Local News Team Stunned to Discover City Has Had a WNBA Team This Whole Time

By Drew Leman

INDIANAPOLIS - A local news team has recently discovered that the city has been the home of the WNBA’s Indiana Fever since 2000, End of the Bench has learned.

The discovery was made by a team member who only happened to walk by Gainbridge Fieldhouse while the Fever hosted the Atlanta Dream in a 100-94 loss last weekend.

“I was simply going for a stroll through the city when I heard the faintest commotion coming from Gainbridge,” said the reporter. “It was too big a crowd to be a Civil War reenactment, and it was too small a crowd to be the Taylor Swift Eras Tour. So, I had to go see what was going on.”

Much to their surprise, the commotion was a regular-season WNBA matchup between the Fever and the Dream. When asked why the whole news team had repeatedly neglected to report on a professional-level local sports team, the reporter claimed they “knew there was something they forgot.”

Despite winning conference titles in 2009 and 2015 and a WNBA championship in 2012, the Fever have struggled to establish local notoriety, even in a city that has little else to boast in the world of professional sports.

A local sports writer shared their insight on the Indianapolis sports scene.

“Once the Pacers are eliminated each year from playoff contention, we have to immediately shift our focus to the upcoming day the Colts will be eliminated from playoff contention. We don’t typically have a lot of time to prepare for anything else.”

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When asked how he occupied himself during the summer, another journalist claimed, “I typically just watch replays of the Indy 500 from June until August. There were a few years when I would spend days at a time camped outside Andrew Luck’s house with a pair of binoculars and a bag of peanuts. No one told me we had any other news to report.”

With the Fever on the hunt for its first playoff appearance since 2016 - the last year the Fever also posted a winning percentage of at least .500 - the city of Indianapolis finally has something to offer its sports fans during the dog days of summer.

Much of the hype surrounding this year’s Fever team is due to the number-one overall pick in the 2023 WNBA draft and favorite to win the 2023 Rookie of the Year award, Aliyah Boston. When asked if she is up for the challenge of enshrining her name among the great Indianapolis sports legends, Boston claimed, “It shouldn’t be hard.”

“Being the greatest Indianapolis athlete since Peyton Manning or Reggie Miller doesn’t seem like a very tall order,” said Boston. “At training camp, they tell us that as long as we don’t have another Malice at the Palace situation, we’re better than most.”

With the Fever poised to be competitive for the first time in more than half a decade, and the city of Indianapolis desperate for newsworthy sports coverage, it seems that the perfect storm is brewing to help put the WNBA and women’s basketball on the map once and for all.

Can we expect to see the WNBA gain media coverage in the near future?

Time will tell.

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