By Jordan Moore
Advertisers hate to hear it, but most television commercials are consumed with the audience’s brain in sleep mode. Even when a spot forces you to chuckle, how often do you remember the brand that it is promoting?
But every now and then, Madison Avenue gets one to stick. “Mikey likes it” and “Just do it” become part of the American lexicon in 30 seconds flat.
In 1997, the WNBA knew it was going to have to fight and scrap for its spot on the sports landscape. Before any games were played, the league’s marketing team needed its magic three words to spark a movement.
“We got next.”
Amid street ball scenes and pickup games, women were demanding their court time.
“When I first saw the commercial, I was so incredibly excited. For the first time, I felt like a star,” said USC women’s basketball head coach Cynthia Cooper-Dyke.
Cooper was already a professional basketball star overseas, so she returned with two simple goals.
“I felt that it was my responsibility as one of the first players in the WNBA to showcase the talent of the female athlete,” she said. But more than anything, “I was on fire to play pro basketball in America in front of my mother. She had not seen me play in 11 years live. I was on a mission to showcase my talent to my mother and show her what I had been doing in Europe for so many years.”
Cooper’s name did not make the marquee going into the inaugural WNBA season. While she was a two-time national champion at USC and an Olympic gold medalist, Cooper took a back seat to Lisa Leslie, Tina Thompson, and other collegiate stars in terms of celebrity.
Of course, Cooper’s game is the only thing more dynamic than her personality, so anonymity did not last long. She collected WNBA MVP awards in each of the league’s first two seasons and WNBA Finals MVP honors to go along with championship rings in the first four campaigns for the Houston Comets.
“I didn’t know if I would be a star or not, but I knew what I could do,” said the supremely confident Cooper, who was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2010. “No one expected for me to be a star in the WNBA. No one expected me to help my team win four championships, but I expected it. The only reason I came to the WNBA was to win championships and make my mother proud.”
She became the WNBA’s first superstar, and filled her mother with pride in the process. After each championship, Cooper eschewed champagne parties to curl up with mom in front of the TV to watch the highlights on ESPN over and over again.
Coming up on 20 years later, having lost her mother to breast cancer, Cooper-Dyke fills the maternal role, not only for her twins at home, but as the USC women’s basketball head coach. Understanding what drove her to greatness as a player, she uses the same emotions to motivate her student-athletes.
“It’s all about the love of basketball and what you do, the pride you take in being the best basketball player and young woman that you can be,” Cooper-Dyke explained. “I want to instill in my players a sense of urgency and pride that they can accomplish anything that they want to do. And hopefully, they look up to me as a mother figure away from home. Because at the end of the day, I want them to be successful.”
Success has a higher ceiling now in the women’s game. While 70’s and 80’s stars like Ann Meyers and Cheryl Miller peaked at the amateur level in college and the Olympics, the best women’s talent can now thrive professionally in the WNBA, fulfilling Cooper’s WNBA mission statement to “create an environment where young kids could dream of playing professional basketball in America.”
Thanks to Cooper and her pioneering generation, the question, “Who’s got next?”, can now be answered by women of all ages, “We do.”
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
/1x.jpeg?auto=webp)
/1x.jpeg?auto=webp)
/1x.jpeg?auto=webp)
/1x.jpeg?auto=webp)
/1x.jpeg?auto=webp)
/1x.jpeg?auto=webp)