For women, by women The Seattle Storm Center for Basketball Performance

By Mark Moschetti, Seattle Storm

From the time the idea first started to blossom in their minds, Ginny Gilder and Lisa Brummel knew they wanted to take more than just a different approach.

They wanted to take a diverse approach.

The idea conceived by the co-owners of the Seattle Storm was for a training and practice facility exclusively for their team. Not a facility for them and some other team. Not one where they had to scramble for whatever practice time slots might be available. Nor one where they were never going to be at the top of the priority list.

This would be solely for their basketball team … their women’s basketball team … their professional, four-time champion women’s basketball team.

This would be a facility to be used by women professionals, who just happen to be professional athletes. So how about using women who are professional building designers … and professional architects … and professionals in the construction industry … to get it built.

Why not, indeed.

“Once we got a small group of people on board, we said we wanted to go out to people who support what we care about, who share our values, and are willing to put a diverse team out here to build this facility – it’s very important to us,” Brummel said. “I think everyone loved the challenge and the opportunity to highlight people who might not have been highlighted in the past.”

Fast forward to now. In tandem with Seattle’s Sellen Construction, work that initially began in February 2023, wrapped up toward the end of April. That was just in time for the Storm to conduct their full training camp inside of what officially will be known as the Seattle Storm Center for Basketball Performance – a project born in the minds of the businesswomen who owned the team, then put together and brought to life in large part by women in all aspects of the building and construction trades.

“Sellen Construction was sort of the first big partner to step up. When they came to make their presentation, even though they had not done practice facilities before, it was very important to them to tell us their level of commitment to diversity,” Brummel said. “Who they would put on the project, what the people would do, and how they were committed to get sub-contractors who fit the same mold.

“We said it was important to us, and they turned and ran with it from there.”

Gilder has been every bit as delighted with both the process and especially with the end product.

“It’s going to raise the expectations of what it means to be a professional women’s sports franchise instead of begging and borrowing and hoping for access to facilities,” she said. “You need to invest in and provide what professional-level athletes need, regardless of whether they’re male or female. It sends a message across the sports landscape that girls and young women need to have the same attention to their needs as athletes that boys and men have.”

When Brummel, Gilder, Anne Levinson and Dawn Trudeau formed Force 10 Hoops to purchase the Storm in 2008 before then-owner Clayton Bennett could move them to Oklahoma City, along with the Seattle SuperSonics, a new practice facility was not one of their Day 1 priorities.

“We had never managed a basketball team before, so Day 1 was figuring out what we had just purchased,” Brummel said.

The Storm still had the Furtado Center, across the street from the Seattle Center. But their purchase of the team did not include that facility, and Gilder said it became clear very early in their ownership tenure that the Gates Foundation was going to turn that property into its own campus.

So, for the last 15 years, the team practiced in Seattle Pacific University’s Royal Brougham Pavilion, a couple miles away from their team offices. They had use of the lower gym (which was renovated a few years ago with a permanent, full-size court, painted in Storm colors), plus a renovated locker room, access to the training room, and some limited office and meeting space upstairs.

As the four owners gradually got a feel for things – which included winning the 2010 WNBA championship, their first and the team’s second – the idea of something more, something better in terms of a permanent facility slowly started to take root.

“We started with this great, first-class facility (the Furtado Center, which the Sonics also used before moving), and women’s pro sports was not where it is today,” Gilder said. “There just wasn’t much thought given to (the idea of) should women have that kind of facility.

“In 2012, we started thinking, ‘How do we get our team to get treated the same way men’s pro sports are?’” Gilder continued. “I started wanting to make this happen for our athletes.”

At that point, they were more than a decade from turning over the first shovel of dirt. But along the way, the Storm were becoming a bigger and more significant part of the city’s sports fabric – and that certainly was beneficial.

“The way we run our business, we’re never going to do anything just because we think it’s a cool idea or because it’s what we want. It has to make good business sense,” Gilder said. “That’s where Brum and I got to over the course of a few years when we started to see consistently the city’s response to the Storm’s progression as a successful sports franchise.”

“In many ways,” Gilder added, “the Storm is a perfect emblem for the city of Seattle and really highlights the city’s progressive values.”

The team’s fourth WNBA title, won in 2020 inside the “Wubble” in Bradenton, Florida, during the year when seemingly everything was either shut down or very limited because of the coronavirus pandemic, proved to be a watershed moment of sorts.

Things didn’t happen overnight. But thereafter, they did start happening on a regular basis.

A key moment was getting Maria Barrientos of Seattle-based real estate development firm barrientos RYAN on board. With her 30-plus years of experience, she has been part of several significant projects around Seattle – and also happens to be a long-time Storm fan and season ticket holder.

