Colson chats with Boardroom about her decision to leave the Las Vegas Aces and join the Indiana Fever, the current state of women’s basketball, what she’s been up to in the content game and much more.
While Sydney Colson has never been a WNBA All-Star, she’s one of the more important people driving the culture of women’s basketball forward. The 35-year-old is a two-time WNBA champion currently competing in the fourth year of Athletes Unlimited in Nashville, where she’s served as a member of the player executive committee since day one. Colson is also a popular, respected, and important voice on social media and a star of the new show Syd & TP Take Nashville for AU, Fubo TV, and a podcast with co-star Theresa Plaisance.
I spoke with Colson about what the W can learn from Athlete’s Unlimited and Unrivaled, whether Nashville can handle a WNBA expansion franchise, and her move from the Las Vegas Aces to the Indiana Fever.
The following has been edited for length and clarity.
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Shlomo Sprung: What’s been different about season four of Athletes Unlimited?
Sydney Colson: We try to make little improvements every year. I’ve been on the player executive committee since year one in Vegas. Then we spent two years in Dallas and now we’re in Nashville. And it probably isn’t noticeable to other people, but we try to change player experiences. We have 24 new players compared to last year. So that’s really good because it’s always been an important part for us since year one to make sure that we’re giving non-W players a chance to play stateside to be seen by their families and by WNBA GMs and coaches. We’ve taken pride in being able to help people get training camp contracts.
SS: What can we expect from Syd + TP take Nashville?
SC: We’ve been here just shooting content. We did some stuff with our Vespas that we got shipped here. We’ve been going around the city. We’ll do some more episodes of us riding around and visiting some Nashville spots that locals would know while introducing them to people who aren’t familiar with Nashville. We’re going to take our personalities and our joy with us wherever we go. So it’s been fun to do stuff in collaboration with AU. We got some barbecue recommendations, some other food spots. So I got to try a few. TP and I went to a place to line dance, I think it was called Category 10. It was a spot on Broadway, which was pretty cool actually.
SS: What does it mean for you to get the opportunity to have this platform?
SC: It’s big because it’s an opportunity for TP and I to showcase our personalities and our humor together, the fun that we have, and the joy we try to bring people we’re around. And, hopefully, people are able to see us in tandem, and we’re in front of some people that didn’t know of us before and appreciate something about what they see. We’re constantly trying to do things to get people investing in season two of the show. And if it’s not the show, we’ll be starting a podcast soon, so that’ll be cool. We both wanted to do things on camera post-basketball, so we’re always thinking about that.
SS: Do you think there would be an Unrivaled without Athletes Unlimited?
SC: I don’t know. I’m sure they would’ve still been working on something. They’re very different. Ours was the first player-led league that is 5-on-5, and, obviously, they’re playing 3-on-3. It’s a different model, but hopefully, people can appreciate what AU brought to women’s basketball stateside. We’re giving everybody a chance and that’s important to us and one of the staples here. All of it together is great for women’s basketball because it’s more opportunities for people to make money in the states and not have to leave and go play overseas if they don’t want to. So hopefully things like this keep popping up because there’s a lot of stuff on the men’s side. There’s The Basketball Tournament, there’s semi-pro leagues, pro-ams. We want the women’s basketball landscape to mirror that as well eventually.
SS: What do you think the WNBA can learn from AU and Unrivaled?
SC: Players have a ton of ideas, and a ton of good ones at that. They know how they want things to be run, things that are beneficial to helping our play be better on court. And it’s always useful for the W or any company to really take in what they have to say. If your employees are happy or they feel like you want what’s best for them, they’re typically going to work harder and do their job better.
@espn #sydneycolson tryna be co-workers 😅 #aces #wnba #parade ♬ original sound – ESPN
SS: When you feel valued, you’re going to provide your best value out there. It’s simple and yet people just don’t listen.
SC: No, they don’t. It’s really interesting. But in my mind, and obviously in yours, if you give people an environment to be successful or happy, you do your job better.
SS: What do you think would happen if they tracked individual player points like they did in Athletes Unlimited?
SC: I think they did it for us as an example. I don’t know over the course of how many games it was, but it would be interesting. It’s not exactly the efficiency rating, but players that people are expecting would have a lot of points because you don’t have to be on the court all the time to be winning because we go by quarter points and game win points. So you could have players that come off the bench and have a very high efficiency rating but don’t necessarily play a lot of minutes still get quarter and win points. So it would be interesting to see, but some of the teams that do it all together and not with two star players that manufacture most of their points would be some of the teams that have the higher individual points and higher team points. Somebody should just do it for fun.
SS: Yeah, it would be an interesting experiment. Maybe someone will track it. It won’t be me because I’m lazy, but it’ll be somebody.
