Yap Zone: Valkyries Beat 🤝 COYOTE

It's no secret that the Golden State Valkyries are a Bay Area cultural phenomenon, entering the FOMO radars of even the most sports-averse people (including yours truly). Beyond just reporting on the games, there's so much to talk about with women's sports, whether it's about the plague of ridiculous bouquets in the WNBA, which Pokémon could represent each WNBA team, or how queer and trans fans in the Bay Area have gone wild for the Valks.

So today, we're thrilled to announce a new partnership with Marisa Ingemi, an independent sports reporter who's likely a familiar name to anyone who's followed the Golden State Valkyries over the past year, first in the San Francisco Chronicle, then at her reader-funded newsletter, Valkyries Beat. In addition to dispatches from the trenches of Ballhalla, COYOTE will be regularly co-publishing her essential coverage of women's sports around the Bay Area: their growth, their cultural impact, and how fans have formed strong communities around their favorite teams and leagues.

To share more about what's in store, I caught up with her while she was following the team to Portland, and we chatted about life as an independent sports journalist, the gaps she sees in women's sports coverage, and today's story about how the Valkyries have navigated a particularly fraught political moment for the WNBA.

Soleil Ho: So what have you been up to since you left the Chronicle earlier this year?

Marisa Ingemi: I'm doing a little bit of everything right now. As a freelancer, the main thing is the newsletter I'm running, Valkyries Beat, which is my coverage of the Valkyries all in one place. After a year of covering the Valkyries for the Chronicle, I realized I didn't want to stop covering the team — I'd had that audience, and that audience wants more than what they're getting from traditional media. Pretty quickly, the reader funding was in place to travel and cover the team on the road and for the playoffs, and to supplement everything I do with freelancing. I'm also getting ready to cover the PWHL San Jose team for the Mercury News and covering the Sparks and UCLA women's basketball for the Los Angeles Times, plus a few other freelance pieces. I'm just kind of doing whatever I feel like right now, and it's pretty fun.

SH: Are you surprised you've been able to get so much direct reader support for your work?

MI: Yes and no. I knew what the audience was because I'd covered the team for a year and seen the numbers. I'd already begun working on a book about the team, so I knew there was demand for coverage and not enough of it locally. I'd been talking to a few places about full-time jobs and didn't love the options, so I posted on BlueSky one day asking if people would subscribe if I just did this, and got enough answers to try it. My philosophy was: if it flopped, at least I'd have a URL for my book next year.