It’s a long way from Oakland to a Golden State Valkyries game. The WNBA’s newest expansion franchise is owned by Joe Lacob’s Golden State Group, and the Valkyries share a home with the Warriors at Chase Center, an arena notoriously not located in the East Bay. Chase is in San Francisco’s Mission Bay neighborhood, an ever-evolving waterfront development that curls around the shoreline south of the Bay Bridge like a crook.
To get there, Oaklanders have a few options, none terribly convenient. They can take a bus to BART to Muni. They can coordinate a massive carpool, paying $85 for on-site parking. They can remember to buy ferry tickets weeks in advance. They can try to mix in a bike ride on either end of a bus or BART trip across the bay. Or they can say to hell with it and call a Lyft. Whatever the choice, the commute is an irritating reminder for Oakland fans that professional basketball, women’s and men’s alike, belongs to San Francisco now.
Longtime East Oakland resident Nenna Okonkwo was complaining to me recently about the stress of finding her way to an upcoming Valkyries home game with her kid. She didn’t want to pay those outrageous sums for parking. Could she try the ferry? Or maybe hitch a ride from someone in her women’s basketball pickup run? “I’m making a community out of just getting there,” Okonkwo said, smiling.
Despite the many inconveniences, Oaklanders are schlepping to The City anyway. They have claimed the Valkyries, even if the WNBA spurned them when picking a location for expansion. I’ve been following the phenomenon all season, for my own grassroots women’s basketball newsletterRough Notes but also as a fan. Like just about any queer woman who grew up playing basketball here, I feel the pull: an inaugural season aglow with Bay Area pride, queer-centered community, and an underdog bunch playing with soulful tenacity, well beyond even the most optimistic projections for the team. If something went missing when the Warriors blew town in 2019, fans are finding some piece of hit here, on the other side of the bay.
Relonda McGhee on a game day ferry departing from Jack London Square. Credit: Maya Goldberg-Safir for The Oaklandside
“If people don’t remember that the Warriors were in Oakland,” lifelong Oakland resident Brian McGhee was saying to me, “that means they are not natives.” I’d met McGhee and his wife Relonda on a special event ferry service leaving Jack London Square. It was June 19, and they were dressed head to toe in matching WNBA Juneteenth merch. We sat together while gliding past the gigantic steel cranes of the Oakland Seaport, talking about the couples’ roots in West Oakland (their families knew one another before the couple met at McClymonds).
“It hasn’t been the same,” said Relonda, referring to the energy around Warriors games during their golden era in Oakland. “It all comes back to The Town.”
I wanted to continue talking to the McGhees, but by then our short ferry ride across the bay had ended, the landscape fully transformed. We debarked beneath the towering waterfront properties of Mission Bay before walking 15 minutes toward the steps of Chase, or what Valkyries fans proudly call “Ballhalla.”
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Years before Lacob and the Warriors publicly announced their bid for a WNBA team, there was a separate campaign to bring a team to Oakland. In the fall of 2021, the African American Sports and Entertainment Group (AASEG) proposed locating a WNBA team in the Oakland Arena. With former WNBA star Alana Beard as the face of the group, AASEG received unanimous support from the Oakland City Council to approach the WNBA for a bid. That’s around the time folks like Joanie Lohman got on board with other community members who have deep ties to women’s basketball in Oakland. Together, they launched a WNBA Oakland campaign in support of AASEG’s effort. It was called “We’ve Got Next,” echoing the WNBA’s original slogan, and campaigners launched a petition to raise 20,000 signatures.
“Let’s make the WNBA the common person’s sport,” Lohman said in a podcast interview in 2023. “A place where everyone can show up. … Racial and gender justice jive with the ethic of the WNBA in Oakland.” Lohman, who has lived in Oakland since the 1970s, has witnessed generations of women’s basketball fandom in the region: from the San Francisco Pioneers to the San Jose Lasers to the Sacramento Monarchs, all pro women’s teams that are now defunct.
Through their shared affection for this billionaire’s shiny new team in San Francisco, Oaklanders have found home in each other.
Alexis Gray-Lawson also helped lead the WNBA Oakland public campaign. One of the most visible and successful women’s basketball players from The Town, Gray-Lawson played in the WNBA for three seasons in the 2010s. (Chelsea Gray, born in Hayward and now one of the leading lights in the WNBA, is a cousin.) In urging support for a WNBA team in Oakland, Gray-Lawson pointed unapologetically to the backbone of Golden State’s success.
“Oakland doesn’t get enough credit for who the Warriors are. Their personalities, their spirit, the way in which they function is really all Oakland,” she said in that same interview with Lohman. Gray-Lawson hoped a future WNBA team would be more affordable for “regular people from Oakland.” She had stopped going to Warriors games, she said, “because it’s absolutely unaffordable. … But it’s not the same energy. It’s not the same as what you got when you were in Oakland.”
