“Listening to the gamers has been a precedence for us from the beginning,” Stephanie Marciano, head of sports activities and leisure advertising and marketing at Ally, mentioned in a dialog at WNBA All-Star Weekend. “A variety of us at Ally, from an government standpoint, are additionally former athletes ourselves. I performed in faculty, and I performed basketball overseas in Germany—so we went by means of it, and we perceive the disparity in sources as we come up, so we actually know what levers we needed to push and pull as properly.”

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In the meantime, along with teaming with media and tradition agency Togethxr to host an All-Star panel with Unmatched-affiliated NBA gamers, together with Rickea Jackson and Kate Martin, Aflac touted its partnership with the WNBA and handed out supplemental checks to WNBA Expertise Competitors and 3-Level Contest winners Natasha Cloud and Sabrina Ionescu.

This yr, Aflac kicked in $115,000 to spice up the prize pool for each the 3-point contest and the All-Star expertise problem. Based mostly on the league’s 2020 collective bargaining settlement, which gamers simply opted out of in October, the WNBA itself offers the winners of each competitions with simply $2,575 every.

Extra monetary safety has been one in every of Collier’s objectives in Unmatched, which had solely 36 gamers in its first season, however attracted traders together with John Skipper, former Turner president David Levy, Moira Forbes, Alex Morgan, Michelle Wie West, Daybreak Staley, Gary Vaynerchuk, and Megan Rapinoe. Within the first yr on TNT Sports activities, Unmatched drew 221,000 followers per broadcast and paid its gamers a median of $220,000 per recreation—or simply beneath the WNBA’s $250,000 most wage.

Throughout Collier’s All-Star MVP trophy presentation, WNBA broadcaster and ESPN’s Holly Rowe reminded everybody that Collier and her fellow gamers and model companions had been making their case for worth independently of the WNBA all through All-Star occasions. Rowe not solely requested Collier through the trophy presentation what was essential for her and the gamers at this second, however introduced up the WNBPA vice chairman’s fellow government committee members, Nneka Ogwumike (president) and Breanna Stewart (vice chairman), to make their calls for recognized.

The latter, Stewart, not solely hinted that the time between Saturday evening’s All-Star recreation and Tuesday’s return to regular-season play ought to seemingly be longer, however earlier that day, noticed Unmatched prolong seven collegiate gamers’ title, picture, and likeness rights offers with assist from its accomplice Samsung. The announcement got here at an Unmatched activation that adopted the league’s profitable first season and was a roughly 12-minute stroll from the WNBA All-Star host web site at Gainbridge Fieldhouse.