The Toronto Tempo arrived in the WNBA this season with record-breaking attendance, a 53-point single-game performance from a star player, and the weight of being the league’s newest franchise. As the season pauses for All-Star Weekend, team president Teresa Resch takes stock of what she’s built, what’s surprised her, and what she’s still figuring out in real time. She talks about running a sports franchise like a startup and how Canada’s complicated political relationship with the U.S. impacts building a fan base from scratch.
This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by former Fast Company editor-in-chief Robert Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today’s top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode.
You and I sat down together back in mid-March, a few months before the season began. And at that point, you didn’t know who was going to be on the team because the expansion draft hadn’t happened yet. You didn’t know what your budget was because the owners and the players union hadn’t yet agreed on a collective bargaining agreement. You seemed both excited and anxious. Now you describe it as a little bit of chaos, huh?
Yeah. I’m really glad that the CBA [collective bargaining agreement] got agreed upon. If we didn’t have a deal done in the next couple of weeks, we probably weren’t going to be able to have a season. And as an expansion team, there’s so much hype around this inaugural season. To not have that happen would’ve been a really incredible blow to everything that we had built over the last two years leading up to it.
So first and foremost, I’m glad that we got an agreement done. And not only that, it was transformative. It’s the largest increase in salaries of any professional sports league ever in history. Last year, the highest-paid player was about $250,000, and now the minimum player gets $270,000, with maximum players getting upward of $1.5 million a year. So to say that it’s transformative and it’s made history is an understatement. All that to say, at that point, we didn’t even know if we were going to have a season. Now all of a sudden, this transformative agreement gets done, and we’re operating at a level that has never been in place for women’s professional sports before. The only issue with that was that we then had to lift up this entire team in such a condensed time.
So in 16 days, we put together a team that usually comes together over about six months. And when you’re doing everything for the first time in a new country, it’s very difficult. But man, our team was incredibly resilient, and we got off to a great start. Injuries have been really tough for us. We have never had the same starting lineup through our first 20 games. Marina Mabrey, Brittney Sykes … we call her Slim … really were leading the team to start the season. Incredible players, incredible humans. And Slim went down. She was performing at an All-Star level. She went down about 10, I think it was 12, games into the season. Otherwise, I think we would’ve had two All-Stars, which is pretty incredible for an expansion franchise.
When you talk about the CBA agreement, it’s great, but I guess your budget has to go up, right? From a business point of view, it’s going to be more costly for you to build and maintain a team.
Yeah. So what’s great about the league is there’s been exponential growth commercially. The league entered into a new media rights agreement that covers that influx, or a lot of it, and then also distribution from the league through sponsorship. So the league’s been growing exponentially, and a lot of that growth is now being returned directly to the players. Another piece of the agreement that was really important for the players, and that the league was able to deliver on, was that they now share in the growth of this league. There’s a revenue split, so I think it was a win-win. But now it’s up to us in our local market to deliver sponsorship and ticketing, to really help us find ways to differentiate ourselves and get that competitive advantage against the rest of the teams in the league.
It must be hard to calibrate expectations when it’s your first season, right? You’re balancing being realistic with being ambitious.
Yes. And it’s also within our own house. Like I said, we have an All-Star. These are not bottom-of-the-barrel players. These are incredibly talented athletes who have been in this league for years, 10 years, and competed at the highest level, who come in and want to win. Our coach has won multiple championships in the WNBA. She’s Australian, has coached their national team for a long time. Sandy Brondello won championships with the Phoenix Mercury and with the New York Liberty. So we’re very privileged to have her leading our team. And she doesn’t come in thinking that losing, or just competing at a high level, is okay.
So there’s a lot of pressure from the basketball side. But then you talk to a fan in the stands who never thought that the WNBA would exist in this country, and they’re just happy to be there. They’re just happy to exist, to have a place to go. So I think it’s balancing all those things. But ultimately, we’re in professional sports. We’re competitive people. So there is this level of competitiveness that we wanted to make sure we delivered, and we’re still in the hunt for the playoffs. The season’s not over. We’re just at the All-Star break. So that was our goal to start, and it still is.
Before you went to the Tempo, you’d worked in the NBA for a while with the Toronto Raptors. You were offered the Tempo opportunity by the primary owner, Larry Tanenbaum, who had been part of the Raptors ownership team. But unlike the Golden State Warriors and the Golden State Valkyries, which was a breakout success as a W expansion franchise, the Raptors and the Tempo are not linked. So you had to build your own infrastructure and organization. Not all expansion teams are created equal.
No, not at all. But I think that’s what makes us unique. We’re all bringing something unique to the table. So it’s been challenging, to say the least, but it’s also been incredibly rewarding. I worked within the Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment structure for 10 years, and so did my CFO. I was on the basketball side, on the team side. He was on the finance side. As we’ve been building out the Tempo, we’ve been able to take a lot of the learnings we’ve had and apply them in two ways.
Number one, if we could start from scratch, it’s what we want it to look like. And then number two, we had no legacy. It takes the chains and the weights off of you. We get to start from scratch and really mold this in a way, and into what we feel can be the best. But along with that comes the challenge of doing it from scratch.
You’ve got to create it, right? It’s a lot of choices, of everything.
Yeah. There are so many things that you don’t even realize you rely on—just processes, things that have been in place so long that they’re second nature. You don’t even think about them when you’re in it. Then you leave it, and all of a sudden you have to recreate those things. The biggest barrier right now for women’s sports is infrastructure—both in performance centers so athletes can train at the best level, and now in the actual performance venues. Rarely is a women’s sports team the number one tenant or in control of its facility, and that leaves a lot of money on the table. There are a lot of venues and organizations profiting off women’s sports without necessarily the women’s sports teams getting that return.