Are the Dream Atlanta’s best sports franchise? They could be.
The Atlanta Dream were amid a dream season, reaching the playoffs after the best regular season in franchise history.
Their playoff run came to an abrupt halt last week with a surprising loss.
It wasn’t supposed to end this way.
Kim Scott and her close friend, Gwen Bowers, stood inside Gateway Center Arena in College Park, on a Thursday night, devastated and angry at the nightmarish finish to the season.
The Powder Springs residents, who are Dream season-ticketholders, were wearing playoff T-shirts as they watched their favorite team walk off the home court, a season full of promise dashed after losing a lead in the final minutes.
First, there was disbelief.
“I really felt bad for them because they actually had a great season and played a great season,” said Scott, who along with Bowers, has been following the Dream since the team’s inception in 2008.
“They’ll learn from this,” Scott said. “Disappointment will teach them that there’s more work they need to do.”
Outside, fans heading to their cars quipped about another hometown team “losing in the most Atlanta way possible.”
It wasn’t quite the Falcons’ 28-3 collapse in the Super Bowl, not the record-setting 2023 Braves offense falling flat in the Division Series, nor the Hawks regulars in the NBA play-in games, nor an underachieving United team.
No, this was Atlanta Dream, who tied for the second-best record in the WNBA and the No. 3 seed in the WNBA playoffs.
They had 30 wins, most in franchise history; they had three All-Stars (Rhyne Howard, Allisha Gray and Brionna Jones) and the league’s best player off the bench (Naz Hillmon) and an MVP finalist (Gray). Their first-year coach, Karl Smesko, was the runner-up for coach of the year.
DraftKings’ sportsbook pegged the Dream as the team with the fourth-best odds to win it all, just behind favorite Minnesota, the surging Las Vegas Aces and defending-champion New York Liberty.
Yet, here they were, on the losing end of an upset engineered by the shorthanded Indiana Fever, who were without superstar Caitlin Clark.
It’s easy to label this year’s run as a disappointment on the hardwood, but what’s growing more apparent for Dream players, staff and dedicated fans is that there are silver linings sketching out positive paths forward in the franchise’s future.
From big wins to in-game action at Gateway Center Arena, the Dream have tapped into its city’s Black culture and community outreach efforts throughout metro area.
It’s a franchise staking its claim as the most authentically Atlanta.
As the WNBA continues to grow, so does the opportunity for its only team in the Southeast to fill voids left by the ‘90s Braves stars, the Dirty Birds Falcons era or big-name personalities like Primetime and ‘Nique.
‘Leaps and bounds’
Before the heartbreak in the first-round finale, Game 3 felt like one big sold-out Atlanta party.
In the first quarter, in-game host Bria Janelle called on fans to wave the black Dream flags placed on their seats. DJ Jay Shalé ran through Atlanta rap gospels, including “Walk It Out,” “Snap Yo Fingers” and “Crank Dat.”
The Dance Cam showed aunties walking it out like the late DJ Unk. Faces from all walks of Atlanta and metro life shared a mutual love for the poetry of Fabo, dancing to D4L’s “Laffy Taffy.”
Just before halftime, fans sang the chorus to Bell Biv DeVoe’s classic “Poison” in unison. Dream co-owner Renee Montgomery was in her usual courtside spot, dancing and cheering.
At halftime, the Dream led, 56-49. Vibes were high. The crowd was loud.
Singer Bobby V performed during the break, reeling off hits like the Ludacris collab “Pimpin’ All Over the World” and “Slow Down” as fans got to fill in Lil’ Wayne’s verse on “Mrs. Officer.”
In the concourse, longtime Dream fan Hector Jordan was taking it all in, sporting a Michael Vick jersey. Jordan is a New York native who came to Atlanta in 2003, and says, “Wherever I’m living, that’s where I claiming.” He’s been a regular at Dream games for the past five years.
Jordan watched a long line for lemon-pepper wings at the Hangar concession stand. Fans crowded the Drip Shop, buying Dream merchandise.
He remembers the Dream playing in State Farm Arena before moving to College Park in 2019. Those days feel like a lifetime ago.
“It wasn’t this. This has grown by leaps and bounds,” Jordan said. “The investment money that they’ve put in, the seed money that they put in, it’s a world-class event. You’re looking for an experience; you get one every time you come.”
Sea change
Things looked and felt different for the Dream in 2020, coming off a season of seven wins. Off the court, nationwide demonstrations rallying against police brutality took hold. Dream players signed and shared an open letter opposing a team co-owner, then-U.S. Sen. Kelly Loeffler, and her objections to the WNBA’s involvement in the Black Lives Matter movement.
Dream players openly supported Loeffler’s opponent in her Senate runoff, the Rev. Raphael Warnock.
The shortened season saw two-time champion and Dream player Renee Montgomery sit the season out to focus on social-justice issues. Loeffler had co-owned the team with Mary Brock since 2011. A decade later, the Dream, a team named after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have a Dream” speech, found new owners.
