After seven days of wind, the morning is finally calm enough in New York’s East Moriches Bay for Sue Wicks to dock her boat to check on her oysters. Hundreds of cages jut out of their lines at odd angles, and a few move away.
Retirees WNBA The star and Hall of Famer admits the fish farm she started at age 50 can be a source of anxiety and compared it to her basketball days.
“Some days you ask yourself, ‘Why am I doing this?’ »You get hurt, you get hurt, you lose, things go bad. And then the next day you do it again because you love it,” she said.
Wicks, 59, has worked as a commentator, college basketball coach and at a fitness startup since retiring from the WNBA in 2002, and says she feels lucky to return to a career “that works for my soul.” But the reality is that even a successful career as one of the best female basketball players in the world didn’t allow her to retire completely.
Although the WNBA is bring more than ever sponsors and ticket salesmany players still find themselves in a precarious financial situation when the final whistle blows.
“The choice is what they will do as a second career, not whether they will have a second career,” said Risa Isard, director of research and insights at women’s sports marketing platform Parity. Since “female athletes are paid a fraction of what men make when they play,” Isard said their next acts tend to resemble traditional career paths more than managing substantial investment portfolios.
The average NBA salary is about $11.9 million, according to data reviewed by The Associated Press. That’s nearly 100 times what the WNBA estimates to be the $120,000 average salary for its players — although major differences in league size, age, profit margins and media contracts partly explain that discrepancy.
For Marissa Coleman, 2009 second overall draft pick and 2015 WNBA All-Star, the main difference in post-playing careers between WNBA and NBA players is that “most NBA guys are sitting with tens, sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars.” And for those who are financially literate, working after the game is “more of a cure for boredom than a necessity.”
“Most female athletes in any field have to find a career after basketball out of necessity,” Coleman said.
All this is happening against a backdrop of unresolved questions about the future of WNBA player compensation. Tensions are high in the ongoing union battle between the WNBA and the players’ union, although it is unclear how far apart the parties are in terms of compensation. The two parties agreed on November 30 to an extension of the current collective agreement until January 9 while negotiations continue.
A major sticking point has been revenue sharing: while the WNBA is booming, players are looking for a bigger share in this growth. They currently earn a significantly lower fraction of league revenue compared to NBA players.
When former Minnesota Lynx forward Devereaux Peters transitioned from basketball to real estate development in 2019, she said the hardest lesson was learning that working hard in her new career might not be enough to produce results quickly, if at all. After a tough match during her playing days, she could “go to the gym, shoot and work on your shot. And you’ll see a result if you put in the work.”
“That’s not necessarily true in the real world,” the 36-year-old said. “You can do a lot of work and do a lot of things right and still get nowhere.”
Giving up basketball was also a financial shock: “It was a bit of a difficult transition in that I had to cut back significantly,” she said. “I learned a lot very quickly” given the “big gap between what I was doing then and what I’m doing now.”
For the past six years, Peters has led a affordable housing project in South Bend, Indiana – home to his alma mater, Notre Dame. Red tape, politics and myriad other logistical challenges made this project “the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” Peters said.
But she says it’s also the best: “Helping people who really, truly need it” makes it worth it. Its affordable apartment building is expected to open next month and open in August 2027.
For Coleman, 38, the next phase of his career also took place well outside the box. Alongside former teammate Alana Beard, Coleman franchised a Mellow Mushroom – a psychedelic-themed pizza chain – in Roanoke, Virginia. She also chaired a campaign to legalize sports betting in Maryland and now leads the strategy and growth of the VIP team at fantasy sports platform Underdog, with the goal of creating a space for more women and people of color to enter the industry.
“I knew from a young age that entrepreneurship and business was something I was really passionate about,” Coleman said.
She added that she was grateful to her parents for emphasizing the importance of education and long-term career planning. With their wisdom, she made sure to seek out mentors and explore areas that interested her throughout her basketball career.
“I knew I didn’t want to be one of those players that retired, and it was like, ‘Oh my God, what now?’ “, Coleman said.
Many former athletes move into sports-related positions, such as coaching or sports broadcasting. But not everyone is sure of finding their next vocation.
Jayne Appel Marinelli, senior vice president of player relations for the league union and former center for the San Antonio Stars, advises players on their career paths after basketball. She explained that the transition remains difficult for many, even with the WNBA and union’s joint tuition assistance and internship program, as well as the opportunity for a semester at Harvard Business School, which Coleman completed.
The players’ union has worked to further expand opportunities by adding player internships to licensees’ contracts, establishing partnerships with universities and more, according to Appel Marinelli. Athletes “sometimes need help recognizing that the skills they’ve learned are so easily transferable to whatever role they’re going to take on next,” she said.
That kind of support didn’t exist for Wicks’ generation when the league was founded in 1997. There “was no stability in women’s sports,” she said. “Our victory was that we received our next paycheck, the lights were on and the bus was still waiting there.”
At the time, “my dream was for the league to exist,” Wicks said. Nearly 30 years later, his new dream is for players to “be compensated in a way that gives them the freedom to do what they want in life.”
Despite her own post-WNBA success, Peters says players might need more guidance to help them understand how to plan, save and prepare for the future.
“In general, the lifespan of a basketball player is not long,” she said. “You have to be prepared to not be here tomorrow or next year.”
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AP Sports Writers Doug Feinberg in New York and Tim Reynolds in Miami contributed to this report.
Women in Associated Press and state government coverage receive financial support from Pivotal Ventures. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP standards to work with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas on AP.org.