SC: Thank you for your honesty.
SS: You’ve been in Nashville for a little bit now and they submitted an expansion bid, the Tennessee Summitt. Do you think Nashville can handle a WNBA expansion team?
SC: Yeah, the city really seems primed and ready for it. They’ve been waiting for it for a long time. And there are a lot of colleges in the area, which I never really thought about until we were about to be making the move. A lot of mid-majors, a lot of D1 programs, and we know Tennessee to be a basketball state. So that fan base would be really excited. Even the people who’ve shown up to our games, they’re talking about it and hoping for it. I think they’d turn out in large numbers.
SS: Obviously you made a big change in leaving the Aces for the Fever. What made you want to join Indiana?
SC: It was a variety of things. There was a new coaching staff. Amber Cox was a big part of that. Kelsey Mitchell I played with here for the first three seasons. DeWanna Bonner and Natasha Howard are players I’ve respected from afar, enjoyed their game. Kate Martin, my teammate from the Aces, is obviously good friends with Caitlin Clark. They played together at Iowa and she speaks really highly of her. And obviously we saw the rookie year that she had. So her, Kelsey, and Aliyah Boston they had something special the second half of the season and I just look at them as a young hungry team. Our veteran presence with DeWanna, Natasha, and me coming from winning programs who have been around the league for a long time can help infuse something in the team that can take us far in playoffs.
It was just an exciting opportunity. My time with the Aces was wonderful and we created history in a lot of ways, and they’ll always be my Aces family and I’ll miss those fans and everything, but I felt God was leading me in another direction. And sometimes stuff can feel uncomfortable. You’re not necessarily feeling like you’re ready to take a step, but I think that’s usually when you need to. So that was what I did.
SS: When you were first with the Aces in 2019, you had Kelsey Plum, A’ja Wilson, and Jackie Young, who were all No. 1 picks, and now you have Aliyah and Caitlin, who were top picks the last two years. Do you see similarities between how the Aces were built with those top Fever picks?
SC: It takes time to build when you’re getting players when they’re young. A lot of people want to rush championships, but it’s not something that happens overnight. It’s a long process of figuring things out together. Sometimes you have to lose a lot. You learn through the losses and the wins. You make it to the semifinals, you lose. Sometimes you have to get lucky and that doesn’t take place.
But it’ll help to have vets that come from winning cultures who understand what it takes to not get too high or too low in this league because you can lose a bunch in a row and then you could hit your stride at the right point and be clicking and win a championship or make a Finals run. We have a nice mixture and we have a nice core group of young players that are hungry to win and are going to put in the work.
SS: Last year the Fever started slow and Caitlin and everyone started figuring things out and they made the playoffs. Now Caitlin will know what she’s doing for a full season and you’ll have vets like yourself in place to make sure you stay on point from the jump.
SC: It’ll be a much easier transition. And now they have a year under their belts together, which will be scary. I’ll be interested to be up close and personal with Caitlin to see what it’s like day to day.
SS: What does it mean for the W to have that back and forth and that community that you’re a part of on Twitter and other social media?
SC: I think it’s great when they’re being normal on there.
SS: You have a new teammate now where the discourse on social media was not normal.
SC: Yeah, it wasn’t normal. It was bad. And that happens with most things. And people talk about it are like “that’s just what happens when something is big.” But we don’t have to make it normal and treat it as something that should be accepted. In fact, we should let it be known that certain things — I won’t say tolerated because you can only do so much, there’s freedom of speech, and people can say what they want — but you do appreciate the people that have been there early on that respect the game, respect the players, and they criticize, but in a basketball way. It’s not personal. Everybody’s game isn’t for everybody. It’s good to have healthy discourse on there, to be able to disagree with people and keep it moving, whether that’s sports or whatever. You don’t always agree, but come at it in a certain way and we can go our separate ways about it. But I do like that the WNBA is picking up traction. More people are watching.
SS: How meaningful is it for the sport to have this solidified year-round pro calendar with AU and W and Unrivaled and it’s almost a 365 day calendar now?
SC: For basketball heads, you like being able to turn on the TV and watch. And obviously college basketball is going on right now and we’re approaching March Madness, but it’s really cool to be able to see so many pro players without having to wake up and watch a game at 2:30 or 5 a.m. in China or wherever they might be. You’re able to turn it on at a normal time whether it’s online or on TV, and I love that.
I just like watching basketball, even if I’m not fully paying attention to everything. Just having basketball on mute is fun to watch. And I’m hoping that this is also giving young players, high school players, college players, another goal to reach one of these levels. You might not make it to the W, you might not make it to Unrivaled, but maybe you’re making it to one of others. The opportunity that we’re all creating is great for the game. And hopefully more things like this pop up and the opportunities become endless for people.
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