Others agreed. Rita Forte, a native of Oakland who started a local pickup run called Women’s All B-Ball in 2015, had been calling for the WNBA team in her city for years. “Just imagine, I mean, just remember I said it here first: who said Oakland can’t have the WNBA?” she told KQED in 2019. “The Oakland fans would love it. It could bring back all of the Oakland fans who haven’t seen a basketball game in years because of being priced out.” As Forte continued expanding opportunities for amateur women’s basketball, word about a potential WNBA team spread throughout the community. “Some older women, like pioneers for women’s sports, they really wanted it,” said Okonkwo, who has competed with Women’s All B-Ball for the last 10 years. She heard about WNBA Oakland while playing pickup alongside women in their 60s. “So it was like: Yes, let’s do it! Let’s bring it here, we’re gonna support it, we’re gonna ride for it.”
But the WNBA Oakland campaign was snuffed out in the fall of 2023. While Lacob had hinted at his interest in owning a women’s team for years, Golden State had quietly worked behind the scenes to lock down a new investment opportunity. On October 5 of that year, the WNBA’s commissioner, Cathy Engelbert, sitting alongside Lacob and then-San Francisco Mayor London Breed, announced that the league’s 13th franchise would be awarded to Golden State. It was a sudden shift for many in Oakland. “I didn’t know anything until it came out,” said Forte. “And then my phone blew up.”
Was Oakland ever really in the running? Asked at the time about the alternative Oakland bid, Engelbert denied its existence. “There was not a second bid,” she said. “With a lot of cities, we have major discussions before you get into the bid process. But we had never received a bid from anyone else.” At the same time, SFGATE reported that Ray Bobbitt, AASEG’s founder, was surprised by Englebert’s response. He said his group had requested an application bid but never received one from the WNBA, adding that AASEG hadn’t had any communication from the league in six months.
Today, AASEG is diplomatic about the process. “Honestly, our group was singularly focused on our efforts to bring a WNBA team to Oakland,” the group said in a statement when I reached out. “So we didn’t have any direct knowledge of the process that Golden State was engaged in.” What AASEG does remember is the impact its own WNBA Oakland campaign had: “We feel strongly that our grassroots campaign, which was supported and covered by our local media partners, played a significant role in elevating the interest in bringing the WNBA to the Bay Area. Between our petition(s) and letter writing strategies, to our public press events; our efforts truly pushed WNBA excitement into a broad focus. … Ultimately, they were awarded the team, so we were congratulatory.”
The statement also came with a text message: “It was a win for women’s sports in the BAY AREA.”
“Man, it’s beautiful,” said Audacious Wilson, a Golden State Valkyries season ticket holder and longtime Oakland resident and educator. She was talking with me about her experiences sitting in section 103 during games. “It’s really bringing people from all experiences and backgrounds together. … I’m in there talking with people from all walks of life and learning their stories and their journeys and their joys.”
For Wilson, the Valkyries’ inaugural season arrived at an ideal moment. “COVID has really done a number on us,” she said. The Valkyries have helped to restore some of the social connections that were shattered in recent years. “There’s a builder and community archivist I worked with over 10 years prior to COVID,” she told me. “But then we literally met in the hallway [at a game] like, ‘Oh my god, it’s you!’ Now we’re building together again and having conversations around the work we do every day.”
Oakland’s Audacious Wilson was honored July 25 at Chase Center for her work with Girls Inc. of the Island City. Credit: Maya Goldberg-Safir for The Oaklandside
And while many folks from Oakland still complain about the challenge of getting to games — “Such a chore,” one lifelong Oakland fan and former basketball player put it — the atmosphere inside Ballhalla is indeed distinct: not dominated by the VCs in their quarter-zips who, it’s often whispered, have soured Warriors fandom, but by a developing culture that is intergenerational and predominantly queer. Queerness is everywhere at Balhalla, traveling along different frequencies at the same time, from the gay couples pushing their strollers to the crowds of lesbians delighting in the innuendo of the Valkyries cheer “What a dagger!”
Tiffany Threets, born and raised in Oakland, offered the games the ultimate compliment: “I can forget that it’s Chase,” she said. “In a good way.” Rita Forte of Women’s All B-Ball said she can’t attend a game without seeing people from Oakland at every turn. “I’ll miss a whole quarter because I’m going to get something to eat and I’m running into everyone on my way back,” Forte told me. “The last time I went to a game, I missed a whole two quarters.”
To Golden State’s credit, the franchise is aware of the power of Oakland’s cultural capital. Oakland artists and creators are featured throughout the team’s marketing, from in-game music by DJs Lady Ryan and DJSHELLHEART, to the Juneteenth poster designed by artist Taylor Smalls, to the sprawling mural by Alison Hueman inside the Valkyries practice facility in downtown Oakland, to the team’s opening night video, narrated by Kehlani and depicted from the POV of a giant flying raven, who soars past the Tribune Tower before flying across the Bay Bridge. (You can tell this video is a fantasy because it does not show the raven waiting for a Muni connection that never comes).
