Behind the scenes of the Atlanta Dream, women also lead

Inside a weekly leadership team meeting at the Atlanta Dream’s front office in West Midtown well before the start of the season, a big list of priorities was on the agenda: the WNBA free agency period when they ultimately traded to bring star Angel Reese to the team, arena readiness and ticket sales, to name a few.

At this conference table, like the Dream on the court, the action is dominated by women. Ten of the 13 leaders in the room are female.

“It’s great to see women in powerful positions and to show people that you’re able to do many, many things and be very, very good at all of them,” said Brooklyn Cartwright, assistant general manager and a five-year veteran in the team’s front office.

That’s a common priority in the women’s game, she said. “And I think that’s really important for young women and girls to see. … It’s about representation.”

But for those who don’t come from women’s sports, it can be surprising.

“It caught me off guard when I came in as a new staff member, to walk into an organization where you see so many women on staff, so many women in leadership,” said Aisha Greenlee, the Dream’s director of community impact, who previously worked in public radio, education and at a nonprofit.

“This is a very unique setting,” Greenlee said. “I will make a safe assumption that most people are not used to seeing this many women leading an organization.”

Women have long led the Dream, and today, they occupy the key roles of CEO, president, vice president, chief revenue officer, assistant general manager and assistant coaches, among others.

It’s powerful for players to “see people that look like you making the decisions every day, and people that they can relate to,” Cartwright said, showing “that we, you know, walk the walk.”

It’s a pivotal time for the Dream, with a new WNBA labor contract boosting salaries for all players and the arrival of Reese, a two-time All-Star with a national following, expected to draw more fans and attention to the Dream.

Women’s sports, basketball and soccer in particular, have seen a surge in interest in recent years. In 2025, the WNBA reached its highest-ever single-season attendance, surpassing the previous record set in 2002.

Atlanta Dream's Jordin Canada, Angel Reese And Rhyne Howard hold up their jerseys during a news conference by the Atlanta Dream on Friday, April 17, 2026, in Atlanta. (Brynn Anderson/AP)

The Dream’s build-up to this point comes after a tumultuous period that dates back to 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, when players’ activism on Black Lives Matter put them at odds with the team’s then-co-owner and then-U.S. Sen. Kelly Loeffler.

“We had a really challenging history with the team before most of us that are here now had arrived,” Cartwright said. “We kind of had a lot of work to do in terms of rewriting the narrative about who is the Dream. What do we stand for?”

Loeffler ended up selling the team in 2021 to an ownership group including real estate investor Larry Gottesdiener, former Dream player Renee Montgomery and Suzanne Abair, who is now CEO of the Dream.

Since then, “we’ve been in exponential growth mode,” said Dream President and Chief Operating Officer Morgan Shaw Parker, who was brought in by the new ownership team and tasked with building the fan base and creating a diverse organization.

As Shaw Parker grew the staff from seven people in 2021 to about 70 this season, she said there was careful thought put into details like where to post job listings to best bring diversity to the front office and leadership.

Reaching the fans

Women and people from different backgrounds bring “an ability to connect the dots in different ways,” Shaw Parker said. “Intentionally building this with women first, I think you automatically get people at the table that can think about the things that these female athletes need.”

President and Chief Operating Officer Morgan Shaw Parker listens as other Atlanta Dream executives listen during their weekly leadership meeting at the Dream office in Atlanta on Monday, March 30, 2026. (Abbey Cutrer/AJC)

And, she said, women leaders can bring a better understanding of the fan base and what they care about.

“We’re finding fans come out of the woodwork that have never felt like they’ve been represented before,” she said.

Michael Lewis, a professor and sports marketing expert at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School, said there’s “a real layer of complexity in terms of women’s sports.”

“There’s a sporting element that’s consistent with every other sport out there. When you win, the fans show up,” he said. But women’s sports “also has this really powerful social component to it. … A lot of the fans are, in fact, advocates for the sport as much as they are for an individual team.”

That’s true for Angela Perry, who lives in Florida near Jacksonville but has season tickets to the Dream and typically flies in for games.

“I’m a fan of the league in general,” said Perry, who played college basketball and now works as a design consultant in banking and as a women’s hoops content creator on the side. But “we don’t have a team here in Florida.”

“As a little girl growing up, it was really exciting when they announced the WNBA. So me and my childhood best friend, we made a whole day of it for the first game” in 1997, Perry said.

“I like to see that a league that is for women is also led by women,” Perry said. “As a woman who is in leadership and management in the company I work in, I love to see it.”

Before deciding to buy season tickets for the Dream, Perry said she had seen other WNBA teams in different arenas, and the Dream “just felt like the best team to be a season-ticket holder” for the community and the perks, like when the team rented out a bowling alley for the day and season-ticket holders could bowl with the team.

“Some of those things feel like women-led ideas and thoughts,” Perry said. “I‘m friends with a lot of different season-ticket holders for other teams, and they’re always really surprised at the things that we get and the access we get to the players.”

The team’s research has shown “women who connect with the Dream specifically do so for the love of the game, but they also do it because they want to be affiliated with a purpose-driven organization,” Greenlee said. “That’s the difference between women’s sports fans and men’s sports fans.”

More than a name

Not long after she took on the job, Shaw Parker led a re-envisioning of the organization’s mission centered around three pillars: equity for all, empowering girls and women in sports and spreading basketball.

“We all agreed at that time that since we were named after Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech through a community-wide vote, that we needed to really live into that name,” Shaw Parker said. “Carrying a name like this matters.”

While other businesses have made changes to diversity initiatives in response to backlash against diversity, equity and inclusion programs over the last couple of years, “We aren’t changing the work. We aren’t changing the name,” Shaw Parker said. “We are just continuing to do it and not taking our foot off the gas.”

That includes the focus on empowering women.

“That’s something that we’re not just saying, but that you see being done in our front office, with our basketball team, in the community,” Cartwright said.

Still, the team faces other challenges in growing into its potential. The team plays in the WNBA’s smallest arena, Gateway Center in College Park, with only 3,500 seats — limiting its reach and revenue.

Season ticket memberships have sold out for three consecutive seasons, and the team has a wait list in the thousands for them.

Having outgrown their home, “our owner has a vision of building an arena for women by women,” Shaw Parker said. Meanwhile, the team will play five games at State Farm Arena, its previous home, this season.

It’s yet to be seen when a decision on a new arena will come. “It really does take time to make sure that we’re putting (our arena) where Atlanta wants it,” Shaw Parker said.

Room to grow will be particularly crucial, because the increase in minimum player salaries from about $66,000 to at least $270,000 in the new labor contract means “a significant impact on my operational budget,” Shaw Parker acknowledged.

But “this is actually what needs to happen to be able to help put women on the map and to put women’s pro sports in a viable, sustainable and profitable place,” Shaw Parker said. At the same time, “it impacts my bottom line significantly.”