A Letter to T-Spoon

On Friday, the Chicago Sky fired head coach Teresa Weatherspoon (affectionately called “T-Spoon” by fans and players) less than a year after hiring her. T-Spoon, a Women’s Basketball Hall of Famer, led the team to a 13-27 season in her first year as a WNBA head coach; the Sky fell two games short of making the playoffs for the first time since 2018. After the announcement, the Sky’s star forward Angel Reese tweeted that she was “heartbroken” by the decision. Maya Goldberg-Safir, who covers the WNBA for the Weekly and on WNBA Rough Notes, wrote this tribute:

Dear T-Spoon,

“I just remember watching you as a little kid, my dad took me to games,” I once ventured to tell you. It was the start of my first-ever question at a post-game press conference.

“Whatchu tryin’ to say about my age?” You shot back, and laughter warmed the room, relaxing me. “I’m trying to say that you’re still here living another basketball life,” I said. It felt like we were talking now, not as adversaries, but maybe even as friends. I asked: “What do you bring with you from the start of the league that comes through to now?”

“This is a helluva question,” you said, “that I have not been asked. And it means a lot to me for you to ask that question.” I was surprised by your openness. It made me think you have a knack for recognizing someone new and inviting them in, or perhaps find joy in meeting a need when you have something meaningful to offer back.

Then you answered my question, and what you said changed me. But I should back up a little bit.

You may know this already, but to be a longtime Chicago Sky fan is to live in fear that the front office may at any moment scoop hope out of you like spoonfuls of melon. And so we steeled ourselves as the 2024 season approached. Then they hired you, and for the first time in years, I felt proud of the WNBA team in Chicago. Because despite their past mistakes, the franchise seemed to understand that you could be a key ingredient to success. They knew, I thought, that alongside the crashing shores sea change in women’s basketball was a critical need to retain its core identity. An identity that you embody. 

I believe that the WNBA, now more than ever, should anchor itself in soulfulness. 

Women’s basketball is not a carbon copy of men’s basketball not only because of historical sexism and homophobia, but because we do not want to be the same as them. 

Alongside historical disenfranchisement came a deep-rooted community in the WNBA. The feeling of gratitude between fans and players as they chatted openly after sparsely-attended games. The pride we all shared when people like Sue Bird and Candace Parker began living openly as gay, when the queerness of our league finally got noticed for what it is: fucking cool. Our excitement and solidarity around elevating Black women essential to the sport as leaders and coaches. 

I also know that this season may have felt like a wonky roller coaster. You were thrown in sideways to a franchise rebuild. And yes, sometimes I felt confused and frustrated by the team’s choices. I wondered if, by the second half of the season, things had slipped from the front office and coaching staff’s fingers a bit. But I was steadfast in the need for Sky fans and media to continue celebrating the good in you specifically. My friends thought I was being overly defensive, and maybe I was. But near the end of the season, I was comforted by what everyone around me thought was true: that a second season was required to assess your performance as the Sky’s head coach. That you, and your process, deserved patience, investment and care. 

It’s been less than a week since Chicago’s front office announced you’d been fired. I can’t imagine what you’re going through right now. Whether you sensed it coming, or if you were totally blindsided. If their reasons, explained over some painful conference call, made any sense. If you feel as disposable or as much like a scapegoat as this bottom-feeder franchise, with their unreachable expectations, has made you out to be.

But I hope you know this: the failure of their decision does not actually lie in the Sky’s unknown future of wins or losses. Instead, this sudden, emotionless, heartbreaking move betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what makes women’s basketball sacred. Their failure is in an attempt to deny what remains the heartbeat of this sport: our interconnection.

Women’s basketball is not a carbon copy of men’s basketball not only because of historical sexism and homophobia, but because we do not want to be the same as them. 

The Sky’s leadership clearly doesn’t get it, but so many others do. I mean the season ticket holders who have been priced out and may only return to Wintrust the next time you do. I mean the University of Mississippi’s head coach Yolett McCuin, who upon hearing the news of your firing tweeted, “This a joke right?” Yes, I even mean Sky Guy, or at least the actor/dancer/artist performing as Sky Guy, who I imagine relates to you, since rumor has it he was the last in the building to know about his immediate dismissal.

And I mean Angel Reese, the greatest blessing to Chicago professional sports in a decade, this record-breaking-Rookie-of-the-Year-sensation. Our prized star, more valuable on and off the court than most of us can even comprehend, who seems as gut-punched as the rest of us. “I’m heartbroken,” Reese wrote after the announcement. “I came to Chicago because of YOU… You didn’t deserve this but I can’t thank you enough. I love you Tspoon.”

I’m worried about love in the WNBA these days. About how it might get lost, or flattened. How the fast track of capital runs away with precious things. How a hunger for profit can smack us into walls of exclusion and half baked ideas by new executives. How the Chicago Sky’s courtside could become just like that of the NBA: not a place for longtime fans, but an impenetrable universe full of shiny, filthy-rich people. How we are already on our way toward dangerous dead ends: the floodgates of popularity now open to faux-“new fans,” people who believe whiteness is both corrective and endangered, and who will pay high ticket prices to reinforce this agenda. Their racism is a special kind of poison: intent on turning Black and queer WNBA players into threatening side characters instead of the foundational leaders they really are.

But back to that press conference, in June, when I asked you what you’d brought from the beginning of the WNBA to now. “When you experience something in life,” you said, “and as much as I’ve experienced in the game of basketball, the beautiful part of it for me is to give back. You don’t experience things to keep. You experience it to give it back.”

Perhaps you were speaking about basketball, but to me your words meant the most perfect and personal writing advice: “You don’t experience things to keep. You experience it to give it back.” How badly I needed to hear this. “Keep going,” you were telling me. “Keep trying.” And so I did. And so I will.

T-Spoon, we all need you in women’s basketball. You have so many more basketball lives left in you and in Chicago, we’re grateful to have witnessed one of them. The fact is that no matter what decisions the people controlling the commands make, no matter how they gate-keep their little growing kingdoms or their swaths of internet, what they cannot stop is our knowing. How we know each other. How we remember. How we remain connected. How we believe in you, T-Spoon, as someone continuing to build the very world we are lucky to stand inside of. 

I hope that in the future, another WNBA franchise doesn’t fail you like this again. I hope the Chicago Sky stops gaslighting its own fans. 

But those are only hopes. You are something immortal. Thank you.

Love,

Maya Goldberg-Safir

Maya Goldberg-Safir is a Chicago-based independent writer and audio producer from Oakland who writes about the WNBA and its culture at WNBA Rough Notes.