Dallas Looks To Score Big With Women's Pro Sports

Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson wanted to bring a professional sports team to the city, and everyone knew it.

In 2022, he did what mayors do best and started a committee, aptly named the Ad Hoc Committee on Professional Sports Recruitment and Retention. In a memo announcing the committee’s creation, Johnson lamented that the *Dallas* Cowboys, FC Dallas, the Texas Rangers, the *Dallas* Wings and the Professional Golfer’s Association had all pulled out of the city (asterisks added by Johnson for emphasis). He called for the Cotton Bowl and the Fair Park Coliseum to be brought up to NFL and WNBA standards, respectively.

Earlier this year, the Dallas Park and Recreation Department and Fair Park First organization launched an historic, $140-million renovation of the 84-year-old Cotton Bowl. Instead of working on the Fair Park Coliseum, the convention center’s Memorial Auditorium received the funding for a nearly $8 million makeover. But even with the money pouring in, Johnson’s dream had appeared to be fuel for little more than social media teasing.

Until the past month, that is, when lightning finally struck. Twice.

On April 24, Dallas City Council certified a 15-year, $19 million agreement with the WNBA’s Dallas Wings that will move the team to Downtown Dallas’ Memorial Auditorium in 2026. The deal was in the works for two years, Johnson said in the council meeting.

Exactly two weeks later, the council authorized a two-year, $592,000 subsidy to the operators of Fair Park, paving the way for the creation of the Dallas Trinity FC women’s soccer team that will kick off its tenure at the Cotton Bowl in August. The team will be one of eight in the newly created USL Super League, which will play matches from fall to spring in line with the global professional soccer schedule.

“Many say what they want about the mayor, but to have his kind of vision and to finally see it paying off now, I think just sends a further message of the opportunity that lies here in Dallas,” Zarin Gracey, chair of the ad hoc committee, told the Observer.

Five years ago, some would have found it laughable that the teams Johnson managed to secure for the city are women’s teams. While those people are not exactly forward thinking, that attitude is indicative of the indifference that women’s sports has historically endured. But whether through luck or some divine, Nostra-Dallas power, the announcements came at a time when women’s sports are finally in the spotlight and bringing in the big bucks.

Deloitte, a financial consulting firm, predicts that 2024 will be the first year women’s professional sports in the U.S. surpasses $1 billion in revenue, hitting $1.28 billion. Compared with 2021’s numbers, the domestic industry has spiked 300%. Globally, soccer and basketball are the highest-revenue women’s sports, and soccer specifically is expected to skyrocket this year, the Deloitte report states.

“When we started this journey years ago we thought we knew where women’s sports was going,” Amanda Vandervort, president of the USL Super League, said. “But the explosion we’ve seen in the past several years has blown the doors off what we could’ve predicted.”

What Set the Stage for the Women’s Sports Boom

By the time the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that college athletes were allowed to legally profit from their name, image and likeness (NIL) in July 2021, a wave of new interest was already trained on women’s basketball.

That March, University of Oregon forward Sedona Price received millions of views on the social media app TikTok after creating a series of videos that pointed out the inequalities between the men’s and women’s NCAA National Championship tournaments. Compared with the lodging, the weight rooms, the meals and the merchandise given to the men’s teams, the women’s competition was clearly an afterthought. And, finally, someone was talking about it.

A few months after Price’s videos, a gender equity review of the NCAA published by the law firm Kaplan, Hecker & Fink called her efforts the “contemporary equivalent of the shot heard round the world.”

While the NCAA looked to make internal changes, female athletes were handed the reins to achieve their own fame. For the first time, the Supreme Court’s NIL ruling allowed student athletes to cut deals with brands or local sponsors, introducing the idea of getting paid to play to college-level athletes. “We inherited more than 500 student entrepreneurs overnight,” Antonio Banos, associate director of Texas Christian University’s Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, told the Observer.

