-Hamilton mentioned 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 Enviornment in Charlottesville on Nov. 4 towards American and was impressed with the ambiance.
“I am simply actually grateful he believes in his alma mater and our athletic division,” Agugua-Hamilton instructed ESPN. “He believes in Carla, me, and the gamers.
“That is game-changing for us. The aim of the present is to assist permit us to recruit and retain student-athletes and put ourselves in place to be an elite workforce. We have been elite earlier than. We’re nonetheless going to function with excessive integrity, do issues the appropriate manner. However this enables us the monetary means to sort of stage the taking part in discipline.”
Virginia mentioned the present will assist handle the modern-day monetary calls for in faculty sports activities, as faculties navigate the switch portal, convention realignment, and the Home vs. NCAA lawsuit, which may permit establishments to share income with student-athletes.
Virginia was one of many prime ladies’s packages within the nation beneath coach Debbie Ryan from the late 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 Ultimate 4 in 1990-’91-’92. These Cavalier groups had been led by level guard Daybreak Staley, who’s now head coach of South Carolina and has received three nationwide championships with the Gamecocks.
Agugua-Hamilton mentioned Staley is a job mannequin and help 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 individuals again, however we’ll flip issues round this season,” she mentioned. “I at all times say progress is a course of, and this present will assist with that now and long-term.”
Ohanian additionally hopes it conjures up extra alumni to help the ladies’s sports activities packages at their faculties and companies to spend money on ladies’s athletics.
“Look, I am fairly a groupie of girls’s sports activities, and I am proud to be that,” he mentioned. “Sure, I’ve two daughters, and I would like them to have nice position fashions. However that is not all that is. I like believing in issues when perhaps not as many different individuals do. I feel it is why I’ve had success in my life as an early-stage investor.
“You see at the moment’s ladies’s athletes are hungry, they’re motivated. Persons are realizing why ladies’s sports activities are so compelling and price funding. It makes enterprise sense.”
