Only four women from Oakland have ever made it to the WNBA. As with a lot of things here, it’s an infrastructure story.

Since the late 1980s, more than 20 men from Oakland have reached the league. On any given night, a channel-flipping NBA fan in the 1990s might’ve glimpsed Payton, Kidd, Antonio Davis, Brian Shaw, Isaiah Rider, and Greg Foster — all childhood friends who a few years earlier might’ve been found calling next at Mosswood Park.

Chelsea Gray — raised in Hayward and Stockton, and a cousin of Gray-Lawson — is a former WNBA Finals MVP and remains one of the faces of the Las Vegas Aces. (The Aces are currently leading the Phoenix Mercury 3–0 in this year’s WNBA Finals, with Gray once again playing a key role). And Sabrina Ionescu, from Walnut Creek and Miramonte High in Orinda, is already a cornerstone of the Liberty and one of the league’s most marketable players.

For an Oakland girl who dreamed of the big stage, the league felt both tantalizingly close and frustratingly far away. Years later, after starring at Oakland Tech and Cal, Gray-Lawson made it to the WNBA as a player and not just a spectator. But she was the exception.

Oakland Tech grad Alexis Gray-Lawson played for the Phoenix Mercury during her two seasons in the WNBA. Credit: AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin

The WNBA came to Sacramento in 1997, and Alexis Gray-Lawson would pile into the car with her 12-and-under team to make the drive. If she wanted to see women’s basketball up close, that was the only option.

For an Oakland girl who dreamed of the big stage, the league felt both tantalizingly close and frustratingly far away. Years later, after starring at Oakland Tech and Cal, Gray-Lawson made it to the WNBA as a player and not just a spectator. But she was the exception.

In the last 15 years, only two women from Oakland — Gray-Lawson and Oderah Chidom — have made it to the WNBA. Go back three decades and Oakland proper still yields just four women drafted by WNBA teams or rostered during the regular season. By contrast, Oakland men have filled NBA rosters for decades, from Hall of Famers Bill Russell, Gary Payton, and Jason Kidd to modern stars like Damian Lillard.

The comparisons aren’t perfect. The NBA is 78 years old and carries 450 roster spots each season. The WNBA, by contrast, is just 28 years old and has only 156 roster spots — a total set to grow to 180 with expansion next year. Still, the contrast is striking. Oakland has played a significant role in every era of the NBA while leaving only the faintest of marks on the WNBA.

The reasons have less to do with a lack of talented individuals and more to do with what surrounded them — the infrastructure that nurtured boys but not girls, the migration of families to the suburbs, and the uneven opportunities that came with both.

‘We just didn’t have the same opportunities as the men’

First, though, we have to decide who truly counts as “from Oakland.” Some players were born in the city but played their high school ball elsewhere. Others grew up here yet appear in the record books under neighboring towns.

For the sake of clarity, this story begins with Oakland proper — women who were either born in the city or played at Oakland high schools — before widening the lens to the East Bay, where many of the region’s most visible women’s players have emerged in recent years.

Since the late 1980s, more than 20 men from Oakland have reached the league. On any given night, a channel-flipping NBA fan in the 1990s might’ve glimpsed Payton, Kidd, Antonio Davis, Brian Shaw, Isaiah Rider, and Greg Foster — all childhood friends who a few years earlier might’ve been found calling next at Mosswood Park.

The numbers are only part of the story. “Oakland’s legacy in sports is incredibly unique compared to anything in America of any size,” said Paul Brekke-Miesner, a third-generation Oaklander who has written extensively about the city’s athletic history.

“It was more or less a perfect storm of situations that happened over the last 150 years that produced an incredible sports legacy. And legacies, for me, are not just about the number of great athletes that came out of Oakland, but the uniqueness of their contributions in the world of sports.”

Bill Russell, for instance, was one of the most prolific winners in the history of sports. He was also relentless in taking on the NBA’s accommodations to racism, and in 1966 he became the league’s first Black coach.

Childhood friends Jason Kidd (left) and Gary Payton (right), both from Oakland, were NBA colleagues in the 1990s and 2000s. Credit: AP Photo/Morry Gash
The picture looks very different for women.

The trailblazer was Anna Johnson, who in 1979 became the first woman from Oakland to play professionally, suiting up for the short-lived San Francisco Pioneers. Nearly two decades later, Rehema Stephens, a star at Oakland Tech, was drafted by the Sacramento Monarchs in 1998. Amisha Carter, out of McClymonds, followed in 2004 and played one season with the New York Liberty. Gray-Lawson was drafted in 2010.

Oderah Chidom, technically born in Hayward but shaped by her years at Bishop O’Dowd, reached the WNBA in 2017 after being drafted by the Atlanta Dream.

What for a time looked like a pipeline for the men was never anything more than a pump spray for the women. “We just didn’t have the same opportunities as the men,” Gray-Lawson said. “The guys were traveling and getting on the big stages early. For us, it wasn’t until later — if at all. It really just came down to opportunity.”

As an Oaklander, Gray-Lawson was made to feel like an oddity upon arriving in the WNBA. “I’ll never forget the owner shaking my hand and being shocked I went to Cal. He didn’t expect that from a kid from Oakland,” she said. “That was a defining moment — realizing people didn’t know what to expect from me, and I had to be the one to set the mold.”

For many of her peers, opportunity never came in the WNBA at all. Instead, Oakland’s top women’s players often had to take their talents abroad.

