“I’m a part of various Facebook groups for ‘Bring Back the Monarchs’ campaigns. With the rise of the WNBA and other teams, there’s a lot of chatter here to bring the team back,” says Terra Lopez, 41, a Sacramento-raised musician whose first job was as a Monarchs ball girl at age 15. “Why don’t we have them anymore? That love has never been lost. Around town, there are folks, including myself, who rock our Monarchs gear still. There’s an appreciation for the team.”

Daniel Tutupoly, a 35-year-old barista, agrees. Though he first fell in love with basketball through the Kings, he quickly realized that the Monarchs were equally entertaining, not to mention more successful, than their male counterparts. Like Lopez, he has refused to completely relinquish his nostalgia for Sacramento’s bygone WNBA glory.

“[The loss of the Monarchs] doesn’t make any sense, in hindsight,” says Tutupoly, who grew up in Sacramento. “The owners just treated it like a business, rather than considering any of the cultural value. The team was an afterthought, always secondary to Kings. I know a bunch of people here who are excited about the Valkyries right now and drive out to games regularly. So imagine the support there would be for the Monarchs, compared to 20 years ago.”

‘Long Live the Monarchs,’ a special issue of Daniel Tutupoly’s Late Pass zine. (Daniel Tutupoly)

In April, Tutupoly released “Long Live The Monarchs,” a DIY zine dedicated solely to memories of the Monarchs. Inspired by old school issues of Sports Illustrated for Kids, the Monarchs-edition zine — part of a larger series, Latepass, that Tutupoly began making during the pandemic — includes crossword puzzles, digital collages, individual player statistics, stickers and more.

It’s a physical vestige of the city’s pride and pain, of having lost despite winning, of everything that Sacramento was and no longer is.

“The Monarchs represent a Sacramento that could have been, in sports but also in every sector of the city,” says Lopez, who played basketball at Sacramento High School as a teenager and recalls the team’s social and cultural impact early on. “[The Monarchs] really took the time outside of their games to connect with younger players in the city. That meant everything to me and all of my teammates, and Sacramento in general. It gave us something to embody and envision in a future that we didn’t have before.”

Queens on and off the court

In 2020, Lopez launched The WNBA History Club, a podcast that briefly looks at the league’s founding and figures (Lopez later hosted the NPR-syndicated podcast, This is What It Feels Like, in 2023). Through it all, she has maintained a vociferous fandom of the Monarchs, having attended the inaugural Monarchs game in 1997 and participated in early community events hosted by the team in local parking lots.

Yolanda Griffith of the Sacramento Monarchs celebrates after defeating the Connecticut Sun during Game 4 to win the WNBA Finals September 20, 2005 at Arco Arena in Sacramento, California. (Jed Jacobsohn/Getty Images)

In addition to the larger-than-life players, an essential element of the Monarchs’ social contributions to Sacramento came from the fans themselves, many of whom were openly queer.

“As a queer person, that was my first representation of seeing queer elders,” Lopez says. “That was out in the open for me for the first time. Queer, older people experiencing joy. That was powerful for me, to know I could have that.”

It all ended far too quickly. In an interview on Knuckleheads, a reputable NBA player podcast, Monarchs’ All-Star point guard Ticha Penicheir said that “the team folded in 2009 and it was kind of out of nowhere, nobody expected it. We never really had a chance to say goodbye to our fans. To thank them.”

It’s a commonly held sentiment by local fans. The way in which the team’s demise came out of thin air is particularly Sacramentan, according to Lopez, who says the city has constantly fumbled good opportunities due to a conservative mindset. Perhaps that has been the hardest part of it all.

President George W. Bush looks at a jersey as Yolanda Griffith, from the 2005 WNBA Champion Sacramento Monarchs, presents it to him at the White House May 16, 2006 in Washington, DC. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)

“You had to be there to really understand the significance of it for Sacramento: historically, culturally, not only in sports,” Lopez says. “From a fan’s perspective, we had so much going. There was so much more potential left. But as tragic as losing the Monarchs was, the people who were in the building at Arco [have] a love and pride for the team that is so palpable. That still exists in Sacramento, too.”