Flau’jae Johnson has always loved a vision board. “I get all the cutouts that I want,” she says. “I’m like, This is what I want my life to look like.” Now in her senior season at LSU, preparing for professional hoops, Johnson has never had more choices of just what to cut and paste onto her board.
Her fellow top players may not all be planning their careers in quite the same way. But they’re all sharing in the same feeling of possibility as the college basketball season kicks off this week. They’re watching as the WNBA rides a major growth wave and negotiates a new collective bargaining agreement. They’re weighing the opportunity presented by Unrivaled, the three-on-three league founded by WNBA players Napheesa Collier and Breanna Stewart, which began play during the W offseason last January and has since announced expansion and a new round of investment to bring its valuation to $340 million. They’re looking at how best to convert their NIL deals into ongoing professional sponsorships. In short, they’re figuring out how they will navigate a world that did not exist when they entered college.
