| Victoria Jackson
When Dominique Malonga, the French teenager with the viral dunk videos, was selected second in the WNBA draft on April 14 by the Seattle Storm, many U.S.-based women’s basketball fans and even journalists were confused about her age and ability to immediately play in the WNBA. Most hoop heads here know that the rules regarding the NBA and the WNBA differ when it comes to draft eligibility. The NBA has a 1-year rule, requiring players to wait one year after high school graduation before entering the draft, while the WNBA extends that waiting period all the way out to four years. Fans of the women’s game tend to be split on the different approach: some take pride in the way the W prioritizes education and college degrees; others see it as yet another mark of condescension, one of many that treat women’s sports like a less serious professional affair. (Players in both leagues agree to their respective rules through collective bargaining agreements.)
But there is another way the NBA and WNBA differ in their draft eligibility rules: whereas in the NBA all players must be at least 19 years old (or turn 19 during the calendar year of the draft), the WNBA holds different age rules for domestic players and international players. Domestic players must have graduated or exhausted their college eligibility, be four years removed from high school (and have given up remaining college eligibility), or be 22 years old. Outside the U.S., however, you can declare for the draft as long as you will turn 20 years old during the calendar year of the draft. It’s not a question of whether or not you’re a United States citizen: If Dominique Malonga had played one year with Dawn Staley’s Gamecocks or Geno Auriemma’s Huskies as an 18-year-old, under the current rules she would have had to wait another three years before declaring for the WNBA draft. But because she has been playing professionally in Lyon, France for ASVEL Féminin instead, Malonga (who is serious about her education and likely to earn advanced degrees eventually) chose the WNBA over the NCAA. She’ll be 19 for the entirety of the 2025 WNBA season; her birthday is in mid-November, about one month after the season wraps.
Shouldn’t American women’s basketball players have the same freedom to choose as Dominique Malonga, and also the two other 19-year-old international top-ten draft picks, Justė Jocytė, Malonga’s Lithuanian teammate in Lyon, and Ajša Sivka, a Slovenian playing in Italy? (Or the same option as NCAA men’s basketball star Cooper Flagg, who just this week declared for the NBA draft after playing only one year at Duke?)
The 4-year wait period for players in the United States is meant to incentivize them to continue their studies. Until the very recent past, a professional athlete in women’s sports wouldn’t make enough money to retire and not have to worry about starting a second career, and so the thinking has been that the college degree would come in awfully handy as retired athletes figured out how to support themselves after sport. Another factor was the much smaller total number of roster spots in the women’s league, which has ranged from only 8 to 12 teams over the past quarter-century (until league expansion beginning this year), and active W players understandably had wanted to have some protection from what could have been larger pools of younger competitors.
But the other explanation is that Americans are happy to do things the American way and differently from the rest of the world when it comes to elite sports, and, historically, what this has often meant for women’s sports in the U.S. is following or accommodating U.S. men’s sports practices (or in some cases, like with draft eligibility age, outperforming the men in doing things our own way).
Women’s pro team sports in the United States have long had to deal with the gravitational pull of U.S. men’s sports, a force working to drag them away from what often has proven to be the more rational alignment with global sport’s business practices, calendars, and even methods of athlete development. The WNBA was a creation of the NBA, coming off the successful run of Team USA in the year leading into the 1996 Atlanta Olympics (playing – and winning – 52 games across 7 countries) as well as during those U.S.-hosted Games themselves. The W has a draft because men’s pro sports leagues in the U.S. have drafts. And the W plays in the summer because it’s the offseason for the NBA.
Remember why so many WNBA stars played overseas during the WNBA offseason for so long? Because the WNBA offseason isn’t just the NBA’s regular season; it’s global basketball’s regular season, and WNBA players could make a lot more money in other countries’ domestic leagues during global basketball’s regular calendar of play.
But recently things have started to change for women’s sports in the United States. More resources, greater confidence, and bolder leadership have created the conditions for American women’s sports to do things differently from men’s sports, make decisions to better serve women’s sports – regardless of perceived effects on men’s sports – and as a result, join the global sports community.
The National Women’s Soccer League and the NWSL Players Association recently agreed to an important step – eliminating the draft – to move women’s pro soccer in the U.S. away from traditional U.S. men’s sports practices and toward the customs of global soccer. And high school-age teenagers have been able to sign with NWSL clubs since Thorn Olivia Moultrie’s successful lawsuit and settlement in 2021 that allowed her to join the Portland team at 15 (the CBA at the time set the age at 18), just like young players elsewhere in the soccer world.
American women’s basketball seems primed and ready to chart a new course too, thanks in large part to the creativity and business smarts of the W’s players. Just look at the success of Napheesa Collier and Breanna Stewart’s new Unrivaled league this past winter.
The good news for American teen basketball prodigies is that the WNBPA and WNBA have opted out of their current CBA, which will stand through the end of the 2025 season. The eligibility age for U.S.-based players very well may change by next year. NCAA women’s basketball is exciting as ever, and with a level of play and compensation opportunities that – let’s face it – make it, clearly, a professional league (just a bizarre one in that it is operated by institutions of higher education). But WNBA eligibility rules shouldn’t require Americans to play college ball for four years before joining the W. American stars should have the same freedom of choice as Malonga has enjoyed.