Fran Harris has a plan.
The former Texas women’s basketball great has the financial backing, she insists. She’s got the support of the school administration and the city’s mayor and has had constructive conversations with the sports investment group that built the possible arena home. She’s got the ear of the WNBA commissioner if not exactly the outright blessing.
And she has the passion.
Oh, does she have passion.
Now she just needs a team.
That’s right. The ambitious fireball of a business entrepreneur who has founded the Athletic Club, which builds sports facilities for soccer, softball and basketball, who once made her pitch on Shark Tank and consummated a deal about the sports drink she was launching (and has relaunched), who has played on championship teams with the Longhorns and the Houston Comets and who’s been an author and behind the microphone for WNBA games has one more thing on her bucket list.
Harris wants to be the owner of a WNBA expansion team.
She’ll be part of a group — she says she can’t reveal her investors — that hopes to submit a bid for an expansion team within the next two months. The league is expected to announce a 16th franchise next spring to start by 2028, but Harris hopes the WNBA will seek to add three, not one.
“It ain’t going to be cheap,” Harris said.
[…]
Harris has had “very friendly” conversations with the Oak View Group, which built Moody Center for $375 million and might be interested in a 20-date WNBA home schedule.
“There’s got to be a big pocketbook,” Harris said. “A big practice facility that would be between $60 million and $100 million. You have to have an arena or a plan for an arena. You have to be a city that welcomes or demonstrates they love women’s basketball. Austin checks all of those.”
Austin does offer a vibrant corporate community, an area population of more than 2.5 million people, and a fan base that is probably starving for pro sports beyond soccer and something other than the Texas Longhorns. It’s got the climate. It’s got a central location in the country. It’s got traffic gridlock. (OK, overlook that.) It’s got money. It’s a destination city.
And it’s got promise.
Nevertheless, you don’t often hear Austin mentioned prominently for the next wave of WNBA expansion, while other cities are tripping all over themselves to capitalize on the sudden popularity and viability of the league, thank you very much, Caitlin Clark. But Harris is aware.
“It’s an uphill climb for getting a team in Austin only with the sheer number of competitors,” she said. “But we know the economics can work. We’ve seen the business model flourish. But I have to say some of those teams don’t check all the boxes.”
See here and here for the previous posts about Tilman Fertitta getting into the fray for the 16th franchise. The first link contains a mention of Austin being a bidder, which I think was the first I had heard them mentioned. Fran Harris was a member of the 1997 Comets, who won the first WNBA championship. I wasn’t following them that closely yet so I didn’t remember her from the team.
I like Harris’ optimism about the W going all the way to 18 – there are lots of suitors for #16, so there’s a decent case to be made for going bigger – but we’ll see. Even in that scenario, I have a hard time picturing Texas getting more than one team; there’s already a franchise in Dallas, so that would mean three for the state, the same as the NBA. I feel like the WNBA would want a bit more geographic diversity than that. But who knows? Spectrum News, KXAN, KVUE, and the Austin Business Journal, which notes that Kevin Durant may also get involved, have more.