In response to the court’s ruling, TCU launched an NIL-specific curriculum at the Neeley School of Business for its student athletes. An upper-level elective course teaches the basics of legal contracts, brand building, business strategizing and taxes, as well as how to prioritize mental health and wellbeing. In the three years the course has been active, female athletes have shown “tremendous” engagement in the program.

“They see the most potential and have peers who have had success [with NIL],” Banos said. “Women’s basketball players have been shown to be the big winners in this NIL race. They’ve been very active on social media, they’ve been actively connecting with their audiences on a deeper level, and that is something that I believe is able to make waves.”

Four of the top five highest-earning college female athletes are basketball players, according to On3.com. The website’s NIL ranking algorithm factors in an athlete’s performance, social media influence and exposure to determine a monetary valuation which, for some athletes, is in the millions.

“Prior to July 2021, it was about the performance on the field, on the court, at the pool, at the track. Now they are student athlete influencers,” Banos said. “The audiences are able to see them as much more [than athletes] because their stories are being told now. It’s not just ‘Caitlin Clark the basketball player,’ it’s ‘Who is Caitlin Clark as a woman?’”

Price, who now plays at TCU, is the 10th-highest-valued female athlete on On3’s list, and TCU-commit Hailey Van Lith is fifth. Prior to graduating from the University of Iowa, Clark ranked fourth across all men’s and women’s sports on the NIL ladder. Louisiana State University’s Angel Reese ranked eighth.

“... the explosion we’ve seen in the past several years has blown the doors off what we could’ve predicted.” – Amanda Vandervort, USL Super League

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The first wave of NIL-era college athletes is aging into the big leagues, and they’re taking their millions of followers and fans with them. The 2024 WNBA draft, where Clark and Reese were two of the biggest names, was the most watched ever, with 2.45 million viewers on ESPN — a 307% viewership increase from 2023’s draft, which was under 600,000.

“I can’t believe this happened three years ago,” Price recently posted on X on the anniversary of her TikTok posting. “The NCAA really had no idea how amazing college women’s basketball is. But don’t worry, they know now!”

The Wings Take Flight in Dallas

Shortly after announcing their 2026 move to Dallas, the Dallas Wings sold out a game that, before this season, had never been open to the public. The first pre-season game of the year is generally a practice run for facilities and operations staff, said Greg Bibb, president and CEO of the Wings.

“But when Indiana won the draft lottery back in December, I took a little bit of a flier and reached out to Indiana to set up a pre-season game for the first available date with the hopes that Caitlin Clark would enter the draft and they would draft her,” Bibb said. “Things aligned … We sold out in 15 minutes.”

By pure coincidence, the next two games on the Wings’ schedule were against the Chicago Sky, the team that drafted Reese. Each of those games sold out as well. While Bibb is happy to take advantage of the swell of interest in women’s basketball that has been dubbed the “Caitlin Clark Effect,” he thinks the stage had already been set for a superstar personality to join the sport.

Just as the athletes coming into the professional leagues are the first to experience the NIL era, they were also the first to grow up watching the WNBA, which was founded in 1996. According to a report published by the Aspen Institute, State of Play 2023, girls are currently participating in sports at the highest rate in a decade.

As more girls begin playing basketball at younger ages, the talent pool has become deeper, Bibb said, and each year the talent in the WNBA draft draws more excitement than the year prior.

“This business, women’s sports, the WNBA, we were already heading in the right direction. Thankfully, for the Caitlin Clarks and the Angel Reeses of the world, that acceleration of growth is now happening,” Bibb told the Observer. “But we will surely sell out games this summer that do not involve Chicago or Indiana, and I think it just speaks to where we are in terms of the women’s sports landscape.”

The growing interest in the sport became increasingly obvious to Monica Paul, executive director of the Dallas Sports Commission, between 2017 and 2023. Both years, Dallas hosted the NCAA women’s final four tournament. Paul thought things were getting big in 2017, when the tournament’s viewership on ESNP beat all previous records. By the time the 2023 tournament rolled around, the hype couldn’t be contained.

