NEW YORK — Swin Cash gets it.
She really, really gets it.
That’s what I kept thinking to myself last Tuesday at the “Game Changers” conference on women and the business of sports in Manhattan, as the former UConn, WNBA and Olympic champion kept imploring her fellow female athletes to embrace the business of what they do.
Sports Business Journal/Sports Business Daily, the organizers of the day-long conference, couldn’t have picked a better representative for the emerging team sport female athlete than Cash, who just finished her 13th WNBA season with the New York Liberty.
We’ve seen women athletes like these in individual sports for years — tennis, golf, Olympic gymnasts, swimmers and figure skaters in particular who parlay their athletic success into endorsement deals and other public appearances.
In the business world, it’s called building a personal brand, and Cash, now 35, has been doing this all along. She’s not the only team sport athlete to do this — Mia Hamm and other women’s soccer players have been prominent since the 1999 Women’s World Cup.
But in the sport of women’s basketball, Cash is making a difference at a critical time. 
She’s got her own splashy website, runs Swin Cash Enterprises LLC and will soon begin a gig as a member of “We Need to Talk,” a new all-women’s sports talk program on the CBS Sports channel.
At the “Game Changers” conference, she served on a panel about the state of women’s sports properties with WNBA president Laurel Richie, Women’s Tennis Association executive director Stacy Allaster and Kathy Milthorpe, the chief financial officer of the Ladies Professional Golf Association.
“Players are brands. We think globally and how we are growing with the league,” Cash said.
Being a pro basketball player isn’t just about just picking up a paycheck, she added, but being invested in the growth of the WNBA, and for each player to take control over her own professional affairs.
Social media engagement is a critical part of this development, she said, noting that a potential corporate sponsor she is negotiating with wants to know how many Twitter followers she has. Athletes must be “the CEO of me,” she said.
Cash’s insights about female pro players deserve some consideration throughout the sport of women’s and girls basketball.
How are coaches and administrators at the college level, leaders of the WNBA and a younger generation of women in sports working to solidify the business of what they do, and not just the competitive product on the court?
I spoke with women involved at those levels of the sport at the “Game Changers” conference, and will be posting their impressions here throughout the week.
A year after the Ackerman Report prompted changes to the NCAA Tournament, what’s next on the horizon for the women’s college game? Especially in the wake of the O’Bannon ruling and other pending court actions that could disrupt intercollegiate athletics in a significant way, what are the next logical steps?
How are college coaches reacting to major changes within their new ranks and the general challenges in their sport? The WNBA enjoyed healthy TV ratings for the playoffs, but what can the league do better to promote its product and broaden its fan base?
And how are young women being encouraged to make inroads in the larger world of sports business that could be applied to women’s basketball?
These are some questions I’ll try to answer between now and Friday, so stay tuned.
