By May of next year, Monica Wright Rogers will launch the Toronto Tempo, Canada’s first and only WNBA team. The 37-year-old is also one of few female executives in professional basketball.Photography by Nicole & Bagol/The Globe and Mail
Each month, generations reporter Ann Hui takes readers along to hang out with fascinating Canadians – regular people and celebrities, teens to seniors – joining them in their favourite pastime for up-close and candid conversations.
It’s after 5 p.m. by the time Monica Wright Rogers walks into the salon.
For Ms. Wright Rogers, the general manager of the Toronto Tempo, it’s already been a day. She started early in the morning with a coffee meeting, and then there was a team-building activity. And then there were more meetings – people to hire, partnerships to sign, strategies to plot.
By May of next year, Ms. Wright Rogers will launch Canada’s first and only WNBA team. She’ll have the enviable – yet herculean – task of building an entire team from scratch: of hand-picking her staff, assembling a roster of players and installing a head coach.
But for the next hour, all of that will fade into the background. For now, she’s here to get her nails done.
It’s Friday afternoon, and we’re at the Sixth Sense nail salon in Toronto’s Liberty Village. This is where she asked to meet. As a first-time GM at just 37 years old, as one of few female executives in professional basketball – one of even fewer racialized female executives – she knows that all eyes are on her.
When Ms. Wright Rogers walks into the salon dressed in a teal suit, her 5-foot-10 frame filling up most of the doorway, she’s greeted immediately with a hug from the owner. In the six months since moving to Toronto, she’s already become a regular here.
Ms. Wright Rogers visits the Sixth Sense nail salon in Toronto’s Liberty Village location every two weeks to get her nails done.
She was instantly charmed the first time she walked in. There were little kids – the children of the owners – hanging out behind the cash register. They reminded her of her own kid, her five-year-old son. “It just felt like family,” she said. “Just immediate, fast friends.”
All of the stations around her are already filled with young women, fresh from work, with bursting giant totes. The walls are covered with a rainbow of nail polish, shelves lined with little glass bottles of pink, purple and red.
Ms. Wright Rogers comes into this salon, like clockwork, every two weeks. When she’s not at the basketball court, in the office or at home with her husband and son, this is where you’ll find her.
“This,” she said, “gives me ‘me time.’”
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It’s the life of a professional athlete. In the years since high school, she’s moved more times than she can count. So with every move, she’s scoped out what she calls her ‘spots’: “a grocery store, a bakery and a nail salon.” A sense of consistency, and normalcy.
Her career began in her hometown of Woodbridge, Va., a suburb of Washington, where she picked up a basketball for the first time at the age of 9. By middle school, she was fielding letters from colleges.
She earned a full scholarship to the University of Virginia before she was selected second over all in the 2010 WNBA draft by the Minnesota Lynx. She went on to win two WNBA championships with the Lynx.
No matter where in the world she moved, Ms. Wright Rogers has always found a new nail salon to visit.
Even as a player – when her nails had to stay short enough that she could make a fist – she always had her nails done. She’d find herself a new salon whether she was in Poland, Turkey or South Korea. (In Seoul, she and the other players developed the habit of recovering after games at 24-hour spas, with a steam and foot scrub.)
She kept up this routine in her postplaying career, too – as a coach (at the collegiate level, and then in the WNBA), as an executive at the NBA, and as assistant GM for the Phoenix Mercury.
The plan was for the two of us to get pedicures. But as we sat in our massage chairs, I saw that Ms. Wright Rogers had arrived with her heels already smooth. Her nail polish gleaming. Only when you leaned in close could you see a millimetre of bare nail – growth since her last pedicure two weeks ago.
So as my nail tech gritted her teeth and filed away – amassing beneath my feet what I’ll only describe as foot debris – Ms. Wright Rogers’s nail tech made quick work of hers. She removed her nail polish and replaced it with the same colour, the same white. Always one of two OPI shades: “Funny Bunny” or “Chiffon-d of You.”
The choice, she said, is strategic. White matches everything. Only on a very special occasion will she diverge. For the press conference announcing her hiring, for instance, she wore a deep Bordeaux colour – a nod to the Tempo’s team colours, blue and purple.
There’s another reason why her nails are always impeccable. The same reason she’s arrived in this late-summer, record-level heat wearing a suit. Why she wears a suit every day, whether to the office or basketball court.
Ms. Wright Rogers almost always has a shade of white on her nails because she says it matches with everything.
In an industry that’s traditionally been dominated by men, she recognizes the burden she must bear. She wants to set a good example.
“I carry a heavy weight,” she said. “I’m overdressed, probably. But you have to present a certain way to ensure you don’t let down the little girls behind you.”
There are currently seven female GMs among the WNBA’s 13 teams. And seven WNBA teams are coached by women.
Is that good? She cocked her chin and gave a long, sideways stare. “You tell me, girl.”
She knows that she faces big challenges. Her team’s eventual success – or failure – just might determine the prospects for other WNBA teams in this country. It’s the future of Canadian professional women’s basketball she holds in her hands. She needs to not just be prepared, but impeccable. Those hands need to be impeccable.
Already, there have been big wins. Serena Williams signed on as part of the team’s ownership. But there have been misses, too. Months before the Toronto Tempo was officially announced, the league accidentally leaked the team’s name on its website. Ms. Wright Rogers’s hiring as GM, too, was leaked.
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Her voice flattened at the mention. “I don’t want to comment on that,” she said.
Her strategy, above all else, she said, is to focus on the long game.
She pointed to the reams of research about women’s sports not getting the same level of attention and investment as men’s sports.
“We’re not going to have everything we want right away, tomorrow,” she said.
Instead, being strategic is important. “Every opportunity you see to get little advances, or get little victories,” she said, “you take them.”
By then, her pedicure was done. Each toenail had been filed neatly, polished into gleaming white rounds.
She thanked her nail tech, and prepared to head back out into the heat. She had her blazer on, and a giant backpack. She carried with her a second bag filled with work, and a box of sneakers. Heavy weight, indeed.
“So refreshed,” she said. And then she was off.