The Dallas Sports Commission plays a middleman role between the city and professional sports events and teams. It was involved in developing the plans for the Dallas Wings’ 2026 move to Memorial Auditorium, which can hold 3,000 more fans than the Wings’ current stadium at UT Arlington.

It was Johnson who first approached the Wings with those plans in the summer of 2022, and Bibb was “immediately impressed” by the interest. The final contract agreed upon by the Wings and the City Council keeps the team downtown for 15 years, while the city pays $19 million in subsidies. The money is allocated from revenue from alcohol and beverage sales, the hotel occupancy tax and convention center profits rather than from the city’s general fund.

When the Wings move to Dallas the team will be the crown jewel of the convention center’s ongoing, decade-long, multibillion-dollar facelift. Other projects in the immediate area include construction of a new convention center and the redevelopment of 30 acres that will become a mixed-use area.

“If you build it they will come. We just had to be patient,” Gracey said. “It’s finally paying off, those investments.”

The brand-new downtown stadium will also give players access to a training facility on par with what would be offered to the Mavericks. As conversations surrounding equity between men’s and women’s sports continue to prevail, enhanced training facilities for WNBA teams is beginning to trend, Bibb said. Women’s teams in Seattle and Los Vegas have recently welcomed state-of-the-art training spaces, and one in Phoenix is under construction. Two more cities have plans for better training areas in the works, according to Bibb.

By that measure, Dallas is right on the curve.

Paul, who grew up playing sports in high school and college, said the opportunity to bring professional women’s teams to Dallas is also an equitable move for young female fans. Growing up, Paul may not have had the option to go watch women like herself play in the big leagues. She wants to change that for the next generation.

“The players are someone to aspire to be,” Paul said. “To have the ability to go out and watch the best of the best, I think that’s inspiring.”

Hopefully a Holy Trinity

Unlike the two years of negotiations the city went through to secure the Wings, City Council member Adam Bazaldua said that Trinity FC’s contract with the city was “the fastest [he’d] ever seen government work.”

“They were just about to close a deal in Arlington, and we got word of it,” Gracey said. “Once we found out they wanted to be in Dallas, we wanted to make sure that we could do everything we could to create that opportunity.”

In North Texas, on the high school level, women’s soccer is a dominant, albeit underrated, force. The last five 6A state championships in women’s soccer have all gone to Dallas-area high schools. In the 5A division, the trophy has left DFW only once since 2015. The success of the local women’s soccer community is evidence of an “unbelievable market” for the sport, Vandervort told the Observer.

“The number of players that are from Dallas that have gone on to have incredible professional careers has been unbelievable,” Vandervort said. “The opportunity for some of those players, if they choose to, to return home is something that I am incredibly proud of.”

There are over 100 men’s professional soccer teams within five leagues across the United States. Until now, there have been only 14 women’s teams, all in the National Women’s Soccer League. The USL Super League will introduce eight new women’s teams, with plans to expand to at least two more cities in the second year. It’s a player-run league, so players can shop around clubs to negotiate the contract they want, rather than be drafted into one.

The USL Super League has been designated a Division 1 league by the U.S. Soccer Federation, putting it on par with the NWSL. (Think the PGA’s companion league, LIV Golf, minus the salary controversy and the Saudis.) Among the requirements for Division 1 standing are a minimum of eight teams across at least two time zones, a majority of teams playing in markets of at least 750,000 residents and a minimum seating capacity of 5,000 seats per stadium.

The Cotton Bowl, which has over 91,000 seats, surpasses the minimum capacity requirement by a large margin.

“I think we have the makings for the female version of Ted Lasso,” council member Paula Blackmon joked before the contract vote.

The two-year, half-million-dollar deal that the City Council made with Fair Park’s management firm, Oak View Group, has an option to be renewed for a third year, with a $296,000 subsidy. The contract was met with some minor concern, primarily from council member Gay Donnell Willis, because of recent controversies stemming from an allegation made by Fair Park First CEO Brian Luallen that said OVG misused philanthropic funds.

