For the first time, WBL’s San Francisco Pioneers will reunite in the Bay Area

Former members of the Pioneers (an expansion team in the Women’s Professional Basketball League, or WBL) will receive long overdue recognition while being honored as part of the Golden State Valkyries History of Bay Area Women’s Basketball Theme Night.

“It’s a massive moment,” Golden State’s senior vice president of marketing and communications, Kimberly Veale, told The Next. “There’s just this joy and pride exuding from these women, and we just want to give them their due.”

But the Pioneers’ journey to being honored has been a lengthy and winding tale. It’s a story of success and disappointment, of solidarity and heartfelt organizing. And it all started decades before the creation of the WNBA, during the early 1980’s, in the San Francisco Bay Area.

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In March of 1981, Roberta Williams’ rookie season as a pro women’s basketball player was taking off. Nicknamed “Sweetness” by her San Francisco Pioneers teammate Cardtie Hicks, Williams was known in the WBL for her silky smooth jump shot and instant offensive spark. Her on-court progress mirrored the momentum of the San Francisco Pioneers, whose rocky start to the 1980-81 season was reignited midway through the season with the arrival of controversial new head coach, Dean Meminger, and the addition of WBL All-Star Molly “Machine Gun” Bolin (who now goes by Molly Kazmer).

Meminger made harsh changes and shook up the team. “Dean came in and started running a whole different system,” Kazmer told The Next. 

He gave Kazmer, already a league-wide star, the “green light” as a shooter. She led the Pioneers with over 26 points per game. And in early spring of 1981, everything started clicking into place. 

“We started winning,” Williams told The Next. “We were upsetting teams that were number one, number two in the league.” 

That March, the Pioneers finished with a 6-6 record, winning as many games that month as the team had won previously throughout the entire 1980-81 season. For her part, Williams averaged nearly 13 points per contest. And she was hungry for more. 

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“It was a dream come true,” said Williams, who won the 1979 AIAW National Small College Basketball Championship with South Carolina State before being selected by the Pioneers in the second round of the 1980 WBL draft. A Charleston native, Williams left South Carolina for the first time to join the Pioneers, where she loved the Bay Area immediately for its familiar proximity to water, its vibrant culture and her team’s camaraderie. 

“I never thought that I would meet another set of females that loved the game of basketball the way I did, but oh man!” remembered Williams. “We was balling. I was looking forward to just the idea that we were gonna go to another level.”

But the women of the Pioneers never got that opportunity. 

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The end of the WBL was less a sudden disbanding and more of a slow crumbling. Though San Francisco’s franchise remained one of the strongest in the country, financial instability and mismanagement plagued the first-ever U.S. professional women’s league. 

Pioneers’ players were always paid, and had their travel taken care of, but they were keenly aware of the struggles that women on other teams faced. “There were players that weren’t paid,” Williams said. “There were players that lost their apartment, everybody had to move into one house and live together. The sacrifices were unmeasured.” 

Fighting for a greater good was commonplace in the WBL. “From the very start we all knew it was an uphill climb,” said Kazmer.  “We had to battle and do everything we could to get it to stick.”

But despite the efforts of players, the league was spiraling. During the final 1980-81 season, the New England Gulls franchise folded halfway through, players on the Minnesota Fillies staged a walk off to protest unpaid wages, and the St. Louis Streak refused to pay for the team’s airfare to a road game in San Francisco. 

Nevertheless, at the end of their season, Pioneers teammates remained hopeful. “We definitely thought we were coming back,” said Kazmer. 

“They waited to the last minute,” starting center Cardtie Hicks told The Next. “When all the teams folded, it was the Pioneers left standing.” 

According to Williams and Kazmer, official notices from the Pioneers’ front office came sometime in late summer. This was the final decree: owner Marshall Geller would not field another team in San Francisco. It wasn’t a reflection of his own finances, Geller insisted, but because the WBL as a whole was too unstable. “I don’t want to have the best house in the worst neighborhood,” Geller told the San Francisco Chronicle.

The players were heartbroken. “It was devastating,” Hicks said. “Devastating watching some of the players, how they just took it.”

Kazmer agreed: “We’re a league that got caught off at the height of our success.”

The Pioneers scattered from San Francisco and dispersed across the country. Many, like Williams, never got the chance to play professionally again. They scraped together odd jobs — working in private security, postal delivery and commercial construction while maintaining connections to basketball. Some began coaching girls basketball, others sought to continue their professional careers. Hicks returned to play pro ball in Europe, while Kazmer repeatedly supported other efforts to launch professional women’s leagues in the United States. First year Pioneers player Anna Johnson built a legacy coaching at Oakland Tech, while Pam Martin led Cal Poly Humboldt as head coach for decades. No matter what, former Pioneers players stayed dedicated to growing the sport they loved. As Hicks told The Next: “We handed down the ball.”

