When Gabby Williams takes the court Friday in Seattle to make her Golden State Valkyries debut, she will become the first $1 million-a-year player for the first women’s sports franchise with a $1 billion valuation (opens in new tab). 

“Knowing what women’s basketball means to the Bay Area and what it has meant here for decades,” Williams said, “I know up close and personal exactly what it means to be a female athlete here.”

Her arrival is part of a sea change: The Bay Area has become the epicenter of a women’s sports boom backed by not just passionate fans but serious money — that billion-dollar valuation, record revenues, and investors who see women’s sports not as a cause but as an asset class.

To Williams, who spent much of her childhood playing for the Bay Area Bulldawgs AAU team out of Mission Rec, joining the Valkyries was a natural fit. But until recently, none of this seemed possible. 

Williams was born in 1996, the year Joe Lacob founded the San Jose Lasers of the American Basketball League. The Lasers played their first game a few months before the WNBA’s inaugural season. That was four years before the San Jose CyberRays became a founding member of the Women’s United Soccer Association, the world’s first women’s soccer league. 

The Bay Area — which welcomed Bay FC of the NWSL in 2024 and the Valkyries of the WNBA in 2025 — could have been the U.S. capital of women’s sports decades ago. No one understands that better than Brandi Chastain.

The San Jose native and Santa Clara star became an icon during the 1999 World Cup and was a 16-year U.S. women’s national team mainstay. Twenty-five years ago, she was the star of the CyberRays when they won the league’s first championship in a penalty shootout against the Atlanta Beat.

A founding member of Bay FC’s ownership group, she doesn’t need directions to find the club’s locker room at its San Jose State practice facility. She knows it in the turn down the hallway, in the muscle memory of a career spent lacing up cleats just beyond that door. But once she steps in, everything else has changed. She pauses and remembers how familiar the bones are, eyes softened at how the rest is not.

Where there were once metal lockers, narrow benches, and a shared shower pole with water spraying in eight directions are now private, contemporary stalls, recovery stations, and space — space to breathe, to prepare, and to belong. 

“I’m so proud every time I walk in there,” Chastain said. “I have to remind some of these new players that this was our home when women’s professional soccer began here in San Jose, and it looked nothing like this.”

In 2027, Bay FC will take the next step in its evolution when it moves to a custom-built 8.5-acre high-performance training campus on Treasure Island designed specifically for women athletes. 

It’s a stark contrast between then and now. 

Women’s sports have always had energy and fandom in flashes around the Bay Area. What they haven’t always had is infrastructure, capital, and long-term belief all at once. 

That’s what’s different. And it’s exactly why the region has emerged as the epicenter. 

There is perhaps no better proof of that than the Valkyries.

At Sunday’s home opener, they’ll tip off their second season at Chase Center, where demand outpaces capacity, and sellouts are the expectation — the organization cut off season-ticket sales at 12,000 and opened a waitlist. 

The WNBA, now in its 30th season, is expanding rapidly, fueled by surging attendance, a $2.2 billion media rights deal, and a wave of sponsorship interest that has pushed franchise values sharply upward.

The Valkyries are at the top, valued at $1 billion by CNBC and $850 million by Sportico (opens in new tab), the highest in the WNBA for a second consecutive year. Just three years ago, Lacob paid a $50 million expansion fee to bring the Bay Area the WNBA’s first new team since 2008. 

Golden State’s Sportico valuation is roughly $250 million ahead of the second-most valuable team, the New York Liberty. The league average per franchise is around $427 million. 

What makes it all the more striking is the timeline. Sportico estimates that the Valkyries generated a WNBA-record $78 million in revenue in Year 1, demonstrating how quickly demand translated into financial performance.

“In this region, we want to be first adopters,” Valkyries president Jess Smith told The Standard. “The mindset of curiosity and openness of our region is really unique, coupled with the fact that we have been fans of women’s sports, whether they’ve been here in different manners or they’ve just been viewing on TV for a long time, and now we have the opportunity to call teams our own.” 