The WNBA franchise was sold to current majority owner Larry Gottesdiener, chairman of the national real-estate firm Northland. It was part of a three-member investor group with Montgomery and Northland President and Chief Operating Officer Suzanne Abair.
Montgomery, an openly gay Black woman, became the first former player to have an ownership stake in a WNBA team. Since the new ownership took over, the Dream leaned into their Atlanta identity, one rooted in celebrating and embracing the city’s diversity.
“The goal is to be authentically ATL at all times. As an organization, we want to be aligned with the Atlanta fan base because we understand they are the heartbeat of everything we do,” Montgomery said.
“We’re always going to turn up for the city because the city turned up for us in 2020.”
Big-game energy
In the time since, the popularity of the WNBA has grown exponentially. The additions of Clark and Angel Reese two years ago brought more eyes to women’s basketball. The Golden State Valkyries joined the league this year. Toronto, Portland, Cleveland, Detroit and Philadelphia are all getting teams, and by 2030, the league will have 18 teams. In 2024, the league broke its single-season attendance record, which has stood since 2002.
Fans are turning out for the Dream. The team has sold out every regular-season home game for the past two seasons. For the playoffs, the Dream Deck — a 300-seat bleacher setup — was added to accommodate more fans. There’s currently a waitlist for season tickets. Those fans, aptly named “the Dreamers,” can make an arena of just over 3,500 people sound like Rome’s Colosseum in its heyday.
Ahead of Game 1 in the playoff series — the only Dream victory in the series — point guard Jordin Canada was focused. The two-time WNBA champion started her career with the Seattle Storm before joining her hometown L.A. Sparks in 2023. Now in her third stop, she can pinpoint what’s different about the fandom and community in ATL.
“The energy, the culture. You feel it when you step into this arena,” Canada said. “It just feels like one big happy family. I love how intimate the setting is. You just feel the energy of the fans and that gets us pumped.”
Implicit in said energy is Janelle. If the Dreamers were a marching band, she’d be the drum major. At every timeout and break in the game, Janelle is guiding fans through chants, promoting dance battles or leading the crowd through a cellphone-light-illuminated “Swag Surf.”
Janelle is a Snellville native who played guard at Greater Atlanta Christian School, winning a state championship in 2007. The event host started watching WNBA games to follow girls she played against in high school and AAU ball. Seeing locals like Maya Moore, Kelley Cain and Diamond DeShields go pro was inspiring.
She joined the Dream in 2008 as an intern, spending seven years with the organization. She’s lent voice talents to pro-AM league Atlanta Entertainment Basketball League (AEBL), Overtime Elite and the Chicago Bulls. She returned to the Dream in 2021, even serving as emcee at previous WNBA All-Star games.
Having experience in different sports venues, she says Gateway Center Arena is uniquely Atlanta. “It’s one of a few arenas that you can go to on a game day and experience a club with a basketball game going on,” she said.
If Dream games feel like the club, then Janelle is both a VIP and arbiter of hype, ad-libbing her way around in-game production scripts. It’s a luxury that’s not afforded to most talent working WNBA and NBA arenas. Janelle credits the team’s leadership with letting her move freely and creatively.
“They want Atlanta to feel like Atlanta. It just allows me to really tap into the city that raised me in a culture that shaped so much of who I am, how I talk, how I sound, how I dress. And all of that comes out on game days,” she said.
It’s seeing herself reflected in the crowd and players on the bench that keeps Janelle coming back.
That sense of home and belonging also led center Brittney Griner to the Dream. After spending her entire career in Phoenix and winning a championship, Griner turned heads when she decided to make her return to the court in Atlanta this season.
“I didn’t get to see a lot of my people in Phoenix,” Griner told the AJC in May. “The culture was not as prominent as it is here in Atlanta. When I’m out in the city, it feels more like family, and it’s refreshing. I’m definitely not a West Coast person at heart. Being in my backyard looking at the trees and watching the squirrels run around, it reminds me of my childhood. I’m more at ease.”
‘A message of hope’
If it feels like the Dream as an organization are embracing all things Atlanta, it’s because they are.
“From athlete to C-suite, the city of Atlanta is a melting pot led by Black culture, and the Dream sits perfectly at the intersection of where sport meets culture,” Montgomery said.
That thinking is shared with leadership throughout the Dream organization. Atlanta native Aisha Greenlee is the team’s director of community impact. Greenlee’s work is driven by three pillars: empowering girls and women, creating equity and growing the game of basketball. That work looks like Power Her Dreams basketball clinics and camps for young people. Girls at any level of the game get a chance to connect with players, coaches and staff.
There are also programs geared toward addressing everyday life issues.
Earlier this year, the team announced that it would work with Cash App and Forgive Co. to relieve $10 million in debt for metro Atlanta residents. It’s a city and metro area rich with Black history, but rife with poor upward mobility scores due to leading the nation in income inequality.
