When the New York Liberty were courting Breanna Stewart during the free agency period before the 2023 season, Ms. Stewart had many conversations with Clara Wu Tsai, the owner of the team. They talked about the future of the W.N.B.A., and each shared her own ambitions.
At the time, the Liberty were practicing in a compound built into the Barclays Center. It was well-equipped, but the building is also used for Nets games, concerts, boxing matches and other events. There were days the team didn’t have full access.
Only one team in the league, the Las Vegas Aces, would be practicing in its own dedicated facility that season. But Ms. Wu Tsai, who owns the Liberty with her husband, Joe Tsai, a co-founder of the Alibaba Group, knew she wanted that for the Liberty soon. She couldn’t promise to Ms. Stewart, a coveted free agent, exactly what it would look like or where it would be. But she wanted Ms. Stewart to understand that the players’ training and recovery was important to her as an owner.
On Thursday, Brooklyn Sports and Entertainment, the parent company of the Liberty and the N.B.A.’s Brooklyn Nets, is announcing plans to build a 75,000-square-foot practice facility for the Liberty in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn. The waterfront space, which the Liberty will lease, is on Newtown Creek, a tributary of the East River, and will sit partly on what is now an empty lot. The Liberty’s ownership group says it will pay for the construction and expects to spend $80 million on it.
In addition to two indoor courts with remote cameras and data tracking technology, a recovery suite and a two-story strength training area, the new structure will have elements that wouldn’t be out of place at a destination spa: rooftop dining areas, views of Manhattan, a hair, makeup and nail studio, and individual pods instead of lockers that will include day beds, wardrobes and vanities.
The Liberty’s announcement is part of a growing arms race in the W.N.B.A. to build facilities that offer often lavish amenities. These spaces can contribute to players’ decisions about where to spend their careers. Salaries, travel and most other benefits are carefully regulated by the league’s collective bargaining agreement. But practice facilities aren’t, so they have become a way teams can stand out.
“This the way that the women’s sport is definitely continuing to evolve,” Ms. Stewart, 30, said in an interview. She added, “It’s putting pressure on franchises, on owners, to make sure your team has the best of the best.”
Ms. Wu Tsai said the organization had considered creating spaces for the Liberty at the Nets’ team facility in Industry City before deciding on a wholly separate location. She sees the investment in the team as a way to show long-term commitment to players, fans and the local community.
“When you start to see returns from your investment, the smart thing to do is to reinvest,” Ms. Wu Tsai said in an interview.
Last season, the Liberty won a championship, thanks to stars like Ms. Stewart, Jonquel Jones and Sabrina Ionescu. Their games have become a coveted ticket, some commanding thousands of dollars on the secondary market. And while no W.N.B.A. team is profitable, Ms. Wu Tsai said the Liberty would be “very soon.”
The team intends to have a Liberty-themed coffee shop open to the public on the property, as well as a team store with exclusive merchandise.
But that is ancillary to the main purpose of the new facility.
For professional athletes, a team’s practice space is akin to their office. When they have private spaces, they decorate their lockers with family photos and leave essentials there. They are places where players can put in extra training, go through recovery routines and feel confident they won’t be bothered.
That’s all standard now in the N.B.A. But in some markets you might have seen a W.N.B.A. team at your local Y.M.C.A. (that’s where the team in San Antonio, which later became the Las Vegas Aces, practiced) or a community center (where the Connecticut Sun practice).
As of last season, three teams had their own facilities — the Aces, whose facility was the first of its kind and opened in 2023, as well as the Seattle Storm and the Phoenix Mercury. The Golden State Valkyries, an expansion team that is set to start its first season, will do so with a dedicated facility. Several other franchises have announced plans for new facilities, including the Indiana Fever, for whom the phenom Caitlin Clark plays.
Hair and nail salons and brightly lit vanities have become standard for the new generation of W.N.B.A facilities, as have saunas, cold tubs, steam rooms, and aquatic centers for training and recovery. The Fever’s new building, set to cost $78 million, will span 108,000 square feet. It will have a podcast and content creation studio. The Aces had a television and minicomputer installed at each locker.
Some of these amenities surpass what some N.B.A. teams offer. The Knicks player Josh Hart posted on social media in 2023 that the Aces’ facility would be a top-five facility in the N.B.A.
A’ja Wilson, who won the league’s Most Valuable Player Award last year and was drafted by the Aces in 2018, said that even in her rookie year she could tell the investment teams were willing to make in W.N.B.A. franchises was growing.
“I’m just lucky that I was added to that franchise,” Ms. Wilson said about the Aces. “I feel like we set the standard for a lot of things.”
The league doesn’t set minimum standards for team practice facilities. When Ms. Wu Tsai was asked if there had been any discussion of including that in the next collective bargaining agreement, a public relations representative stepped in to say she would not answer. The current collective bargaining agreement expires after the 2025 season because last year, in hopes of capitalizing on the wave of interest in their game, the W.N.B.A. players voted to end the agreement early.
In the past, the wide discrepancies in the quality of training centers gave teams with their own facilities a recruiting advantage. Ms. Stewart said players still paid attention to that. But Jonathan Kolb, the general manager of the Liberty, said that simply having a practice facility was no longer as helpful as it had once been.
Mr. Kolb said he had suggested to Ms. Wu Tsai that the team consult with the players about what they wanted in the new facility. Starting in November, the team’s three biggest stars — Ms. Stewart, Ms. Ionescu and Ms. Jones — spoke with the architectural firm Populous, which designed the Sphere in Las Vegas.
One theme that emerged: The players wanted more privacy.
A typical locker room is a set of cubbies positioned around a room. For the Liberty facility, the firm designed each player’s locker as an individual suite that includes a seven-foot-long day bed, a full-size wardrobe and a vanity.
Ms. Stewart said she had told the architects that she would love to see the layout of the facility follow the order in which players needed each room. So, for example, a player would encounter the training room before the cold tubs.
She was especially excited about the child care facilities. Ms. Stewart said the space would have a dedicated rooms for toddlers, one for mothers who needed some privacy to feed their children and one for infants who needed dark rooms for naps. (Other W.N.B.A practice facilities have child care on site, too.)
“Blackout curtains. White noise machine,” Ms. Stewart, a mother of two, said. “Listen. I can’t wait to go shopping for all this stuff. They should bring me.”
Construction won’t begin for months, and the facility won’t open for two years. In the life of a professional athlete, that can feel like an eternity.
Will Ms. Stewart be with the team in two years when the new facility opens?
“Yeah, I hope so!” she said. As of Tuesday, she hadn’t signed her contract yet for this coming season, but was still thinking ahead. “I need to see this thing come to life for sure.”
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