NEW YORK, NEW YORK – OCTOBER 12: Sheryl Swoopes attends Women’s Sports Foundation’s Annual Salute To Women In Sports at Cipriani Wall Street on October 12, 2023 in New York City. (Photo by Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images for WSF)
Getty Images for WSF
This year, the WNBA is celebrating its 30th anniversary, marking three decades since the league was founded in 1996. But it was 1997, when the inaugural season tipped off, that the league began to take shape on the court and three-time WNBA MVP and Olympic gold medalist Sheryl Swoopes was at the center of that history, marking a transformative change for women in sports.
Swoopes made history as the first player to sign a WNBA contract, the first female athlete to receive a Nike signature shoe with the Air Swoopes, and the first WNBA player to record a regular-season triple-double.
Swoopes now finds herself at another career-defining moment as one of the central figures in the Roku Original documentary Gamechangers: Mother/Athlete, which explores the behind-the-scenes realities of the WNBA and the balance between basketball greatness and motherhood. The documentary, which premieres on Roku this fall, screened at the Martha’s Vineyard African-American Film Festival on August 9. In the anthology, Swoopes, Skylar Diggins-Smith, Bria Hartley, Natalie Achonwa and Allison Feaster share how they embraced motherhood while competing at the highest level of professional basketball.
Swoopes wasn’t open about her pregnancy initially while helping launch the WNBA; nearly 30 years later, she is publicly confronting that experience in a documentary about how motherhood has changed professional basketball.
Within the documentary, the stories reveal the unseen realities of pregnancy and motherhood in professional basketball—from the stigma and pressure surrounding pregnancy to the physical and emotional challenges of returning to the court, navigating postpartum depression, and caring for children on the road or leaving them behind. The film also highlights how dramatically the WNBA’s approach to motherhood has evolved, particularly following the landmark 2020 collective bargaining agreement, which expanded maternity and family-planning benefits for players.
Swoopes was immensely vulnerable in the documentary, as she felt transported back to 1997 when she was pregnant with her son ahead of the inaugural season, where she faced media scrutiny and backlash for being pregnant and then deciding to return to play for the season after giving birth. “Thank goodness I have thick skin, and I know who I am because hearing a lot of the media commentary could have pushed me to the point where I could say, ‘Screw it! I’m not even going to try to come back.’ I wanted the space to really enjoy the pregnancy, like other moms, but to be in a career in a space at the time where it was almost like, let’s keep this hidden and quiet because I know what the media is going to say. I know what the fans are going to say, and I don’t want to have to deal with that,” she told me during our interview at a swanky hotel on Martha’s Vineyard.
Swoopes credits getting through that difficult time to the support of her close community and family, including her first husband at the time and mother, but often laments the sacrifices she had to make as a full-time basketball player at the top of her game, who although had several high-paying endorsements did need to play overseas, as many WNBA players do given the pay inequities of the league compared to the NBA.
“There was a year where I was like, ‘Okay, I need to go make some more money, and I need to go overseas,’ so I went to Italy, but I didn’t take my son with me; he stayed back home with a really good friend of mine. He was younger, but he was in school, and it was one of the hardest decisions that I ever made: having to go be away from my son for six months,” she said candidly. “I don’t know if people understand the sacrifice that we had to make.”
Sacrifice has been a throughline in Gamechangers: Mother/Athlete, describing the players’ experience with making decisions as women athletes when their identities as mothers collide with the demands of elite competition.
Unfortunately, stories about motherhood and professional women athletes have been missing from the sports conversation for so long, but this documentary aims to show the full picture. “It’s not a conversation happening in men’s sports, and that’s where you know people focused much of their attention. I think it’s a uniquely women’s issue. I don’t even know if issue is the right word; it sounds funny to say issue. It’s just part of their lives. I think it’s important to highlight these things and to shine a light on them. There are some very universal struggles in their stories that I think a lot of women can relate to as well, and yet they’re completely unique. I mean, their job as a professional and an elite basketball player is already so challenging, and there are already so many sacrifices and things that have to be made in order to play, and so many beautiful things, of course, that come with that position and role in place,” Christine Turner, the director of the documentary and mother to two children, said to me.
“I think also, just because the popularity of the WNBA has really exploded, you can’t help but wonder what the realities of this are and what it takes and requires. There’s the emotional, the physical, the mental realities of navigating all of it.”
She continued, I feel an obligation or responsibility to tell stories of women and people of color in particular, but with complexity and nuance, and to see them in their full humanity and as unique individuals with their own personalities.”
Swoopes said Turner created an environment where she could revisit painful experiences without feeling judged.
“What I loved about it was I felt like we had known each other for a while, just giving me the space to be vulnerable and to not judge, but a place where I could actually tell my story because there was so much stuff that I kept hidden and I kept inside,” Swoopes said. “And you think that you’re over certain things, and then she found a way to bring those things out, but not in a bad way, but in a way where I was like, ‘Damn, I thought I was over this.’”
For Swoopes, the process became unexpectedly therapeutic. Revisiting what she experienced as one of the WNBA’s pioneers also allowed her to recognize how much the league has changed for the women who came after her.
“To sit and talk about it, and to not be judged, but to also talk to someone who probably can’t relate, you know, just being in her profession and in this field. So for me, it was very therapeutic,” she said. “As much as I don’t want to cry about it, I think I get emotional about it because I think it’s such a powerful story that people need to hear. But I also cry like happy tears because of what I went through and where we are today.”
She continued, “The women in the WNBA don’t have to deal with the stuff that I personally had to deal with when we first started. So I’m grateful that I got to work with her and that she gave me this space.”
That space also allowed Swoopes to articulate what she hopes women—and the people around them—take away from Gamechangers: Mother/Athlete. For her, the conversation extends far beyond professional basketball.
“Regardless of what your profession is, what your career is, as a woman, if you’re a woman and want to start a family, you should be able to do that and not be judged for it, and not feel like, ‘Oh my God, what are people going to think? What are people going to say? Am I going to lose my job?’ And those are things that we think about,” Swoopes said.
When Swoopes discovered she was pregnant in the months leading up to the WNBA’s inaugural season, those fears were immediate. After taking five pregnancy tests, she still kept the news to herself, even withholding it from her agent for a time.
“I didn’t tell. I didn’t even tell my agent for a while, because I’d just signed a contract, the WNBA was about to start, and I had all this pressure on me to build this league,” she said. “And when I found I was pregnant, my first thought was, ‘What’s the league going to say? What’s Nike going to say?’”
Nearly three decades later, Swoopes wants women to know that motherhood does not have to come at the expense of their ambitions—or their humanity.
“I only bring all that up to say we are human. We’re women. We’re very vulnerable. I’m just like you. Give me the grace to be a woman and not just an athlete,” she said. “And I do think I’m hoping in this documentary that people, women in particular, who may even be struggling with that themselves, like a career and motherhood, can see it’s not going to be easy, but we did it, and you can do it too. I think more stories like this need to be told because it’s real life.”
But Swoopes also believes the conversation cannot be confined to women. Men, she argues, need to understand the realities women face when they choose motherhood while pursuing demanding careers.
“I think women need to see and hear these stories, but you know what? I also think men need to hear these stories,” she said. “Because who are you as a man to tell me what a man can’t do after I give birth?”
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