The 3XBA tour is creating equity of opportunity for women’s 3×3 basketball players

Team B&B, a versatile quartet made up of Caitlin Bickle, Serena Sundell, Kennedy Brown, and tournament MVP Amy Okonkwo, won the 8-team tourney, along with a $20,000 purse. They also earned a bid to play in the Edmonton stop of FIBA’s 3X3 Women’s Series Tour, which will take place in August.

But the real winner in Spokane was the 3XBA itself and the larger community of American women’s professional basketball players.

Founded last year by Alanna McDonald, Arlan Hamilton, and Holly Levow, the 3XBA describes itself as “the premier women’s FIBA 3×3 tour and youth development pipeline in the United States.” 

But for the athletes who participate in the tour, the primary allure of the 3XBA is the opportunity it provides to advance their professional basketball careers if they’e unable to make a WNBA roster.

“The WNBA is the most competitive league in the world,” Cierra Burdick, a Founding 3XBA Athlete, told The Next. “We’re talking numbers-wise, like 156 roster spots, so maybe seven WNBA draftees actually make a roster and are able to stay on the roster.

“So that means all that top talent that’s coming out of college every year needs somewhere to go, especially in the summer months, when overseas is in their off season,” Burdick continued. “So this is a great way for top talent to continue to play, to compete, to stay in shape, to work on their skills, to work on the IQ side of things, because 3×3 [requires] a lot of IQ. And then hopefully, they can stay in this in the summer and then go overseas, or whatever they want to do in the main basketball season.”

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Like many 3XBA tour members, Burdick starred in college, earning First Team All SEC honors while playing for Tennessee. She was selected in the second round of the 2015 WNBA draft by the Los Angeles Sparks and enjoyed playing stints with several WNBA teams, including the New York Liberty, the San Antonio Stars, the Phoenix Mercury, and the Seattle Storm. 

But while Burdick was competing hard every season for a roster spot in the WNBA, officials at USA Basketball in Colorado Springs were eyeing her for a role in the organization’s nascent 3X3 program.

“Carol Callan, the head of USA basketball at that time, gave me a call and asked me if I’d be interested,” Burdick explained. “And if you know Carol Callan, nobody says no to Carol Callan. She’s one of the greatest human beings on the planet. So I can give her credit for getting me into the sport. And over the years, she just encouraged me to keep playing, keep playing, keep playing. I think she saw what could happen and that I’d have a chance at the Olympics way before I saw it. So I have a ton of gratitude for Carol Callan.”

Burdick found success right away in the emerging sport. 

“My first 3X3 experience was actually in 2014 when I played in the World Cup,” Burdick told The Next. “It was myself, Tiffany Mitchell, Jewell Loyd and Sara Hammond, and we were playing for USA basketball and went to the World Cup and actually ended up beating Russia in the gold medal game in Moscow. So that was a pretty cool experience.”

Burdick added to her gold medal collection by playing on Team USA’s 2023 Pan American and World Cup championship teams. She also won bronze for Team USA in the 3X3 competition at the 2024 Paris Olympics.  

“I have the best of both worlds,” Burdick told The Next. “I’m able to play 3×3 in the summer, and then I go overseas, and I’m in Europe for another eight months into the year. So it’s a great way for you to be able to compete, because when you’re just at home, training, training, training, you kind of get that itch to compete. So to be able to go home and train, and then come here and play in games and get live contact. It’s a lot of fun, and I think it’s really beneficial to all the players.”

Roxy Barahman, a former Yale standout and one of seven former Ivy League athletes who played in the Spokane tournament, has taken a slightly different path to the 3XBA tour than Burdick. 

“I’m really well connected with the girls here that are in this tournament,” Barahman told The Next. “And so I knew that they were signing up, and I reached out to them and said, ‘hey, do you need another guard?’” 

Barahman’s timing was right.

When Kaitlyn Chen, a former star point guard at Princeton and a member of UConn’s 2025 National Championship team, pulled out of the Spokane stop to take an open roster spot with the Golden State Valkyries, the 3XBA suddenly needed another guard to complete the Spokane tournament roster. Barahman, who has played professionally overseas in France and China, got the offer to join the tour and has made the most of her 3XBA opportunity, impressing her peers with her tenacity and skill.

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“This has been such an awesome way to just demonstrate the talent [among] the hoopers that are playing overseas,” Barahman said. “And so I am really grateful that I got to be able to showcase my skills here.”

Harmoni Turner, a 2025 third round pick of the Las Vegas Aces who was waived during training camp, feels the 3XBA is helping to fill a gap not present on the men’s side of professional basketball.

“We don’t have a G league like the men do, and so I think this is a really great opportunity for us to showcase our talent.”

The driving force behind the 3BXA is Alanna McDonald, a dynamic Brown University graduate and former professional volleyball player. 

After witnessing a 3×3 basketball tournament for the first time in France in 2017, McDonald saw an opportunity to build a professional league in the United States similar to what she had observed in the world of professional beach volleyball.

