Sue Bird is an icon within the girls’s basketball scene, steering the Seattle Storm to 4 WNBA championships to turn out to be the primary participant in league’s historical past to win titles throughout three many years.
Drafted prime general in 2002, the 42-year-old Bird additionally performed an enormous function for USA nationwide crew as she helped the squad copped its ninth Olympic gold medal in 2021 in Tokyo and her fifth general.
Bird, nevertheless, known as it a profession through the earlier WNBA season, placing an finish to an illustrious profession that noticed her emerge as probably the greatest girls’s cagers on the planet.
And she hopes to proceed writing her legacy whereas additionally serving to girls’s basketball develop additional as she was named because the ambassador for the 2026 FIBA Women’s Basketball World Cup in 2026 in Germany.
“Just a lot of excitement but on top of that, I feel honored to be sitting here. Women’s basketball is a really exciting moment,” Bird mentioned throughout a press convention on Friday on the Mall of Asia Arena.
“It’s pivotal and no better way to continue, not as a player anymore, but as a former player, to help grow that game and really ride that wave that is women’s basketball.”
Bird is aware of there’s present challenges for ladies’s basketball throughout the globe, certainly one of which is viewership and fanbase for the game. But the 13-time WNBA All-Star mentioned closing the hole is not a troublesome one, stressing the truth that followers are already present.
“I don’t think it’s difficult. Women’s basketball fans are there. They’re out there and they just haven’t been able to get access,” Bird added.
“It’s just a matter of access. The fans already exist, you don’t have to convince them.”
Bird additionally hopes that with the brand new version of the World Cup developing, extra tales of gamers, coaches, and groups can be advised to the world.
“I think the way I view it is it’s not WNBA and then FIBA and Europe, it’s not. It’s one. It’s a global game. I think when one grows, it’s only gonna help the other and vice versa,” she mentioned.
“There are so many incredible stories and a lot of times, those just haven’t had the chance to be told. I think that’s how you build a fanbase, that’s how you build viewership.”
—JMB, GMA Integrated News
Source: www.gmanetwork.com
