For Philadelphia women’s sports fans, the wait to see WNBA players hit the court just got a lot shorter.
Today, alongside Mayor Cherelle Parker, comedian Wanda Sykes, Philadelphia 76ers play-by-play announcer Kate Scott and rapper Tierra Whack, Alex Bazzell, president of Unrivaled Basketball, announced that the 3-on-3 professional women’s basketball league would be making a tour stop in Philly for the 2026 season. The scene somewhat replayed that of June, when the Sykes joined the Mayor to announce a WNBA franchise for Philly in 2030, owned by Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment, owner of the 76ers.
The league, now in its second season, aims to offer more opportunities for WNBA players to compete — and earn money — during the fall-winter off-season, when many players travel abroad to play. Unrivaled has previously played in Miami only. Philadelphia will be the first stop on its first tour on January 30, 2026.
The tournament is part of growing efforts — championed by Sykes and her wife, Alexandra, who live in Delaware County — to bring more opportunities for professional women’s sports to Philly.
“It’s meaningful when you have such buy-in from a group that wants you there,” Bazzell said a few days before the announcement. “We want to continue to try to grow the game and go to markets that don’t have a WNBA team just yet. I know they’ve announced Philly as a new city, which is great.”
Tickets for Unrivaled’s Philly tournament are on sale now for $20 to $50.
Founding Unrivaled
Napheesa Collier of the Minnesota Lynx and Breanna Stewart of the New York Liberty founded Unrivaled in 2023 to help decrease that vast gap between WNBA (women) and NBA (men) players, where the average salary is 80 times higher. WNBA pays its players between $60,000 to $250,000 per season, with the majority in the lower range. In Europe and other countries, an WNBA player can earn more than twice her salary in the U.S.
Unrivaled’s salaries are competitive — at more than $200,000 for their inaugural 10-week season, their players were the highest paid U.S. women’s athletes in 2024. Unlike in the WNBA, Unrivaled’s six teams aren’t city-based (no travel) and they play 3-on-3, (vs. 5-on-5), but still full court.
Collier and Stewart recruited all 36 players, who played 48 games from mid-January to mid-March. It reached almost 12 million total viewers in its inaugural season. Earlier this year, investments from Serena Williams’s firm, Serena Ventures, plus existing investors Warner Bros. Discovery and USNWT star Alex Morgan’s Trybe Ventures helped bring the company’s valuation to $340 million.
With this level of interest, Unrivaled’s co-founders decided to expand and tour in their second season, rather than waiting until their third.
That’s where Wanda and Alex Sykes come in. The Philly women’s sports boosters have campaigned for years to get a professional women’s sports team through The Philadelphia Sisters, (Philly Sisters) the organization they founded in 2019. The group, which includes former federal prosecutor and congressional candidate Ashley Lunkenheimer and business woman Starla Crandall alongside the Sykeses, has rallied the NBA, the WNBA, city and state officials and local investors and sponsors to bring a WNBA team to the City. They remember meeting with then-City Councilmember Cherelle Parker in 2020 over Zoom.
Philly Sisters had no plans to stop there, however. They wanted to create even more opportunities to watch and play women’s sports in our city. The Sykeses, who were initial investors in Unrivaled, attended a game during the inaugural season in Miami earlier this year and were chatting with the League’s commissioner, Micky Lawler, about her plans to grow the league.
“They were looking at tour stops and she mentioned New York and D.C. — the obvious cities,” Alex Sykes says. “We were like, well, how about Philadelphia?”
The couple, who are raising teenage twins, long ago adopted Philly as their hometown. Alex, who grew up in France, has so fallen in love with Philly’s sports culture that she’s sported Eagles t-shirts on trips to Paris (and been greeted with “Go Birds!” as a result). Wanda, whose acting career makes her officially bicoastal, recently went on Kylie Kelce’s Not Gonna Lie podcast to beg North Philadelphian and very winning University of South Carolina women’s basketball coach Dawn Staley to get involved in Philly’s WNBA franchise.
“I want Philadelphia to be the capital of women’s sports in the next five years. I hope one day we’ll have five men’s mascots and five women’s mascots.” — Alex Sykes
But they’re not just down with the WNBA. They also made an official pitch to Unrivaled’s leadership, inviting them to Philly to check out Xfinity Mobile Arena, run the Rocky steps, meet with potential sponsors and see why Philly sports fans are, frankly, the best sports fans. It poured rain the whole day of their visit, but by the end, Unrivaled’s leadership was enamoured.