But Oaklanders like Threets will need more than gestures from the Valkyries.
“People say this all the time, that you can’t forget about Oakland,” said Threets, an artist and cocreator of Donut Time Designs. “So it’s like: Don’t be performative. We’ll always support and clap for the mural and the free shoes for the kids, but it’s beyond performative. What else are you doing to make sure that all these people are not forgotten about?”
Anna Johnson, the first pro women’s basketball player from Oakland, and former Oakland Tech standout Yolanda Shavies cheer at a Valkyries game. Credit: Maya Goldberg-Safir for The Oaklandside
An Oakland community organizer who has met with representatives from the Valkyries found the conversations limiting, if not outright frustrating. Ideas that met with initial enthusiasm didn’t get the proper follow-through. Or worse, the team seemed to claim them as its own. Nevertheless, the organizer wants to remain “supportive” of the Valkyries and agreed to speak with me only on the condition of anonymity. “We’re excited because it’s the WNBA, and they’re here in the bay,” they told me. “But they’re still corporate just like the Warriors. They are literally of the same thing.”
Then there is the question of whether the Valkyries will ever play again in Oakland. As they’ve closed in on an unanticipated playoff spot, speculation has mounted around whether they’ll need to relocate for potential postseason games, owing to a scheduling conflict at Chase. For Threets, competing in the historic home of the Warriors should be an obvious choice. “It’s just sitting there!” she said. “And we know about all the historic nights that have happened there. … Why can’t they budge?”
AASEG is in the midst of what has been a torturous process of buying the Oakland Coliseum complex, which includes the arena. I asked the group whether it had been in touch with the Valkyries about the possibility of hosting games in Oakland. “We are grateful that the Bay Area was awarded a team,” AASEG said in a statement. “We look forward to the possibility of WNBA games being played in Oakland.”
On a midsummer Tuesday evening at Xingones Cantina near Jack London Square, the room is electric with energy. There are about 60 people inside, all watching the down-to-the-buzzer battle between the Golden State Valkyries and the Atlanta Dream playing out on screen. After a delay caused by the strange appearance of a sex toy thrown on the court — to which we all respond in a collective shocked scream — the game comes to an even more dramatic finish, with rookie Janelle Salaun muscling through for the Valkyries’ game-winning bucket. This room of intergenerational fans explodes: strangers-turned-friends high-fiving and hugging over a key win for the prospects of a Valkyries playoff run.
Welcome to what organizer Audacious Wilson has dubbed “The People’s Watch Party,” a series of gatherings to watch the Valkyries play, including raffle giveaways, free shots of tequila, trivia, and a crew of hosts all with deep ties in Oakland. In fact, throughout the summer, Wilson brought together delegates from every corner of East Bay Valkyries fandom, among them Rita Forte, Kim Woozy, and Sara Brande (another key member of WNBA Oakland) from Women’s All B-Ball; Tiffany Threets and her wife, Jane Rabanal, of Donut Time Designs; and Jeff Perstein of SoleSpace Lab.
Valkyries head coach Natalie Nakase, center; players Kayla Thornton and Veronica Burton; and assistant coach Sugar Rodgers at the team’s Oakland training facility in May 2025. Credit: AP Photo/Jeff Chiu
“I think for us there’s another level to [Valkyries fandom] because we are all rooted in the community, like the Oakland community,” said Threets. “There’s another level of community unlocked for us that we get to build our own little Marvel superteam to make these watch parties happen.” The group, which some playfully call “The Avengers,” is focused on making the WNBA more accessible for folks from Oakland. “It’s not, ‘Oh, that’s just a San Francisco team,’” said Wilson. “It’s like, no, this is our team.”
“This idea of community building, it feels more to me like it’s community-bridging,” said Megan Doherty-Baker of the ValQueeries, a fast-growing LGBTQ+ Valkyries fan group, who joined the People’s Watch Party’s first event in July. “Like so many of these women’s basketball communities have already been here.” For organizers from Oakland, waiting to become a priority for the Valkyries isn’t an option: it’s about drawing on the support of the community itself. That’s how it’s always been anyway. As Forte told me: “We’ve never waited. We’ve been building for 10 years. We built this ourselves.” Okonkwo was joking when she told me about making a community by battling through traffic to get to Chase, but she was also getting at something real: Through their shared affection for this billionaire’s shiny new team in San Francisco, Oaklanders have found home in each other.
After the game, over a dozen folks continued hanging out inside Xingones, where owner Mayra-Alex Velazquez has made a habit of passing out tiny plastic cups of tequila after games. Two women approached Forte, who also owns Olive Street Agency, a graphic design business located in East Oakland. “I know I’ve seen you before!” one said. They stood in a circle, pondering how they knew each other, until the moment clicked. As it turned out, both women played a role in helping the legendary Black-owned television network Soul Beat return to local airwaves.
“We were already connected but now we’re connected in this way too,” Forte told me later. “So it’s only gonna strengthen relationships inside our communities.”
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