Women’s pro sports arrived in the Bay Area in bursts over decades — always promising, but always fleeting. Lacob’s Lasers lasted just three seasons. The CyberRays folded two years after winning their title. Hayward-based FC Gold Pride won the Women’s Professional Soccer championship in October 2010 and ceased operations a month later.

The energy, in some sense, has always been here. The audience, though it has grown tenfold, has too. What was missing was everything around it. 

Today, there’s a willingness to invest early and substantially, to treat these franchises as major league operations from day one, and to trust that the audience is hungry.

“You have to take two perspectives: the soccer side and the business side,” Chastain said. “Previously, everything was lumped into one. Now we’re actually looking at this as a business. It’s not a charity.”

That distinction has reshaped the landscape. The audience for women’s pro sports is growing — and evolving.

There’s a boom in fandom, but it doesn’t look exactly like traditional sports culture. It’s intentional. The Valkyries and Bay FC are building identity, community, and signaling a cultural shift around what it can look like to be a fan. They might be a lifelong sports diehard or someone drawn in by the values — equity, access, representation — or by an atmosphere that looks, feels, and sounds different. 

Inside arenas, that mix is visible. Families sit alongside basketball junkies, and with that, the divide between who does and doesn’t “belong” in sports spaces is disappearing.

Smith remembers sitting next to a boy at the Valkyries’ April 25 preseason game, listening as he analyzed Veronica Burton’s play — her offseason jump in quickness, her footwork, her decision-making. There wasn’t any novelty to it; he was just a fan supporting a basketball player. 

That’s part of a cultural shift, and why the business side of these operations is accelerating. 

It’s not limited to high-profile leagues either. New ventures like League One Volleyball and the Golden State Storm tackle football team have entered the Bay Area with the same premise: Women’s sports are no longer a gamble; they are an opportunity. Everyone wants in. 

“Women’s sports are investable, they’re scalable, and they’re being built for the long term,” said Stephanie Martin, president of League One Volleyball’s San Francisco team. The incoming franchise has built out one of the most expansive — and accomplished — collection of owners ever seen, with more than 50 people, including Abby Wambach, Steve Kerr, and Jeremy Lin,  buying in and ready to support volleyball as the country’s next big-time sport.

“In previous decades, there was this idea of investing in women’s sports as how do we help equity and support women in their growth — more of philosophical support,” Martin said. “What’s happening now, this is an asset class in understanding that there’s a tremendous amount of growth. … We’re seeing true market validation, not only from investors and owners but from brands and fans too.”

That extends to the pipeline. At Cal and Stanford, some of the biggest NIL earners are women. Marketability and visibility are aligning earlier than ever before. The next generation of athletes aren’t waiting for professional validation; they’re already building brands. 

Increasingly, elite players are taking notice. 

Stars like Williams, who signed a three-year contract that will pay her upward of $3.7 million through 2028, are part of a global talent pool that sees the Bay Area as a premier destination. 

Take Claire Hutton, 20, and Alex Pfeiffer, 18, who arrived at Bay FC and embraced a vision that appears far more ambitious than the one Chastain once navigated. 

The draw isn’t just money. It’s culture. It’s fandom. It’s the sense that these franchises and leagues are being built with intention, and that the people funding them expect this movement to endure.

“I think one of the biggest things is the ambition that this club has, and for me, top to bottom, this club is aligned with my values and what I want to achieve as well, on and off the field,” Hutton said after joining Bay FC in February. “So just to be in such an amazing area, the Bay Area, with the support it has for sports — not even just soccer, but other opportunities as well — is something that attracted me.” 

Back in Bay FC’s locker room, Chastain can see the arc of it all. From the metal benches to the custom-built, state-of-the-art spaces. From folding leagues to bar-raising expansion franchises. From passion projects to serious business in a market that’s proven.

The Bay Area has seen waves before. The energy here isn’t new, but the foundation beneath it is. Smith describes the ethos in a simple way: “joyfully relentless.” Happy to be here, not yet satisfied.

The bet isn’t just that women’s sports can survive here. It’s that they’re only getting started. 

“There’s no end in sight,” Smith said. “We just want a better world, and we’re doing that through women’s sports.”