ABSTRACT
As COVID-19 shut down sports leagues across the world, the 2020 Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) season seemed to be in serious jeopardy. Desperate to save the season, the league decided to sequester its players in a bubble-like environment at IMG academy, colloquially known as the ‘Wubble’. The ‘Wubble’ would serve to highlight the way in which COVID-19 and racial justice movements became inextricably intertwined in 2020, as WNBA players utilised the ‘Wubble’ as an institutional space to carry out activist work, most significantly helping to elect Senator Raphael Warnock over Atlanta Dream team owner Kelly Loeffler. This chapter will argue that the way in which the WNBA was able to adapt to the catastrophic environment caused by COVID-19, though an extremely taxing environment for the players, provided an opportunity and level of visibility for WNBA players to expand the possibilities for protest in sport and made explicit the link between sport, place and politics.
