How Napheesa Collier Built Unrivaled, the Most Equitable League in Women’s Basketball

Napheesa Collier possesses the kind of humility every parent wishes they could instill in their child. She’s just disrupted the world of women’s basketball forever and yet she recounts the experience as if it were light work. I know it wasn’t.

It’s a Tuesday morning and the two of us are sitting in the Lunar Owls’ locker room of Unrivaled, a manifestation of Collier’s over two years in the making. Unrivaled is Collier’s brainchild: a women’s basketball league featuring a 3 vs. 3 style of gameplay based in Miami, FL. Some of the biggest WNBA stars — from Brittney Griner to Breanna Stewart (Collier’s Unrivaled co-founder) — have joined the roster during the WNBA offseason, which is typically spent playing internationally.

“For a long time, players would go straight from the WNBA to overseas and then back,” Collier says, which left them with about 10 days of downtime in between and a greater risk of injury. Going overseas can create a grueling cycle, Collier says, both physically and financially.

“A lot of people don’t realize, we make most of our money off the court, and so brand building is a huge part of our careers. When you go overseas, you’re essentially going dark for that six months,” she says. You lose the opportunity to activate with brands and miss out on partnership deals. On top of that, you’re in a long-distance relationship with your family, spouse, and children for months at a time, Collier says.

Her solution: a domestic off-season league “where you’re not away from your family, you’re not overseas, you are home for holidays,” Collier says. But you’re still getting better at your game and making money. After discussing the idea with her husband Alex Bazzell, an NBA and WNBA trainer and coach, he looped in basketball operations pro Luke Cooper. The two started talking investors. Collier, meanwhile, picked up the phone.

“We need one of the top players in the world to get behind this because we want this to be a league with the best players in the world,” she recalls thinking. “So our first call was to Stewie [Breanna Stewart].” Once the three-time WNBA champion was on board as co-founder, the recruiting began.

The pitch: a for-athletes-by-athletes league where the players would not only have equity (via a 15 percent pool), but the average player salary would be $200,000 for the nine-week season. It’s a substantial offer considering the highest salaries for a WNBA season are between $200,000-$250,000 a year, per NBC. On top of that, WNBA rookies aren’t even making $80,000 — as shown by Angel Reese and Caitlin Clark’s 2024 contracts. These figures become even more startling when compared to the NBA’s multi-million dollar contracts.

Unrivaled aims to do better, offering athletes competitive salaries, equity, and the chance to activate with aligned brands like Icy Hot, the league’s official recovery partner, as well as Sephora, Ally, and more.

“This is the foundation and the baseline of what should be acceptable for for women.”

Arike Ogunbowale, a point guard for the Dallas Wings and the first Unrivaled signee, says it didn’t take much convincing to get her on board: “I knew I would play in it, just with everything they were offering.” Beyond salary and equity, the 130,000 sq. ft Unrivaled facility is breathtaking, featuring bespoke locker rooms, saunas, cold plunges, an Icy Hot training room, on-site aesthetician, glam room, content studio, and the weight room of any athlete’s dreams.

“This is the foundation and the baseline of what should be acceptable for for women,” says Lindsey Elizondo, PT, DPT, Unrivaled’s director of medical in a group press interview. Before joining Unrivaled, Elizondo had spent the majority of her career in men’s and women’s sports training, with her most recent stint as the assistant athletic trainer for the NBA’s Orlando Magic. She’s also held training positions with the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) and worked the US Open, Australian Open, and Wimbledon, as well as in MLB within the Boston Red Sox and LA Dodgers organizations. Her biggest complaint throughout the years has always been the discrepancy in access between men’s and women’s sports.

Unrivaled provides an opportunity to help close that chasm. Elizondo remembers the 2021 March Madness weight room fiasco, in which the powers that be thought it acceptable to provide the women’s teams with a single stack of dumbbells, while the men had an entire heavy lifting facility.

Unrivaled’s goal, and Elizondo’s personal mission, is to make that image feel like a fever dream. “It’s never gonna happen again and it should never happen again,” she says. In an ideal world, “you walk into some place and you don’t know if it’s men’s or women’s — it’s just a sports training facility.”