“They were just blown away,” Sykes says. “They were like, okay, we get it. Philadelphia is going to show up.”
Bazzell says the league was impressed — and mentioned Unrivaled players Natasha Cloud and Kahleah Copper are from Philly — and that Dawn Staley was an early investor in Unrivaled.
And make no mistake: Unrivaled’s choice to play in South Philly is a big deal. “They are taking a risk in choosing us. We’re the only tour stop. We’re the only city,” Lunkenheimer says. “It’s easy to go to a place where there’s already a fan base and we don’t have any women’s sports teams, so we don’t have that set list. Everything has to be built.”
“We’re not just showing up and playing a basketball game,” Bazzell says. “We have such an obligation for it being our first time outside of Miami that we want to do it correctly, because we do have incredible fans, and we want to show just a different experience.”
That experience will consist of four TBA teams playing two back-to-back, action-packed games on January 30. (One ticket admits you to both games.)
If you’re familiar with a WNBA or NBA game, well, Unrivaled’s format is quite a bit different. Whereas the WNBA plays four 10-minute quarters (plus 5-minute periods in overtime), Unrivaled games have three 7-minute quarters plus an untimed fourth quarter played to a winning score (the leading team’s end-of-third-quarter score, plus 11), which prevents overtime and helps create a faster pace. The 3-on-3 versus traditional 5-on-5 setup exposes players’ strengths and weaknesses. You can’t be out there if you can’t play offense, defense, and everything in-between. As a result, some of the WNBA’s biggest stars joined the league.
WNBA superstar Sabrina Ionescu has called the league “the best of both worlds” — a chance to train, earn, and “surround yourself with the best players.” In this way, every Unrivaled game is its very own All-Star game.
No wonder Lunkenheimer says local college and university teams have called, wanting to bring players. The league also plans to work with groups like Watch Party PHL, which hosts inclusive meet-ups to watch women’s sports, to promote the event.
Unrivaled + Philadelphia Youth Basketball
Unrivaled’s players won’t just be competing in Philly. They’ll be giving back, partnering with the nonprofit Philadelphia Youth Basketball (PYB) to host a youth health and wellness event on January 29.
“We were like, if you come to Philadelphia, you have to do something in the community,” Lunkenheimer says. “And they [the Unrivaled team] were like, of course we wouldn’t want to come to a community and not do something in the community. That shared value is very authentic to them and it’s very important to us.”
They’re still working out the details, but the event could include conversations about healthy eating and physical activity, interaction with players and potentially health screenings. PYB provides basketball training, mentorship, leadership development, health and wellness, and academic programming for kids aged 7-18. Last year, their programs reached more than 700 kids from 74 different Philly zip codes.
“Sports is so tied to health and wellness,” Lunkenheimer says. “Kids don’t even know that they’re getting healthy when they’re playing.”
Philadelphia: women’s sports city
Since founding Philly Sisters in 2019, the Sykeses have seen interest in women’s sports explode in Philly. There was the big WNBA announcement, and a smaller, but seriously viral — line-around-the-block— debut of Marsha’s, an all-women’s sports bar on South Street a couple weeks ago. (Alex Sykes will join Jason Wright, former Washington Commanders president and now an investor in professional women’s sports, at The Citizen’s Ideas We Should Steal Festival on November 14.)
Watch Party PHL raised just shy of $90,000 to open their own bar in time to host watch parties for the PGA Championship, FIFA World Cup and MLB’s All-Star Game and draft — all coming to town next year. “We get to kick those things off,” Bazzell says.
It couldn’t happen at a better time: Last year’s 2024 WNBA finals championship series drew an average of 1.6 million viewers, a 115 percent increase from 2023. A report from McKinsey found that between 2022 and 2024 revenue from women’s sports grew 4.5 times faster compared to men’s sports. They expect the market to reach $2.5 billion in value by 2030.
“It’s only going to grow because the demand is so high and women’s sports is so untapped,” Sykes says.
Alex Sykes hopes that some of this meteoric growth makes its way to Philly. She and Wanda aren’t stopping with women’s basketball. They plan to continue fighting to bring more professional women’s leagues to Philly — maybe try another soccer team? An ice hockey team? Volleyball? Boxing?
“I want Philadelphia to be the capital of women’s sports in the next five years,” Alex says. “I hope one day we’ll have five men’s mascots and five women’s mascots.”
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