A WNBA team may come to Austin, thanks to a multimillion-dollar bid led by former Texas Longhorns basketball champion Fran Harris. The women’s pro hoops league has already formalized plans to add franchises in Portland, San Francisco, and Toronto over the next two seasons, with room for one more city to join the league and bring the WNBA’s total number of teams to sixteen by 2028. Harris, a Dallas native who led UT women’s basketball to a national championship in 1986 and played for the WNBA-champion Houston Comets during the league’s inaugural season, told Texas Monthly she’d been dreaming about an opportunity like this for more than twenty years.
“My first thought about ownership was the first day of the WNBA, in 1997, walking on that court in Houston and seeing sixteen thousand people watching,” Harris said. “I wasn’t sure I was ever going to see that in my lifetime.”
But ownership comes with a hefty price tag in the rapidly growing WNBA. The new owners in Portland bid a whopping $125 million, a record fee for the league. Harris said the effort to bring a franchise to Austin will cost far more, with bids from other cities such as Miami and Philadelphia ranging from $200 million to $250 million. Harris, who has been raising funds for Austin’s bid since 2023, said she locked down a primary investor six months ago, but the ownership group isn’t yet ready to reveal names.
Besides Austin, about a dozen other cities are being considered for WNBA expansion, including Houston; Kansas City, Missouri; and Milwaukee. Harris said Austin deserves the nod, calling the town a “sweet spot” for women’s hoops and pointing to fans who have rallied around Longhorns women’s basketball, which is ranked fourth in the country so far this season. With the 2022 opening of the Moody Center, which can seat up to 15,000 fans, Harris said the city has the facilities and corporate sponsors to support a pro team. She also said she has her eye on several potential locations around the city for the construction of a practice facility. Given Austin’s central location in the state, she predicts that a WNBA franchise would draw fans from major cities such as Houston and San Antonio, both of which used to have their own teams in the league.
But we must address the elephant in the room: Longhorns aside, Austin has never been known as a rabid sports city, so will local fans rally around a new franchise? Harris sure thinks so. She pointed to the unwavering support for Austin FC, a team whose spirited supporter groups have remained dedicated through four up-and-down seasons for the still-young Major League Soccer club. Even the San Antonio Spurs have been cozying up to Austin by scheduling a handful of their regular-season home games at the Moody Center. There’s even been talk of bringing a Major League Baseball franchise to Central Texas, given the growth of communities along Interstate 35 between Austin and San Antonio.
Harris said she senses a “hunger” in Austin for another pro franchise the city can claim as its own. Compared to other growing metro areas around the nation and to some of the other cities vying for the remaining WNBA expansion slot, she said, Austin has fewer pro teams and less competition for sports fans’ loyalty (and ticket purchases). “The pageantry and the way people love [Longhorn] athletics is not going to change, but what we’re seeing is people moving to Austin who don’t care about the University of Texas,” she said. “They want their own team. The WNBA gives them the opportunity to build with us.
“I’m excited to see how Austin responds to women’s pro anything,” Harris added. “We’ve been a college town for so long, and soccer is very different from the WNBA, so I’m eager to see how [Austinites] show up for us.” The WNBA hasn’t said when it will decide which city will host the league’s sixteenth franchise, but Harris said she hopes to hear an announcement next spring, when interest in March Madness 2025 and the women’s NCAA tournament will be peaking.
At the college and professional levels, men’s sports have historically garnered more attention and revenue than their women’s counterparts. But that disparity is getting smaller with every passing year, and sports such as women’s basketball, soccer, and volleyball are considered some of the best growth opportunities (with lower costs of entry) for investors looking to get into the business of sports. In May, WNBA games averaged 1.32 million viewers across television networks, nearly triple the previous season’s average viewership. Earlier this year, for the first time in NCAA basketball history, the viewing audience of the women’s national championship game eclipsed that of the men’s. “This is an amazing moment in women’s sports,” Harris said, one when female athletes are starting to get the hype they’ve always deserved.
