Natasha Cloud of the Chicago Sky looks on prior to the game against the Indiana Fever at Wintrust Arena on Aug. 23 in Chicago.
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When Nadia Rawlinson came to be a co-owner of the Chicago Sky, Chicago's WNBA franchise, in 2023, she said her corporate career made her empathetic to the experiences of many players on the team.
"I'm an African-American woman who has been an executive in the private sector for my entire career [and] recently came into sports ownership about four or five years ago," said Rawlinson, who is also chairman of the team. "And so just being a 'lonely only' in the worlds that I'm in and excelling at the highest levels in corporate America and in sitting in public and private boardrooms, I instinctually understand that experience."
That background, Rawlinson said, also meant she understood at a personal level what her players were going through when they started to become targets of ugly, and sometimes frightening, online abuse.
"When our players were telling us this is what they're seeing, I believed them because it was very much related to how I experience my own life," she said.
As the WNBA heads into the final weeks of its regular season, outsiders continue to bombard the league with stunts aimed at inflaming division over culture war issues.
The soaring popularity in women's basketball in recent years has made it an alluring platform for bad faith actors to raise their personal profiles and stoke political tensions. Increasingly, players across the league have raised the alarm that they have been inundated with targeted abuse, harassment and threats – both online and offline. The WNBA has taken some measures, such as launching a "No Space for Hate" campaign in 2025 and offering players an AI-driven service that deletes toxic social media comments. But the Chicago Sky is taking its protective measures a step further — by enlisting help from national security experts.
"It's just become a new world that we have to operate in, that we need to figure out, how do we combat this level of abuse and harassment," said Rawlinson.
According to Rawlinson, the Chicago Sky is the first WNBA franchise to partner with American University's PERIL, the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab; and with the threat intelligence company Moonshot. PERIL, which describes its work as "preventing radicalization to violent extremism by strengthening community resilience," has developed educational materials around identifying and countering misogyny in the game. The team hired Moonshot to monitor online threats against its players – using tools that Moonshot developed a decade ago for national security purposes.
"It says a lot that here we are, 10 years later, taking that same technology, the methodologies that we use to help governments counter terrorism and other targeted violence, and we are now having to apply it to sports entertainment," said Elizabeth Neumann, chief strategy officer at Moonshot.
At a Sky game against the Connecticut Sun in late July, the energy at Wintrust Arena in Chicago was electric. The team's official drumline, The Pack, pounded on illuminated drums during quarter breaks, while Skye, the team's sassy, blue-haired lioness mascot, jumped onto the T-shirt cannon to launch souvenir merchandise high into stadium seats. Fans of both teams cheered and groaned as their favorite players' fortunes fluctuated.
Natasha Cloud #9 of the Chicago Sky dribbles past Charlisse Leger-Walker #4 of the Connecticut Sun during the first half at Wintrust Arena on July 30 in Chicago.
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"After I attended my first WNBA game as a fan, I shifted my entire career because I loved the vibe at the games so much," said Frankie de la Cretaz, an independent journalist whose work focuses on the intersection of sports and gender and the author of the Out of Your League newsletter. "It was the most positive sporting experience I had ever had as a fan."
Before that fateful game in 2017, de la Cretaz was a men's sports reporter. They said that the culture of the WNBA at that time was uniquely welcoming and supportive. Historically, most players in the WNBA have been Black. Some players are openly lesbian, and some are masculine-presenting. At the time, de la Cretaz said these differences were non-issues. Even instances of heckling at games – over performance on the court – felt good-natured, rather than insulting.
But de la Cretaz said that in 2024 there was a change.