Assistant park and recreation director Ryan O’Connor said the deal would not be affected if the city decides to end its relationship with OVG or Fair Park First, as the city would assume the contract. Ultimately the council voted 14-0, with one absence, in favor of the agreement.

The subsidy works out to $18,500 per game, coming from funds similar to the Wings’ agreement.

“There’s not a drain on the taxpayers,” Rosa Fleming, director of convention and event services, told the council. “Our funds are not taxpayer funds.”

Jim Neil, CEO of the Dallas Trinity FC, told the council that the team plans to use the practice facilities at Dallas College Brookhaven Campus and has pledged to hire students out of the Dallas College system as front-office interns. Neil also pledged that more than half the team’s employees will be women, and hiring will prioritize those from “ethnically diverse” backgrounds. There are “some very significant Dallas women” lined up as minority stakeholders for the team, Neil said, although names have not yet been announced.

Gracey, who worked in City Hall for 16 years in the economic development realm before joining the City Council, said the promise of new jobs coming from the Trinity FC acquisition marks a “sunny day for South Dallas.”

“We talk about nursing, we talk about the tech industry, we talk about all those industries, but I don’t know that we’ve had a real discussion about the jobs and the opportunities around the [sports] industry,” Gracey said. “From the management, to the accounting offices, everything that surrounds the industry, it’s not just jobs, it’s careers.”

“The more women’s professional sports offerings there are in a given city, the better it is overall for women’s sports.” – Greg Bibb, Dallas Wings

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Neil also told the council that Trinity FC leadership has been in talks with the State Fair of Texas about holding a game on the last weekend of the state fair between Trinity FC and a professional women’s team from Mexico. The current attendance record for a women’s soccer game in the U.S. is just over 40,000 fans. The goal, he said, is to shatter that record.

If Dallas Trinity FC is able to successfully join the community, Paul believes it will make future grabs for professional teams and events all that much easier.

“If we can help position and uplift our Dallas USL women’s professional team, it’s also a part of the road map or strategy to help to position Dallas for a FIFA women’s world cup in the future,” Paul said.

Women’s sports aren’t new to Dallas, but maybe it’s the first time we’re actually looking at them. The city annually makes around $65 million from the National Cheerleaders Association national championship that has been held downtown for 30 years, but when was the last time anyone actually bothered to pay attention to the hoards of girls in glitter and bows that descend upon our city every spring?

“[Dallas has] always been centered around the male athletes,” Gracey said. “The naming of the stadium after Sha’Carri, that was lowkey the beginning of it. It was a great thing to celebrate and when we started to realize what’s happening in sports for women.”

Sha’Carri Richardson, a Carter High School alum who regularly shouts out her hometown, is an athlete who perfectly embodies the changing public attitude toward women’s sports and female athletes. In 2021, the track star was hit with a wave of backlash after she tested positive for marijuana and was disqualified from the U.S. Olympic Trials. At the time, Richardson apologized for the drug use and said she had turned to weed as a coping mechanism after the death of her biological mother.

Today, Richardson stars in nearly every commercial promoting the 2024 Paris Olympics. She is the fastest woman in the world. And in a unanimous vote last October, the Dallas ISD board decided to embrace Richardson’s legacy, messy past and all, by naming the track at South Dallas’ John Kincaide Stadium the Sha’Carri Richardson Track.

“A rising tide lifts all boats,” Bibb said when asked about the women’s sports movement. “The more women’s professional sports offerings there are in a given city, the better it is overall for women’s sports.”

For Mayor Johnson, the last month has probably been, at the very least, a dream realized twice. To some extent, it’s probably been a vindication, too.

“The professional sports world is watching what Dallas is doing and has been doing since we formed that committee,” Johnson told the City Council on May 8. “Rest assured we are not done here in the area of sports. The best is yet to come.”