The Virginia girls’s basketball crew is getting what the varsity calls a “multi-year transformational reward” from entrepreneur and philanthropist Alex Ohanian.
Ohanian, who’s married to tennis legend Serena Williams and is likely one of the founding traders within the Angel Metropolis FC crew within the NWSL, has a historical past of help for and funding in girls’s athletics. He’s additionally an alumnus of the College of Virginia, graduating in 2005.
The particular greenback quantity of the reward was not launched, however it’s the largest within the historical past of the Virginia girls’s basketball program. It is going to permit this system to be “a premier vacation spot for feminine student-athletes whereas addressing the monetary and aggressive calls for of this new period of faculty athletics,” the varsity stated.
“Beginning Angel Metropolis and seeing the wave of funding in girls’s sports activities actually has been inspiring,” Ohanian instructed ESPN. “Girls’s basketball has popped up continuously on my radar, and many of us have been asking me about it.
“It is my alma mater. I’m in New York loads for work and I reside in Florida, so Charlottesville is a simple cease in between, so I will be catching fairly just a few video games.”
Ohanian has been bullish on the potential of ladies’s sports activities for a number of years. He factors out that as not too long ago as 2019, it value roughly $1 million to purchase an enlargement crew within the NWSL. Distinction that to controlling stake in Angel Metropolis FC being bought in July to Willow Bay and Bob Iger, CEO of the Walt Disney Firm, at a $250 million valuation.
“There was an under-investment in girls’s sports activities, but in addition a mindset that it was not about excellence or enterprise returns, it was about ‘charity,’ ” Ohanian stated. “The curse of these low expectations actually hampered the expansion.”
He stated he was notably bothered seeing the “weight room debacle” revealed on social media by then-Oregon participant Sedona Prince in the course of the 2021 NCAA girls’s basketball match held in a COVID-19 “bubble” in San Antonio. Prince confirmed how the ladies had just a few small stacks of weights at their NCAA match, in comparison with an enormous weight room for the boys at their match in Indianapolis
“I used to be like, ‘This is mindless to me,’ ” stated Ohanian, who was crucial about it on social media on the time. “And the unhappy factor is, the expertise had been there within the girls’s recreation. And for those who appeared on the Web, at locations like Instagram, on the follower counts, the curiosity was there. This stated to me that the ladies simply wanted extra funding and promotion.”
Virginia coach Amaka Agugua-Hamilton stated she first heard of Ohanian’s curiosity from Cavaliers athletic director Carla Willams. Then Ohanian got here to the Cavaliers’ season-opener at John Paul Jones Area in Charlottesville on Nov. 4 in opposition to American and was impressed with the ambiance.
“I am simply actually grateful he believes in his alma mater and our athletic division,” Agugua-Hamilton instructed ESPN. “He believes in Carla, me, and the gamers.
“That is game-changing for us. The aim of the reward is to assist permit us to recruit and retain student-athletes and put ourselves in place to be an elite crew. We have been elite earlier than. We’re nonetheless going to function with excessive integrity, do issues the correct method. However this permits us the monetary means to form of stage the enjoying area.”
Virginia stated the reward will assist handle the modern-day monetary calls for in school sports activities, as colleges navigate the switch portal, convention realignment, and the Home vs. NCAA lawsuit, which may permit establishments to share income with student-athletes.
Virginia was one of many prime girls’s packages within the nation underneath coach Debbie Ryan from the late Nineteen Eighties into the Nineteen Nineties, and made 20 consecutive NCAA match appearances from 1984-2003. That interval was highlighted by three consecutive journeys to the ladies’s Ultimate 4 in 1990-’91-’92. These Cavalier groups have been led by level guard Daybreak Staley, who’s now head coach of South Carolina and has received three nationwide championships with the Gamecocks.
Agugua-Hamilton stated Staley is a task mannequin and help for her as a coach. Now in her third season main Virginia, Agugua-Hamilton believes the Cavaliers, 6-5, can return to upper-tier standing after making only one NCAA match look since 2010.
“We’re coping with some accidents and making an attempt to get folks again, however we’ll flip issues round this season,” she stated. “I at all times say progress is a course of, and this reward will assist with that now and long-term.”
Ohanian additionally hopes it conjures up extra alumni to help the ladies’s sports activities packages at their colleges and companies to spend money on girls’s athletics.
“Look, I am fairly a groupie of ladies’s sports activities, and I am proud to be that,” he stated. “Sure, I’ve two daughters, and I need them to have nice position fashions. However that is not all that is. I really like believing in issues when perhaps not as many different folks do. I believe it is why I’ve had success in my life as an early-stage investor.
“You see right this moment’s girls’s athletes are hungry, they’re motivated. Individuals are realizing why girls’s sports activities are so compelling and price funding. It makes enterprise sense.”
