It’s 10:30 p.m. on a Monday night in late January, and Kayla McBride is wiped out. Sitting down at the microphone for Unrivaled’s postgame press conference, the Laces Basketball Club standout, affectionately called “McBuckets,” glances at the stat sheet in front of her in disbelief.

“Eighteen minutes?!” she says to reporters from news outlets including Women’s Health. “That’s minuscule compared to how I feel.”

While her playing time in the Laces’ 71-64 victory over Rose Basketball Club had lasted just 18 minutes and 51 seconds (with the guard leading the club with 31 points), she was absolutely gassed.

McBride, a 32-year-old WNBA veteran who played the past four seasons with the Minnesota Lynx, averages more than 30 minutes of court time per game during the regular season. But playing in the inaugural season of Unrivaled, a full-court 3-on-3 league, “feels so different,” McBride says. “There’s a lot of miles on my body.”

Unrivaled games are shorter—with 7-minute quarters to the WNBA’s 10—and the 72-foot-long court is more than 20 feet shorter, too. While the shorter game of 3-on-3 seems like a sprint to viewers, to players, it’s a marathon. “With only six players on the court, you’re always engaged in some fashion, on both ends of the ball,” McBride explains. “It can be exhausting. It’s taxing. That’s the name of the game.”

Before 2025, a majority of top WNBA players spent the offseason playing traditional 5-on-5 basketball in overseas leagues, which can supplement the often paltry income the world’s best female athletes make in American pro leagues. (For context, WNBA number one draft pick Caitlin Clark’s 2024 rookie base salary was $76,535. In the NBA, all 30 first-round picks make no less than $2 million each.)

But in 2025, McBride’s Lynx teammate Napheesa Collier, along with New York Liberty forward Breanna Stewart, founded Unrivaled to give players an opportunity to make the highest-ever salaries in women’s team sports—an average of $222,222 for about three months—while also allowing them to stay stateside and compete with and against top-tier talent. “We want everyone to have the option,” Stewart told WH in April 2024 after raising more than $35 million in funding for the venture.

Unrivaled aims to quite literally provide players with an “unrivaled” experience—from state-of-the-art fitness and recovery equipment to paid-for housing and childcare services (8 of the 36 players are moms, including Collier and Stewart). The facilities are NBA caliber, says Lindsey Elizondo, a physical therapist and athletic trainer who spent the past four seasons working with the Orlando Magic and now serves as director of medical for Unrivaled. “These are the best athletes in the world, and they deserve access to the best things in the world—and to not have to be searching for it,” she says. “It should just be at their fingertips to let them perform at that level.”

And with strong infrastructure in place to support these athletes, high-level output quickly follows. Sure, the extra conditioning required to maintain stamina in a fast-paced 3-on-3 game may hurt in the moment, but Unrivaled’s inaugural season is quickly proving that it is here to forever change the DNA of women’s basketball.

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Unrivaled’s Inaugural Season Is Changing Players’ Bodies—And The DNA Of Women’s Pro Basketball