But the team never came back to San Francisco together. They never had a final chance to express their gratitude toward the city or their fans. Pioneers guard Musiette McKinney said it best when she told The Next: “We never said goodbye to our city, where it all started.”

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Musiette McKinney has always been a community-builder at the heart of the San Francisco Pioneers.

When the original Pioneers team formed during the 1979-80 season, a core group of players quickly emerged: All-Star center Hicks, who at 5’9 was capable of dunking the basketball; All-Star guard Anita Ortega — called “Thoroughbred” by head coach Frank LaPorte — who played nearly every minute of the season; steely and consistent point guard Debbie Ricketts, who sometimes had her teammates run five miles after practice; and McKinney, affectionately called “Moose,” who was known as the glue of the team.

 “[Musiette] would hug us, you know, she was just that motherly,” said Hicks. “She could have been a captain, but she was definitely our leader.” 

Ortega, McKinney and Hicks had the longest-running tenures on the Pioneers; all three women played for the franchise during both seasons of its existence. They are also all Black women, and were often overlooked for major endorsements and marketing campaigns. While Ortega led the Pioneers with 867 points during the team’s first season, outscoring No. 1 draft pick Pat Mayo by nearly 300 points, this fact was never widely publicized by the team. And according to the San Francisco Pioneers 1980-81 yearbook, four out of five of the “Players to Watch” in the WBL were white women, despite the fact that the majority of women who played in all three of the league’s All-Star Games were Black. 

“This is a white girls’ league, and it’s run by white men,” an anonymous player said in Lacy Banks’ April 1980 Ebony feature on the WBL. White players like Ann Meyers, Nancy Lieberman and Molly Kazmer earned well-deserved praise, but systemic biases meant that equally skilled Black players were often overlooked by both team owners and the press. All too often, this same coverage gets recycled now in retellings of the WBL’s historical significance, failing to celebrate the achievement of all the league’s deserving players.

Nonetheless, all players on the Pioneers continued to foster a culture of care. “We were good friends and we really became tight,” McKinney said. “You have to build in a support system.” 

As two-year “veterans,” McKinney and Hicks recalled bonding with Pioneers teammates off the court as well. They spent late nights at a classic local bar called Tommy’s Joynt, introduced rookie Roberta Williams to her first burrito (“she took me under her wing,” Williams says of Hicks), and drove around exploring the Bay Area together. McKinney and Ortega were especially close, living as roommates in Daly City. “We loved certain songs and we would sing ‘em as we were coming home from the game,” McKinney said. “We’d cha-cha on the court.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever had a team that was so into each other,” Hicks told The Next. “We collaborated on every level.” She credited her teammates for coming together as a cohesive unit. “We had some good athletes, white, Black, all kinds, we didn’t care. We were all family.”

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According to many former women’s basketball players, the WNBA has not yet properly honored the sport’s history before the league’s inception in 1996. Liz Galloway-McQuitter is the founder of Legends of the Ball, an advocacy organization made up of former WBL players, and passionate about spreading awareness of her generation’s accomplishments . 

“Of course you are ‘growing the game,’ but growing it from where?” Galloway McQuitter told The Next. “What is the measuring point? [The WBL] grew the game too, and so did the players in the 80’s and in the 90’s.” 

Former Pioneer Molly Kazmer, also a board member of Legends of the Ball, pointed out a number of the league’s innovations: introducing the smaller ball now universally used in the women’s game, created by trailblazer Karen Logan, and the addition of the 3-point line.  “The WBL incorporated the 3-point line the second season,” said Kazmer. “At a time when the men often weren’t even incorporating it.”

In the NBA, recognition for the sport’s long-term growth is not only symbolic, but material. In the 2022, the NBA responded to advocacy efforts by former American Basketball Association (ABA) players, who broke barriers as part of the upstart league in the 1960’s and 70’s. The historic decision included “recognition payments” averaging $3,828 per year for former ABA players. “I can’t overstate how much it means to them to have the NBA and NBPA recognize their tremendous contributions to today’s NBA game,” Scott Tarter, director of Dropping Dimes Foundation, told USA Today at the time.

“The men go in and out of their history with ease,” Galloway-McQuitter said. “But women’s basketball doesn’t connect the dots.” In 2023, she told The Next, “We are confronted time and time again with the omissions and inaccuracies … each time adding to the agony of a pioneering group of women whose accomplishments deserve so much more.”

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As a first year franchise in the WNBA, the Golden State Valkyries’ invitation to reunite the San Francisco Pioneers sets a different tone. Could this be a chance for other franchises and the league itself to better contextualize its history within the framework of professional leagues that came before? 

“When we set out to build the franchise, it was really important to us and quickly became obvious that there were some incredible stories and reasons why women’s basketball has been so successful in this market,” said Golden State’s Kimberly Veale, in conversation with The Next. “We’re not here in totality without the Pioneers, the Lasers and all the people who have been involved in the women’s game at a professional level here.”

