ABC7 Chicago is now streaming 24\/7. Click here to watch<\/a><\/p>\n“This is new to me, like I never seen one on public court,” high school student Beautiful Pearson said.<\/p>\n
“That’s fire. So, you know, if you hit from the 3, over and over again, you are on fire,” said Michael Lindsey, with the Chicago Park District.<\/p>\n
The bright fire-orange WNBA 3-point line now painted at Hamilton Park in Englewood is rare, but the Chicago Sky hope it won’t be for long.<\/p>\n
“We didn’t have the lines, yeah. Sometimes, we didn’t even have basketball nets,” former Chicago Sky player Linnae Harper said.<\/p>\n
Growing up on Chicago’s South Side, former Sky guard Harper says she used to write in her journal that one day she’d play professional basketball, at a time when pathways in the sport were mostly built for boys.<\/p>\n
“Growing up, I only played with all boys. I was the only girl on my team,” Harper said.<\/p>\n
Now, more than two decades later, the Whitney Young grad is seeing something she never had as a kid: a WNBA 3-point line on a public court.<\/p>\n
“If I can make a shot from the WNBA line at that age, then I can make it anywhere in life,” Harper said.<\/p>\n
It’s all part of the WNBA’s “Line ‘Em Up” campaign, a push to make women’s professional courts visible in neighborhoods across the country.<\/p>\n
“When you often go out and play at the courts that are around your house or in your neighborhoods, you have a 3-point line that’s for the high schoolers or the NBA men’s professional sport. But what about the women?” Chicago Sky co-owner Nadia Rawlinson said.<\/p>\n
While there are tens of thousands of park courts across the country, the league says less than 1 percent currently have a WNBA 3-point line.<\/p>\n
In Chicago alone, the park district says more than 3,700 girls participate in its basketball programs.<\/p>\n
“Not only is gonna help your game, like, tactically, like the inspiration, the feeling of like this is for me. Like, I matter; like, I can do this,” former Chicago Sky player Allie Quigley said.<\/p>\n
And while the WNBA and the players’ union continue negotiations<\/a> ahead of the upcoming season, the Sky says this moment is about something bigger: building the next generation of leaders.<\/p>\n“It’s not just to be a star athlete; it’s not just to be a WNBA player. But it’s to be a leader. It’s to be a CEO. It’s to be a boss, and this is your chance to show it just first here on the court,” Rawlison said.<\/p>\n
The fire orange line is just the first of the hundreds to come that the Chicago Sky is planning across park district courts.<\/p>\n
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