At the time when Cynt Marshall became CEO of the Dallas Mavericks, the franchise faced a lot of obstacles to earning the trust of potential female fans and, indeed, that of women in general. Coming off a scandal replete with misogyny, they needed to make fundamental changes to their culture.
The dynamic Marshall has driven that change. Now, to win back, or even expand, the base of female MFFLs (Mavs Fans For Life), they need to let people know about it. Sunday, they made a big move toward that end.
The Mavericks aren’t the only professional basketball franchise in the area. The other one features a roster consisting entirely of female players and it plays in the highest-profile women’s league on the planet. In executing a partnership with the Dallas Wings, the Dallas Mavericks found perhaps the most visible way possible to announce to the world that their basketball brand fully supports women.
As part of their sponsorship arrangement, the Mavs placed a logo on the front of the Wings’ player jerseys. The mark includes the familiar horse-head logo, but it adds three letters: G-E-M. The acronym stands for “Girls Empowered by Mavericks.” The club implemented the GEM program “to engage, inspire and empower young females through the use of physical activity as a backdrop to their development and success.” They said the initiative reaches more than 3,000 North Texas girls annually through athletic, health, and educational components. Those programs will now include the widely-known female players and coaches of the local WNBA team.
The GEM program should serve as an example of the Mavericks’ commitment to doing more than lip service when it comes to empowering women. That they even had a WNBA team in the area to help them push it forward has more than a little to do with another basketball group in attendance at Sunday’s Wings game. A concourse display featured artifacts and alumni of the Women’s Basketball League. The WBL played three professional seasons from 1978-81. The team in Dallas, the Diamonds, began play a year before the Mavericks. The league didn’t last, but it laid important groundwork. The next year, the NCAA finally began to sanction women’s sports. Those early developments led, eventually, to an NBA-affiliated league in 1997, a WNBA team in Arlington, Texas in 2016, and Women’s Final Fours in Dallas in 2017 and 2023. It was at the latter where discussions began about this first-of-its-kind partnership. One might conclude history was both made and recognized on Sunday, as the WBL players were recognized on the court and Marshall received the Nancy Lieberman Women of Inspiration Award (itself named for a former Diamonds star).
The day also spoke to the future. In his press conference remarks, Wings President and CEO Greg Bibb cited statistics about the exploding popularity of women’s sports. The Wings’ promising young core players acknowledged their excitement around the initiative. And girls enrolled in the GEM program helped unveil the new Wings jerseys. While obstacles still exist, certainly, there’s never been a better time in history to be a female basketball player or fan. Sunday, the sport’s two North Texas pro teams both made it clear they want to be part of continuing that momentum.
