Players in 2026 WNBA Draft enter league in a new era created by predecessors
When Sue Bird was in fifth grade, she and her classmates were asked to predict what they’d be when they grew up. Bird wrote: A doctor, a lawyer or a professional soccer player. At the time, there was no NWSL (or WNBA, for that matter).
The main professional team sports leagues in the U. S. were for men — the NBA, NFL, MLB and NHL.
It’s not surprising that someone who achieved so much in her profession was so driven as a child that she could easily imagine a world that didn’t yet exist. Three decades later, Bird would retire from the WNBA as the league’s leader in assists and games played. “The year I made those predictions, the WNBA didn’t even exist yet.
There was no professional path, no professional league, no obvious place for someone like me,” Bird said in her Naismith Hall of Fame enshrinement speech. “What a wild journey over 30 years to go from no league at all to a league of our own. ” What a wild journey, indeed.
A few years after making that prediction for herself, still before there was a WNBA, Bird traveled to Philadelphia to see the 1996 Olympic women’s basketball team play as part of its run up to the Atlanta Games. Watching those women — many of whom went on to become founding players in the WNBA — was Bird’s “see it, be it” moment. Once she saw what they did on the floor, and the path they carved out in the professional basketball world, Bird knew where she was going.
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