Gabby Green, after starring at Cal, signed a training camp deal with the Los Angeles Sparks but built her pro career overseas. Breanna Brown, out of Bishop O’Dowd, spent her post-college years in international leagues. Asha Thomas, another O’Dowd alum and Cal record-holder, also went overseas before moving into coaching. And Faatimah Amen-Ra, who grew up in Oakland after emigrating from Toronto, carved out a playing career across four continents before founding the Women’s Premier Basketball Association, a semi-pro league she now runs out of Oakland.

Meanwhile, some of the Bay Area’s most recognizable women’s stars have come not from Oakland proper but from its surrounding suburbs. Brittany Boyd-Jones, a Berkeley High product, became a first-round pick by the Liberty in 2015. Courtney Paris, who played at Piedmont High, enjoyed a long WNBA career and now coaches in Chicago.

Chelsea Gray — raised in Hayward and Stockton, and a cousin of Gray-Lawson — is a former WNBA Finals MVP and remains one of the faces of the Las Vegas Aces. (The Aces are currently leading the Phoenix Mercury 3–0 in this year’s WNBA Finals, with Gray once again playing a key role). And Sabrina Ionescu, from Walnut Creek and Miramonte High in Orinda, is already a cornerstone of the Liberty and one of the league’s most marketable players.

That geographic shift underscores the contrast: While Oakland proper has been a reliable source of NBA stars, its women’s basketball success stories increasingly come from the suburbs.

Oakland’s ‘incredible park system’

Brekke-Miesner points to the city’s early investment in public recreation as a reason for the gender asymmetry.

“From the early 1900s, Oakland had this incredible park system — baseball fields, basketball courts, swimming pools, playground directors at every school,” he said. “For most children in Oakland, their first initiation into organized sports and coaching was on those playgrounds. That system was unique in America.” The results were staggering. From playgrounds to junior highs to the Oakland Athletic League, generations of boys came up through a system that functioned a little like baseball’s minor leagues — each level tougher than the last, each producing athletes who would eventually star in the pros. Girls, though, weren’t permitted in that pipeline.

Before Title IX, Oakland girls had virtually no access to organized school sports; options were limited to “play days” or intramural-style games that were treated more like recreation than competition. By the 1950s and ’60s, while boys were already moving through structured leagues and getting the attention of college scouts, girls’ teams were practically invisible.

The inequities lingered even after the passage of Title IX in 1972. Oakland schools didn’t fully implement its requirements for years. The infrastructure that supported boys — from public playground directors who ran after-school programs, to the junior high leagues that fed into the Oakland Athletic League — had been designed with boys in mind. There were few (if any) women hired into those early roles, and girls weren’t part of the system those coaches and leagues were meant to serve. So even as opportunities technically opened up, girls’ teams couldn’t count on having fields, referees, or coaches ready for them. Instead, new programs had to be created from scratch, which meant that in the late 1970s and ’80s they remained underfunded, undercoached, and underpublicized.

By the time the WNBA launched in 1997, Oakland girls were still catching up. And at the very moment that a new generation of girls might have seen a professional future in basketball, the collapse of the city’s own recreational system meant that many never got the chance to take those first steps in Oakland. Budget cuts beginning in the late 1990s shut down after-school programs and led to the closure of several recreation centers and gyms, as Brekke-Miesner noted. The Oakland Athletic League, once a proving ground for future pros, struggled to field full rosters in some sports.

At the same time, the growth of charter schools siphoned students away from traditional public schools — and those charters often lacked the funding or facilities to offer full athletic programs. The result: fewer teams, fewer coaches, and fewer opportunities.

“You drive by playgrounds now and don’t see much activity anymore,” Brekke-Miesner said. “It’s a sad thing to see.”

Gray-Lawson remembers how steep the climb was, even in what she calls the Bay Area’s “golden era” of women’s hoops.

“I didn’t even get to a big recruiting tournament until junior year,” she said. “It really came down to being in the right place at the right time — and a lot of girls never got that chance.”

Visibility and access were scarce. Gray-Lawson credits her break to a coach in Los Angeles who put her on the national AAU circuit.

“That opened doors for me that otherwise wouldn’t have opened. Opportunity is everything,” said Gray-Lawson, who was a McDonald’s All-American her senior year of high school, along with three other East Bay products.

‘If you can see it, you can dream it’

The story of opportunity is also a story of geography. Brekke-Miesner pointed to rising housing costs and demographic change as one cause of the hoops gender disparity. Families have left Oakland and moved to the suburbs and beyond, where schools and clubs often have stronger resources. The importance of AAU basketball in the recruiting circuit has likewise tilted the court in favor of the wealthier families in the suburbs.

“Suburban teams have money and access,” Gray-Lawson said. “Some programs charge $6,200 a summer to play. Most Oakland kids can’t afford that. You can be incredibly talented, but if you’re not on that circuit, you don’t get seen. It’s not about talent. It’s about opportunity and money.”
Today, Gray-Lawson is the athletic director at Oakland Tech. Credit: The Oaklandside
While the arrival of the Golden State Valkyries in San Francisco has brought about a regional women’s basketball boom, Gray-Larson wasn’t so sure it would help the game in Oakland. “Tickets are $200 on a Monday night,” Gray-Lawson said. “How many kids in Oakland can afford that? Being around the game matters. If you can see it, you can dream it.”

In a way, that’s her job now: helping kids to see opportunities that might not be immediately visible to them. After her own career — which included two seasons in the WNBA and a few stints overseas — she returned to The Town and now serves as athletic director at Oakland Tech.

For her, the work is as much about presence as it is about wins and losses.

“My job at Tech is to be visible,” she said. “I’m still in the neighborhood I grew up in, showing kids that it’s possible. I tell them to keep dreaming — but also make a plan. Network. Learn how to put yourself in the right rooms. Because it’s not just what you know, it’s who you know.”