“We want our community efforts to be intentional, thoughtful, and purposeful and specific to the needs of Atlanta,” Greenlee said.
Intentionality is at the heart of what happens in and outside of Gateway Center Arena. In the post-2020 Dream world, fan growth was the ultimate goal. Ownership and leadership agreed that game experiences should be collectively curated. They need to reflect the community and people of Atlanta.
“This has kind of been one of our north stars over the last few years. We wanted to ensure that the game-day experience was differentiated from other types of sports experiences in Atlanta, and it felt as authentic to the city and the culture as possible, so that any time a new fan came, they came back,” Hannah Spencer, the Dream’s VP of marketing, said. Spencer leads a team that works on branding, photo, video, social content, web, email marketing and retail.
Spencer first joined the Dream’s marketing team in 2022. She left for a year to work with the U.S. Soccer Federation before returning to the Dream last year.
Spencer, who works closely with Janelle and in-game talent, is focused on spreading awareness about the team and engaging loyal fans. They have their hands on all aspects of the fan experience.
“We pay attention to the details to add additional touch points,” Spencer said. “Of course, we want our team to be great and we want them to win games, and winning drives momentum and excitement, but that’s not something we can control.”
As a native, Greenlee says her work is personal. The diversity of women on the Dream’s roster, the family feel of games, and stressing the importance of representation drive her. The feedback from fans tells her that the marketing and community outreach efforts are paying off.
“One of the things that I’ve heard is that they feel seen, they feel supported, they feel embraced. It’s important that they are able to consistently see that not only are Black women heavily represented on the Atlanta Dream and in the W, but they are supported. They are celebrated, and we want you to celebrate them with us, but we also want you to know that we’re celebrating you by way of amplifying these players, because what they are offering is a message of hope,” she said.
Dreaming big
Ellenwood resident Mark McCollum sees the hope and promise in the Dream. McCollum attends Dream games with his wife, Crystal, and their son, Ethan. During the playoffs, the family showed up in bedazzled Dream pendants and gold rope chains they made together. The family is big on Rhyne Howard and rookie Te-Hina Paopao. When the Dream hosted an HBCU night, Mark, a Morehouse alum, and Crystal, a Spelman alumna, were in the house.
The McCollums love the feeling of inclusion at games. That the vibes are unapologetically Black doesn’t hurt, either. “People can come out and be themselves and this is how basketball really should be, right? There’s no phony in here in Atlanta,” he said.
Superfan Christina Granville is living out her childhood dreams on WNBA courts. Known to fans, players and the internet as “Ms. Basketball,” the South Florida native, event host and influencer had hoop dreams of her own.
She arrived in Atlanta in 2013 doing promo work for a beverage company, even played some semi-pro ball. A couple of years later, she did some emceeing for halftime at Dream games when it felt like the organization was giving tickets away to fill seats.
Like Montgomery, Granville is a fixture on the sidelines during games. She’s dancing, cheering, even collaborating with Dream partners like CashApp on content. Through her work, Granville has developed relationships with other WNBA players and teams. She’s also the commissioner of the AEBL Women’s Pro-Am league.
What stands out to her is the fact that she can see the Dream’s executive leadership on the floor, in the crowd and on the concourse, engaging with fans. There’s also the fact that acts with homegrown ties such as Bobby V, Lloyd, KP the Great and Crime Mob performing is a regular occurrence other franchises don’t have.
“There’s no other city, no other arena, no other WNBA team that has access to as much Black excellence that we have,” she said.
Granville hopes that going forward, the rest of the city can embrace the Dream. She wants to see players on billboards, doing more local media rounds, partnering with prominent companies and brands in Atlanta. “I want people to start really loving on our girls. Wear their jerseys, support them, show them love even when they’re out,” she said.
It’s the same for Scott and Bowers. Like any die-hard fans they’ve got thoughts on the future. If they had their druthers, they’d be offering face-to-face feedback for general manager — and three-time executive of the year winner — Dan Padover.
They’re eager to see more stars potentially join the Dream. They want to see Coach Smesko grow in year two. They want better officiating. They want to see the Dream eventually move into a larger arena to boost the team’s influence.
Scott grew up wanting to play pro basketball, but didn’t think it was a possibility for women, especially Black women. Seeing it live today gives her a sense of promise for the future.
Despite the playoff loss, the ladies’ connection to this team is only growing. “We love this team and we just want to wrap our hands and arms around them,” Bowers said.
The pitch to the team and city is simple, they say.
“You have to have the faith and the confidence that what you’re building is something great and that other people will buy into it if you just take them there,” Scott said. “You don’t really have to sell it to ‘em because this city is starving for a champion and this can be their champion.”
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About the Author
Gavin Godfrey is an editor and Team Lead for UATL, the AJC's Black culture franchise. He's an award-winning writer and editor from Atlanta who's covered everything from OutKast to the water boys. Before joining the AJC, Gavin worked for Capital B Atlanta, CNN, and Creative Loafing.
