The Seattle Mariners, whose svp of marketing Gregg Greene was Gulley’s graduate school professor at the University of Washington, have been known to make appearances at Storm games. The Seahawks, meanwhile, celebrated their first Super Bowl win by acknowledging the Storm’s titles and showed up to throw T-shirts when the Storm beat Caitlin Clark and the Fever in Seattle last year.
Our friends @Seahawks are tossing t-shirts 🏈 pic.twitter.com/dDUSFdHFXj
— Seattle Storm (@seattlestorm) May 23, 2024
That support has been part of the formula that’s helped the Seattle Storm convince partners of what fans in the city already knew: Women’s sports are top-tier sports. When Sue Bird walked off the Climate Pledge arena court for the final time as a player in 2022, 18,100 fans saw her go. When the Storm inhospitably welcomed Clark’s Indiana team with an 85-83 win last year, 18,343 packed the building.
When they built a $61 million Center for Basketball Excellence training facility and got Starbucks and the Providence Swedish medical group to sign on as sponsors, the Storm sat back and watched WNBA teams in Chicago, New York, Portland, Phoenix, Dallas, D.C., Toronto, and Indianapolis invest in similar facilities of their own. In that context, building celebrations and campaigns around the No. 2 pick in the WNBA Draft doesn’t just score easy points in the short term—it anticipates the next play in the game ahead.
“In the world going forward, you’re going to have to have everything to offer players,” Brummel said. “Think about the way they’re coming out of college with their NIL deals and the quality of facilities at the high-level programs where we’re getting our players from. You can’t have them step down when they become a pro, you have to have them have the opportunity to step up and excel at their next level.”
