In Oakland, A G-League Is Emerging For Women's Basketball
The WPBA Championship takes place this Sunday, concluding a third year of operation for a league with high aspirations.
Kaylin Randhawa has a busy weekend ahead of her. She’s in San Diego this Saturday morning, attending a coaching clinic that includes heavy hitting names like USC head coach Lindsay Gottlieb and New York Knicks head coach Mike Brown. On Sunday, she hopes to trade in a coaching polo for a team jersey and compete for a championship.
“I didn’t play overseas once I finished my basketball career,” the former Sacramento State guard and 2022 Big Sky champion says, “So being a first year coach, you have that itch to want to play and get up and down the court and compete. This was perfect for me and I was able to join a team where I knew some familiar faces.”
It may not be the WNBA, but those in charge of the Women’s Premier Basketball Association (WPBA, for short) have aspirations of one day being an integral part of the sport’s landscape. Since their inception in 2022, the league has grown to eight teams all operating out of the Bay Area while bringing in names that women’s basketball fans will know.
WNBA veterans including Morgan Bertsch, Reshanda Gray and Erica McCall all currently play in the league while other recognizable NCAA names — from former Jackson State star Angel Jackson to Stanford forward Brooke Demetre — are also WPBA regulars.
Ameela Li, a former All-WCC Honorable Mention at Pacific, has been playing in the league since its inception.
“We’ve got a lot of young stars that are coming up that people are actually following and excited to watch,” she says of the sport as a whole. “The people in community around you help you get there.”
While other leagues — including EXALT in Austin, Texas and Upshot in Jacksonville, Florida — are also priming themselves to be destinations for former college players that don’t make a WNBA roster, WPBA Commissioner Faatimah A. believes that her organization is uniquely positioned to help players make the leap.
A Toronto-born Bay Area immigrant with a single letter last name, she found her center on basketball courts in West Oakland. Like many players in the States, she finished her college career but still felt the sport had more in store for her. Over the course of the next four years, Faatimah played in Australia, Norway, Greece, Egypt, Canada, Mexico and Spain while representing Jamaica in the FIBA Caribbean Championships.
“I started doing this work because basketball saved my life in so many ways,” she explains. “The Bay Area is such an underserved community but there’s so many talented players in this community and I feel that the more we are able to set the example for the next generation of athletes, we’re going to be able to build up not only strong athletes but just better people.”
In addition to the opportunity to play past college, the league also helps players edit and create tape for overseas basketball teams and WNBA squads as well as training for coach/GM interviews. The league also offers a skills trainer that can meet with players twice a week for anybody who needs to get some work in before the season starts.
Faatimah sees the WPBA as the missing middle in a sport where developmental options are limited but also knows there are unique opportunities for high level competition for her players. The league competes in the FIBA Americas Basketball Champions League, an intercontinental competition that pits top club teams in leagues across North and South America against one another.
The WPBA’s Bay Area Phoenix made it to last years’ final where they fell to Indeportes Antioquia of the Colombian top flight. Seven players from Indeportes represent a Colombian national team that finished fifth in the 2025 FIBA Americup.
The WPBA also has introduced its own innovations within their own league as well. Games are scored out of seven points for standing purposes. If you win a game, you get three points much like they do in professional soccer. In the WPBA, teams can also gain an additional point for each quarter won. What this means is that a team can win a game by 20 points but if they lose one of the quarters, they’ll only get six points out of a possible seven.
Players like Kaylin admit it took some getting used to but now enjoy the system as it rewards teams for giving it their all every night.
“It does enhance the competitiveness,” Randhawa says. “We’re trying to be selfish. We want all seven points. We want to win the game and we want to beat you in every single quarter.”
“I think back to some of our moments during the season where we had a close quarter with a team and maybe we’re up by 16 or 17 points but you look at the quarter score and they’re beating us by two or three,” she adds, “And it just raises the intensity.”
As the league continues to grow, Faatimah hopes the WPBA can expand their footprint outside of the Bay Area and potentially add another east coast hub city. While they are still looking for more funding to be able to make the league sustainable in the long term, she feels confident that their community first approach has laid the groundwork for them to be an enticing investment opportunity for those looking to get into a sport that seems to be growing faster than any other right now.
For Bay Area kids like Ameela Li, the league also serves a vital purpose: continuing to give Oakland — a place that is distinct from San Francisco but lumped into ‘The Bay’ as a monolithic entity — something to be proud of during a time in which professional teams have fled the city.
“I think there’s definitely a lot of opportunities still in Oakland,” Li says. “There are a lot of kids [in Oakland] who maybe going to San Francisco isn’t the easiest, you know, to get to a [Golden State] Valkyries game.”
Ahead of a Finals matchup on Sunday, players like Randhawa and Li are thankful to have found the league and what it can offer them and others coming up.
“Having this is important,” says Li. “It’s going to allow for so many more college players to not have to go overseas. I think this could potentially be something that stabilizes [the ecosystem] a little bit but also helps the league grow.”
The WPBA Finals will take place on Sunday, August 10th at the Oakland Hills Campus at 4:00 PM PT.
Tickets are available at www.womenspba.com and the game will be streamed live on BENCH.
Thank you. Wonderful story.