“I have to work hard not to get emotional when I talk about it – it has been the most phenomenal experience,” said Barrientos, whose company (with business partner Kristin Ryan) serves as the Storm owners’ representative project manager. “From the ownership group and every single person in that organization, the inspiration we’ve all gotten for caring that much about women and enhancing opportunities for women – the overall message was a very deliberate and intentional commitment to women.

“It wasn’t just an afterthought,” she added.

Added Brummel, “Finding people who want to do this because they’re passionate about it aligns with now Ginny and I think about it. Maria is a great example of someone who checked all the boxes for us.”

So did Sellen Construction, one of the Northwest region’s top general contractors.

“I felt like it was a good connection right from the beginning – and it must have been a mutual feeling,” senior project manager Sarah Carlson said. “What I had read is what they were looking for was the right team and one that was going to really challenge the status quo of a very male-dominated industry. (They wanted to know) what we were going to be able to do to both engage women in leadership positions as well as in the trades and local small diverse businesses.

“A building is a building with walls and a roof – all of those things are in every building,” Carlson said. “Sometimes, you can get so focused on the building type and lose sight of what is the most important part of creating the right team for a project.”

Many of those who ultimately became involved at all levels of it are also Storm fans.

“Especially in this kind of work, you go to the project that you get assigned to,” Carlson said. One time it’s here; one time it’s there. A lot of it can feel run-of-the-mill. For the ones who had the opportunity to work on this, it was a big high.

“There were definitely others in the company, especially women, who said, ‘Sarah, how to I get on this project?’” Carlson added. “It was tough when you have to make those selections.”

Carlson has seen quite clearly that many of those working on the facility were treating it as more than just another construction job.

“One thing I’ve noticed, especially in the homestretch, the final push to get across the finish line, is the level of commitment to it across the board,” she said. “They’re more interested in this from a personal level and just the engagement with the owners. They’ve been on site, and have been very appreciative of what they see, as well.”

Barrientos has seen the very same thing.

“Not just for me, but for everyone on the team that we hired – and we got to 85 percent women-led team members on the engineering and architecture side – this is probably the most feel-good, heart-warming project anyone has worked on,” she said.

That particular aspect certainly has caught Gilder’s attention.

“Something I don’t think we realized was how much this would affect women in the construction industry to get to work on a project that was being directed by women and where we were interested in creating opportunities for women, and how much that would impact the construction industry locally,” she said. “It ended up being this whole ancillary benefit, more of “see it, do it,” which was very powerful.”

That also extends to the architectural aspect of the facility – and that’s where Liz Shearer came in. She is with ZGF Architects, which is based in Portland, but has offices in a handful of major U.S. cities, including Seattle.

ZGF did the interior design from the get-go, and eventually took over on exterior design, as well. Shearer came aboard “because we were looking to round out our team with experienced women, and I’m capable of building exteriors and kind of a whole range of building elements. It was a really good fit for me.”

She said she would like to see exterior design become a good fit for more women. In her experience, interior design often has women involved, while exterior has tended more toward men.

“Interior is more about how people will be using the space – the finishes, things people are touching day to day,” she said. “I think women so often show strong skillsets in the organization that it takes to get the interior piece and the people piece going. They kind of get pushed in that direction because often, they’ve been developed societally and with the practice to be good in those areas.

“Exterior is thought of as being more technical, thinking more about structure, what’s holding the building up and keeping the elements out,” Shearer continued. “Exterior tends for some reason to think men might be better at those technical things, more in their comfort zone, and they gravitate toward it.”

Shearer – and the new Storm facility – are proof that women are just as capable and competent outside as they are inside.

“To be honest, I gravitated toward it because I saw a little bit of a void of women in that area, so I pushed for that opportunity,” she said. “I really like programming and interior components of architecture. But I saw a little bit of a hole there (in exterior design), so I pushed to be considered there.”

Whether it was architecture, design, or serving in leadership positions, Shearer has been beyond thrilled to see women in all phases of the project – and for good reason.

“Really watching Sellen push the limits on women- and minority-owned businesses that have an impact on the project and the number of women engineers and leaders on the contracting side … I’ve never seen so many women,” she said. “It changes the demeanor of meetings, and from my experience, it changed the attitude of how we get things done. There’s a lot less blaming and lot more of, ‘How do we get there?’”

Case in point: Midway through the process, the decision was made to switch to a concrete tilt-up building. In a nutshell, large elements (usually walls) are cast onsite, then lifted into place with a crane.

“It turns out with the teams we put together, no one had ever done a concrete tilt-up building,” Shearer said. “We really needed to support each other in terms of finding answers and solutions and figure out how to do something where we had the skillset but not the direct experience. That was really very important.”