“It reminded me a lot of beach volleyball, and the first time I ever saw it played live, it had all the fun elements of beach volleyball,” McDonald told The Next. “You’re outdoors, it’s dynamic. There’s music, there’s a fun community, festival-like feel. And I thought this is an amazing format. It’s accessible, and it reminded me of the way that fans love the Olympics, where they’ll watch any sport, stay, and watch both men and women because of the way that it’s made accessible and presented.”

But McDonald’s passion to create a professional women’s 3×3 league in the United States wasn’t purely motivated by its economic potential. She saw in the 3×3 game an opportunity to create greater equity of opportunity for women basketball players. And she also saw a level of accessibility for both athletes and fans in the 3×3 format that is not similarly available in the 5-on-5 game.

“The cool thing about 3×3 is you need less equipment,” McDonald told The Next. “You can play year round. You can play indoors or outdoors. So pretty quickly, I realized that it was designed to be very accessible and low barrier. And additionally, I realized that there was already emerging a men’s professional tour globally, the FIBA men’s World Tour, but there was no corresponding women’s tour.”

McDonald felt that FIBA had missed an opportunity to create equal opportunities for men and women athletes by concentrating their efforts on establishing infrastructure for the men’s 3×3 game, including development programs and tournaments, without doing the same for women.

“It felt like [FIBA had] a once in a lifetime opportunity to build equity in the core of the sport from day one, and then you can be a model to everyone else, of like, this is how we get it right if we have the opportunity to start a new sport, this is how we design it equitably from the jump.”

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McDonald pitched her idea for an American-based women’s 3×3 league to the Seattle Storm and was hired to create a pilot project involving the entire WNBA, with the Storm serving as the nerve center for the project. That’s where McDonald came into contact with Burdick, then rostered on the Storm, along with several other soon to become 3×3 stalwarts, such as Blake Dietrick and Camille Zimmerman.

The pilot was a success with McDonald eventually standing up six teams that played in a league called Force 10, named after the Storm’s ownership group.

But McDonald says the WNBA became more focused on expansion than developing a 3×3 league, and eventually Force 10 was phased out. That’s when McDonald decided to team up with two investors who share her values and vision: Arlen Hamilton and Holly Anderson Levow. 

Together, they launched the 3XBA last year and successfully staged its first tournament in Frisco, Texas in August 2024. The Spokane Hoopfest provided an even bigger stage for the 3XBA’s second tournament.

Over 250,000 players and fans of 3×3 basketball descend on downtown Spokane every year for Hoopfest, and this year many of them gathered around center court at the Riverfront Park Pavilion to witness the 3XBA competition. A total of 19 games were played over two days on a vibrant red and blue outdoor court under a stunning canopy of white sails.

During the event, the thirty-two women who competed bonded with each other and also made ample time for autograph sessions, photographs, and interactions with fans, many of whom were young girls and boys. 

But once the games started, the competition became fierce.

After winning a hard fought quarterfinal win with her team, The Crown, Madison Scott, a 5-year star at Ole Miss, exclaimed, “I want to win this tournament SO bad!” Scott and her teammates were hoping to claim the top prize of $20,000, although every team was guaranteed earnings of at least $3,000 depending on where they finished in the standings.

But winning prize money wasn’t the primary motivation for these professionals.

“Honestly, I really think even if money wasn’t involved, just the opportunity to come here and play and compete and be around other top talent, like as an elite athlete, you thrive on that,” Burdick told The Next. “You want to be around the best. You want to have the chance to compete against the best and with the best. So I really think [the prize money] is just the cherry on top.”

In the championship game, Team B&B faced The Chosen Ones, made up of Shyanne Sellers, Azana Baines, Destanni Henderson, and Lauren Manis. Forced to play only 15 minutes after prevailing in their semifinal match, The Chosen Ones played valiantly and hung tight with better-rested Team B&B.

With less than five seconds left to play and trailing by two, Baines had a chance to tie the game for the Chosen Ones with a bomb from beyond the arc, worth two points in the 3X3 game. (A bucket from inside the arc is worth one point). But Team B&B’s Amy Okonkwo contested the shot and Baines’s attempt rimmed out, cementing the win for Team B&B. Despite the loss, The Chosen Ones won a $10,000 runner-up prize.

Moments later, an exhausted but exuberant Okonkwo, voted MVP of the tournament by her peers, told The Next: “I love playing three-on-three, and I love the opportunity to play with the 3XBA. I love the organization. I love the girls and the community. It’s really fun.”

McDonald hopes to stage more stops on the 3XBA tour in the coming months. “We are scaling, and by 2026 we expect to have a full tour across multiple markets. We are hoping to add more this summer, but we also plan to play on the international circuit as well.”

What’s the ceiling for the 3XBA and the sport of 3×3 basketball?

“I don’t think there is one,” McDonald says. “It’s an Olympic sport. So it is inevitable. The development of this sport isn’t inevitable, and I think it should be us that leads the way. I think it’s a special opportunity in the women’s sports landscape, and rare that we can establish a women’s product in the US market before there’s a men’s product that comes first.”

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