Michelle Onyiah just proved something this town needed proved.
The Indiana Fever announced Friday they've signed Onyiah, a forward for the Charlotte Crown (the first-year women's pro team most of this city still hasn't clocked yet), making her the first player in UpShot League history to reach the WNBA. Not a call-up. Not a showcase invite. A signed contract, from a team sitting atop the Eastern Conference with one of the best records in the WNBA, for a player they watched play in a league that's less than three months old.
Understand what that means. Indiana isn't a lottery team handing out minutes to see what sticks. They're on top of the East and pushing toward the postseason, and they just signed a player who got waived in the spring. Teams in that spot don't do favors.
I wrote about the Crown ten days ago and made the case that this town was sleeping on a genuinely good basketball team. UpShot League, four founding franchises (the Crown, the Jacksonville Waves, the Savannah Steel, the Greensboro Groove) run by Zawyer Sports, the same operation behind the Checkers. Pitched from day one as a pipeline toward the WNBA. Pitched. Talk is cheap. A player actually getting signed is not.
Crown head coach Trisha Stafford-Odom, who played in the WNBA herself, put it plainly: "This validates every vision that [UpShot League Commissioner] Donna Orender and [Zawyer Sports and Entertainment CEO] Andy Kaufmann had. It verifies the fact that this is a legitimate league. It verifies and validates the fact that the WNBA powers that be, the general managers and coaches, do have their eye on this league. UPSHOT is real."
Look. A coach is going to say her league is legitimate. That's the job. But the numbers back her up here.
Onyiah has quietly been one of the best two-way players on this roster all season, and the efficiency is the whole argument. Twenty-one games in, she's averaging 9.6 points and 6.9 rebounds, third-best in the league on the glass, while tying for the league lead in blocks. Two hundred and one points, 145 rebounds and 23 blocks in all. She's doing all of it on 52.8 percent shooting in under 24 minutes a night. That's not a volume scorer padding a line. That's someone who doesn't waste possessions.
It tracks with where she came from. In her final season at Cal she led the ACC in field-goal percentage and ranked 11th in the country. She's 6-foot-3, 24 years old, and she took the long way here: five seasons in Berkeley, a season overseas with Basket Namur Capitale in Belgium, a training camp shot with the New York Liberty back in April that ended in a waiver before the regular season even started. Cut by one WNBA team in the spring. Signed by another in July, off what she did in Charlotte in between.
And the Crown are not some also-ran while all this is happening. They closed out July with a home win over Greensboro, 85-78 at Bojangles Coliseum, first game back after a long road trip. Schaquilla Nunn went for 24 and 15. Reigan Richardson added 16. This team is 14-10 and sitting second, with the league's first Championship Weekend set for August 29 at VyStar Veterans Memorial Arena in Jacksonville.
UpShot Commissioner Donna Orender called it "an extraordinary achievement and an exciting moment for the entire UPSHOT League," and tied it to the thing the league was built to do: create "the opportunities that can emerge when players have a professional platform on which to compete, grow and be seen."
So here's where we are. Your Charlotte Crown are two-plus months old as a headline in this town. They've already sent a player to the WNBA. And they have a month to play their way into the first championship weekend this league has ever held. Folks, that's not nothing.
Update, Aug. 3: The Crown have since run the streak to seven, beating first-place Jacksonville 105-73 on Sunday with a league regulation scoring record. Full story.