When I started covering the WNBA, it was 2012. I just covered a couple of Washington Mystics games for a website called DC Sports Box, so I wasn’t extensively covering the entire league. But I knew who Maya Moore was. A couple years earlier, 2010, was my first time supporting the women’s basketball team at the school I actually attended (Maryland), and I was disappointed that we missed the NCAA Tournament, while Moore’s UConn was simply in a class of its own, going 39-0 and winning the second of back-to-back national championships. I knew that Moore had teamed up with Seimone Augustus, Lindsay Whalen and Rebekkah Brunson on the Minnesota Lynx and won the 2011 WNBA championship. And I knew from my limited coverage of the league in 2012 that the Lynx were heavy favorites to repeat.
But when I became a Swish Appeal writer in 2013 and the calendar turned to June, it wasn’t the Minnesota Lynx I was asked to cover at the White House; it was the Indiana Fever.
The great Tamika Catchings had done the improbable: She led the Fever to a WNBA Finals upset of Moore and the Lynx, and it didn’t even take her five games. In the Fever’s eighth-straight season of making the playoffs, a stretch that included two Finals appearances and five semifinal appearances, they solidified…
 and two No. 2 picks (Kelsey Mitchell and NaLyssa Smith). Mitchell (2018 draft) is finally reaping the benefits of all her hard work through tough times, as she and the other three (added over the past three years), have helped the team live up to 2024 expectations.){kind=link}