The Valkyries’ intention to honor the careers of past professional women’s basketball players is woven into their inaugural season. At the Sephora Performance Center in downtown Oakland, where the Valkyries practice, Golden State worked with local artist Allison Hueman to design a custom mural that nods to Bay Area women’s basketball history. A player near the center of the mural wears a jersey with the same basketball from the San Francisco Pioneers uniform, and a laser nodding to the namesake of San Jose’s ABL team slices through the image.

Multiple Pioneers players, in turn, are excited to support the Valkyries. They remain passionate about the evolutions of women’s basketball and proud to have been part of laying the foundation for the WNBA.

“I’m so proud that what we did did not go in vain,” said Williams. “Our innovation laid the foundation, even though it was short-lived,” Johnson added. “It’s invigorating to see qualified women who have earned the right to open doors through women’s basketball.” 

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For years, the women of the Pioneers fell out of touch. 

Then came 2018, when the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame in Knoxville inducted all former WBL players as “Trailblazers of the Game.” Unsurprisingly, it was the Pioneers’ connective leader, McKinney, who searched for a number of her former teammates. “She found me,” said 1979-80 Pioneers reserve Anna Johnson. “And I hadn’t heard from her since the day she drove off saying ‘bye!’” 

Together in Tennessee that July, the women started a text message thread that’s continued, on and off, over the years since. But the announcement of an expansion franchise awarded to the Golden State Warriors in fall of 2023 sparked something new. 

“Oh, I cried,” said Hicks, recalling the day she heard the announcement of a new WNBA team in San Francisco. “That’s where I played first,” she told her wife, who looked stunned as Hicks burst into tears. “I said, ‘because that’s where I played first.’ We were the pioneers.” 

McKinney spoke out passionately. “We are waiting on some type of reunion in San Francisco,” she told The Next’s Tee Baker in October of 2023. “We want to be introduced to the city before the Golden State team.” McKinney also delivered that same message directly to the Valkyries. 

“Before I even had a [marketing] team, when it was just me,” remembered Veale, “Musiette McKinney was blowing me up. Just wanting to be part of it. Molly [Kazmer] and Musiette were the two that were just so excited and wanted to touch base and share stories.”

Rumors about a possible Pioneers reunion began swirling this past winter, before the Valkyries inaugural season even started. McKinney continued to make her rounds, calling up former teammates and asking “are you ready?” 

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Kazmer was also quick to organize with her former teammates, including reaching out to former Iowa Cornets teammates who joined the Pioneers after the midwestern franchise folded. She also worked closely with Galloway-McQuitter to bring Legends of the Ball into the event and to propose the inclusion of a documentary film crew. Their project tells the story not only of the Pioneers, but of the WBL as a whole, and Kazmer’s own historic career and complex custody battle in which her success as a professional women’s basketball player was weaponized against her.

And on the ground, an unlikely organizer emerged: Anna Johnson, a lifelong Oakland resident and Pioneers reserve player during the 1979-80 season. The only member of the team born and raised in the Bay Area, Johnson is a proud Valkyries season ticket holder and has worked closely with team representatives to get in touch with former Pioneers. 

Finally, plans for a formal reunion began taking shape. In May, the Valkyries officially invited the Pioneers to be honored at the July 14th matchup against the Phoenix Mercury. As part of the evening, the Valkyries will also recognize the American Basketball League’s (ABL) San Jose Lasers, a team whose primary backer was Golden State majority owner Joe Lacob. Kimberly Veale of Golden State says that the evening will focus on individual stories of players, woven together to create a whole picture. 

“The focus on the Valkyries purely being here and ushering this new era of professional women’s basketball in the Bay Area has been very loud,” said Veale. “So at this point, midway through the season, we felt it was important to just take a pause and circle back to how we got here.”

And it’s just the beginning. “This isn’t a one and done moment in terms of us celebrating this history,” Veale added.

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In just a few weeks, an impressive group of Pioneers will reunite in San Francisco, traveling in from across California and as far as Michigan and South Carolina. “Anita Ortega. Jan Ternyik. Pam Martin. Gerry Booker. Roberta Williams. Cindy Haugejorde. Molly Kazmer. We’re hoping for Musiette McKinney. And me, Anna Johnson,” Johnson said, reading aloud the names of confirmed attendees in early June. “This really is Musiette’s dream coming true.”

Not all of the Pioneers can attend the reunion, or witness the incredible transformation of women’s basketball. Some players worry about their friends’ health and wellbeing, and the WBL has already lost some of its greatest stars. “Unfortunately some of the ladies that even were at the Hall of Fame induction [in 2018], they transitioned and passed on,” Williams told The Next. “They’re not as fortunate as we are because we are still alive to see what’s happening in the league.”

“We don’t know how long we have on this earth,” Hicks told The Next. “But this, this is a gift.”