Chiney Ogwumike.
For Chiney Ogwumike, who has seamlessly bridged the gaps between worlds — men’s and women’s basketball, on-court excellence and media work, brand-building and creating change — the decision on whether to play in the WNBA in 2024 came down to a simple question. Where could she make the most impact?
Her 2023 WNBA season led directly into working on the ESPN broadcasts of the WNBA Finals, NBA Today, Women’s College Gameday and now, March Madness. It gave her a chance for her body to heal, a long career of playing hurt that hasn’t stopped her from winning 2014 Rookie of the Year Honors, make two all-star teams, combining elite offensive efficiency with dominance on the offensive boards.
“And so, dealing with those pains, also understanding myself, my body, I just realized that it's just focusing on my voice right now,” Ogwumike said on the Locked On Women’s Basketball podcast Tuesday. “[I’m] never closing the door. I'm only 31 years old, but understanding the impact that I have in the space that I occupy, particularly with broadcasting, that's where my energies are right now. So I would never say never, but right now, I've been called to do a lot of great things. And I want to make sure I spend my energy where I feel like I can make the most impact. And right now, that's TV.”
But not just TV — it’s never one thing with Ogwumike. Her new podcast, The Chiney Show, is meeting basketball fans where they are, increasingly the space she has long occupied. Ogwumike is the personification of the idea that men’s basketball and women’s basketball isn’t a binary choice. It’s a continuum, with room for everyone, along with the explicit understanding that neither one takes a back seat to the other.
It makes for appointment viewing — produced through PlayersTV, she’s managed to eclipse 60,000 views on each of her first four YouTube shows, a testament to the built-in audience that Ogwumike herself brings to the table.
“I don't want to say I'm allergic to hot takes, “Ogwumike said. “But I've learned to form stronger opinions. I guess that's a different way. But for me, I just like speaking the truth. I like watching the game. I like bringing the facts. And I like bringing the true perspective of athletes in the locker room because I currently am an athlete in the locker room.”
The show covers women’s basketball, men’s basketball, pop culture, all through the same lens — Ogwumike’s relentless intellectual curiosity — that informs her media work on ESPN. For nearly a decade, she’s been in the rooms where these decisions are made. She’s laid the groundwork, too, for other players to take their media careers to the highest levels while still playing, the latter a path that ends so fast, it leaves players scrambling for what comes next. Ogwumike showed it wasn’t necessary to wait.
“I know I was probably the first simultaneously,” she said. “There are others that have that are doing it now. And I think that's the thing I'm most proud of, knowing that when we occupy spaces that are not necessarily built for us, that we create pathways for others. I know Candace [Parker] did it thereafter. Draymond [Green], a lot of people think about him, notably CJ McCollum. Now it's very commonplace. But back in 2014-15, when I was starting, it really wasn't.”
As Ogwumike conducted this interview, she was less than halfway through a day that began with training, included a two-hour meeting in her role on the President’s Advisory Council On African Diaspora Engagement in the United States. She had done her homework — Stanford grads tend to — and said she’d made several proposals that were adoped to be taken to President Biden.
It was all enough to make her flash back to life growing up with her sister Nneka, president of the WNBPA, and wondering aloud how far her life had come.
“I'm very grateful,” Ogwumike said. “But it's another job. It's another responsibility and it's honestly a blessing because in my wildest dreams, I always joke with Nneka: ‘Did you ever think that us crazy little girls — Nneka, probably around age nine, me at age seven, growing up in Cypress, Texas, would be living the life we're living?’ Never in our wildest dreams. And it all came through basketball. And so yeah, your girl’s in politics.”
That was the culmination of a story that included Secretary of State Antony Blinken, National Women’s Soccer League star Crystal Dunn and the Ogwumike sisters. The long-form nature of The Chiney Show, at 20 minutes per episode, means the audience gets all of it, from details on the population, hopes and dreams of the new generation in Nigeria to a heartfelt recommendation of the show “Love Is Blind”.
She may not be playing in the WNBA in 2024, though one must never rule anything out when it comes to Chiney Ogwumike. But she’s only begun, with The Chiney Show the latest pathway, to using her voice and her very existence to make an impact unlike anyone we’ve ever seen.