That said, when it comes to Unrivaled, you know it was built for women. Not because there’s any deficiency to point out, but rather a surplus of attention and detail in every square foot.

Take, for instance, the on-site nursing room and nursery. The former features a cozy chair and blanket where moms can relax, pump, and feed as needed, while the latter offers up a crib, high-chair, changing table, and most importantly, pre-vetted nannies who are on-call during practices and game days. There’s also a larger family room with a plushy green couch, a mini library, and tiny tables where kids can play and spend time with their busy parents.

These amenities were non-negotiable for moms Collier and Stewart. Knowing that your child is safe and you don’t have to worry about them “is your number one priority,” Collier says. When that part’s handled, you can focus on everything else: yourself, your team, the game.

The nanny services have proven beneficial outside the arena, too. They’re available on off days for help at home, grocery-store runs, or when players need time to themselves. “Everybody uses it,” Collier says.

Worth noting: these childcare amenities are monumental in the world of women’s basketball, considering the WNBA’s history with maternal and childcare. It wasn’t until 2020 that the players negotiated a $5,000 childcare stipend, family-planning benefits, and a fully paid maternity leave as part of their collective bargaining agreement.

With athletes from different WNBA teams working together, Unrivaled also helps provide transparency to break down the mystique around certain aspects of the industry, including partnerships deals, competitive salaries, and free agency.

“It definitely allows you to facilitate those conversations a lot more, because I could just go down the hall and be like, ‘Hey, you want to go talk about free agency?'” Collier says. Ogunbowale agrees, noting how much the Unrivaled system breaks down barriers.

“You’ll be able to talk to people if you’re interested in them — see if they’re interested in your team, or see what they’re talking about. You really just get more of an inside [look] at who people are and what they want and where they want to go,” Ogunbowale says.

Still, as I sit across from Collier, she tells me that this is just the start of what Unrivaled can offer. She has her eyes set on more space for training, expanded communal areas, and a model where Unrivaled hits the road. While Collier couldn’t share their first tour stop, she did express wanting to replicate the same excitement and feel you get at their Florida facilities.

Having experienced the energy firsthand, I see why. The minute you step onto Unrivaled territory, there’s a sense of thrill and intimacy — as if you’re in a secret “real fans only” kind of club.

The entrance is unassuming; you’d miss it if it weren’t for the traffic controllers and expensive cars pulling up. But as you head to the main entrance, the hype builds. As you walk past security, you’re greeted by outdoor fan activations: food and drink booths, a carnival-style shooting competition, and plenty of photo ops. My personal favorites: a fill-in-the-blank wall and a throne made of Unrivaled basketballs so that fans can claim their spot in WBB history. Once you’ve geeked out, you enter through the arena’s merch shop, which features cozy sweatpants and hoodies, t-shirts for each of the Unrivaled’s six basketball clubs, and a video wall with footage from some of the league’s notable athlete partners, include collegiate phenoms Paige Bueckers and Flau’jae Johnson, who signed NIL marketing deals with Unrivaled last year.

Steps away from the merch shop, you’ll find Unrivaled’s built-from-scratch 70 x 50 foot court, surrounded by colossal LED boards and a total of 850 tiered seats. Each plush folding chair feels like a courtside seat, with the furthest only 32 feet away from the court. Meanwhile, players cover the court at full speed while viral hits like “Cut It” by O.T. Genasis and “Soak City” by 310babii play in the background.

It’s as much a stage as it is an arena — and rightfully so. These are the best of the best, Collier says, and they deserve as much attention, support, and resources as any other professional team (men’s or women’s).

For Collier, it’s simple: “We try to be elite, because we’re treating elite people.” As for the rest of the industry — it’s time to step it up.

Alexis Jones (she/her) is the senior health and fitness editor at PS. In her six years of editorial experience, Alexis has developed passions and areas of expertise around mental health, women’s health and fitness, racial and ethnic disparities in healthcare, and chronic conditions. Prior to joining PS, she was the senior editor at Health magazine. Her other bylines can be found at Women’s Health, Prevention, Marie Claire, and more.