Napheesa Collier, the WNBA’s Fiercest Warrior
In less than four years, Collier had a baby, won Olympic gold, and cofounded a women’s sports league worth $340 million. Now she’s the face of the WNBA’s fight for fair pay—and she’s not taking no for an answer.
When sixth-grade Napheesa Collier wasn’t given the opportunity to try out for her Missouri hometown’s Amateur Athletic Union basketball team because it was “full,” her parents created their own team of girls from neighboring towns called the Lady Warriors. And when Collier was looking for better financial opportunities than the WNBA provided, she did the same thing.
In 2023 her husband and business partner, Alex Bazzell, sat down with New York Liberty’s Breanna Stewart to discuss an off-season league that would offer higher salaries than the W, equity in the league for inaugural players, and an opportunity to remain in the States between regular seasons. “I was actually overseas at the time, so Alex flew to New York, had dinner with Stewie, kind of laid out the plan, everything involved,” she tells me. “Right away, she’s like, ‘This sounds awesome. This is something I want to be a part of.’ And she came on board.”
After raising $35 million in capital investments and scoring a multiyear media rights deal with TNT, the trio launched the first season of Unrivaled, a Miami-based three-on-three league featuring 36 of the best players in the WNBA in January 2025. Since its inaugural season, Unrivaled has been valued at $340 million and is already expanding its roster and state-of-the-art facilities.
If all of this sounds very fast, Collier initially planned to move even quicker. “Honestly, we were trying to push to launch in 2024, but that was just way too fast,” she said. “I mean, the sport is just exploding. We knew the time was now, and so the faster you can get in and get it off the ground, the better.” In the end, she said, it was the right choice to wait another year and make sure they were able to create the best experience for fans and players.
And despite how effortless her style of play might look, it’s not. “I’m not the most athletic player, and I’m undersized for my position, but something that I was taught at UConn is that I try to use my abilities to be smarter than other players,” she says. That means reading scout reports and thinking hard about timing and the way she maneuvers her body. “I am smaller than a lot of people, so I have to use my body to get into them before I shoot again, just trying to outsmart instead of out-talent, because I’m not gonna be able to do that.”
I don’t know about that, but it sounds like another example of the strategic instinct she’s employed to push for changes in the WNBA. “You know, everything is so great in Minnesota. We share everything with the men’s team [the Minnesota Timberwolves]. So whatever they have, we have,” Collier says. “After learning that [other teams] don’t even have practice facilities, they don’t even have changing rooms, they don’t have all these things. It just feels really unjust.”
She continues, “I feel like that is not a hard thing for me to fight for because I’m a player in this league too. I want to lift this up for everyone…. I don’t mind that New York takes planes. I’m glad for you guys. But it shouldn’t be unfair [to the point] where [some] people are living in squalor.”
While Collier couldn’t go into specifics about every single thing the Women’s National Basketball Player’s Association was hoping to achieve from the new collective bargaining agreement, she says a walkout is certainly possible if the players don’t get the things they need.
“If we give in, we’re not only doing a disservice to us, we’re doing a disservice to where we have gotten in women’s sports,” she says. “We really have no choice but to stand strong again, not just for the present, but for the future of our league too.”
As Collier tells me ahead of the deadline, “We are standing really firm on what we want, and we’re not going to give in before we get it.”
Read More: https://www.glamour.com/story/napheesa-collier-women-of-the-year-2025
Posted Oct 28, 2025, 4:47 PM UTC