Tesla chair and Blackbird associate Robyn Denholm, has one-upped Atlassian’s Mike Cannon-Brookes, half proprietor of US NBA crew the Utah Jazz, by shopping for a whole basketball league, the WNBL.
The deal between the Wollemi Capital Group Syndicate (WCGS) and Larry Kestelman’s Nationwide Basketball League (NBL) consortium to amass a majority stake within the Girls’s Nationwide Basketball League was signed final week.
From April subsequent 12 months, Denholm’s household workplace, Wollemi, will personal 49% and the NBL, 29%. Basketball Australia retains the steadiness of the shareholding.
Denholm additionally has a 30% stake within the Sydney Kings males’s crew and Sydney Flames within the WNBL. Her daughter Victoria, CEO of Wollemi, is the Flames president.
Whereas no worth was disclosed, the Australian girls’s competitors had been valued at as much as $35 million.
The 15-week girls’s season received underway just lately, with the Flames presently seventh out of the eight groups.
Larry Kestelman owns 94% of the boys’s competitors, having initially purchased in to the comp in 2015 and subsequently turning across the financially-troubled league.
The WNBL’s new co-owner, Robyn Denholm. Picture: Anna Kucera
The takeover was described as a transformative second for Australian girls’s sports activities.
“Women’s basketball in Australia boasts a remarkable legacy and an even more promising future,” Robyn Denholm stated.
“We’re thrilled to play a number one position in shaping its subsequent chapter, offering the assist and funding wanted to raise the game for many years to come back.”
Victoria Denholm stated they need the WNBL to be a sporting powerhouse that displays the recognition of the sport for the various Australians taking part in it.
“Our League is residence to a few of the most proficient athletes with inspiring tales,” she stated.
“We’re dedicated to amplifying these tales and elevating girls’s skilled basketball, making certain it reaches new heights each on and off the court docket.”
Basketball Australia CEO Matt Scriven stated it was an thrilling stage of the long-term imaginative and prescient of the WNBL.
“The WNBL continues to attract world class talent and the level of commercial, attendance and audience engagement so far in season 24/25 demonstrates the opportunity ahead. We will continue to work closely with the consortium in ensuring that the momentum of the WNBL continues beyond the transfer in April next year.”
Larry Kestelman, stated the WNBL is Australia’s oldest skilled girls’s sporting league.
“It deserves to be showcased on the identical degree as different elite competitions,” he stated.
“This acquisition unlocks an thrilling new period of progress, visibility, and alternative for gamers, followers, and the game as a complete.”
Alongside a love of sport, Wollemi Capital has invested in a spread of Australian startups – most just lately visa utility platform Matilda Migration in addition to plant-based supplies startup Alt.Leather-based
The sector additionally has basketball followers from the game, with basketball legend Andrew Bogut a daily angel investor.
With girls’s sport gaining better prominence throughout the board because of the success of groups just like the Matildas and Alyssa Healy’s cricketers, the query now’s whether or not the Denholms are tempted to observe within the footsteps of Cannon-Brookes, who additionally has a slice of the NRL as a co-owner of the South Sydney Rabbitohs, together with actor Russell Crowe and fellow billionaire James Packer.
Or possibly simply purchase the ladies’s league.
