Dearica Hamby always had nice shoes, but the WNBA’s two-time Sixth Woman of the Year wouldn’t have called herself a sneakerhead early in life. But as she started to play basketball and eventually became a star hooper at Wake Forest from 2011 to 2014, she found herself coming back to the same two brands.
“I stuck with the Nike and Jordan route pretty much my entire life,” Hamby said.
Hamby developed a mentorship with former Jordan director of regional sales Ron Walden and explored doing an internship with the joint company while in college. NCAA rules wouldn’t permit it, though, so it never came together. When she was drafted No. 6 in the 2015 WNBA Draft, however, her desire to be affiliated with the brand was far from satiated.
“When I got drafted I really wanted to sign with Nike and it didn’t happen,” Hamby said in a phone interview last December. “And Jordan only had Maya Moore; it wasn’t really a thing for other women to sign with Jordan. I kept being like, ‘I got to sign with Nike or I gotta sign with Jordan.'”
The Las Vegas Aces forward fielded offers from other companies after winning her first Sixth Woman of the Year award in 2019, but still wanted to hold out for her dream brand. Shortly after repeating as Sixth Woman of the Year in 2020 and watching her team make it to the WNBA Finals while she was sidelined with a torn MCL, her agent called to let her know she’d earned a meeting with Jordan.
“I get on the Zoom call and they have this whole presentation laid out for me about why they want me to be on the Jordan team,” Hamby said. “I was literally like, ‘Oh, shit,’ because I didn’t know that the call was gonna go that way. They’re doing this presentation and I’m like, ‘Holy crap, it’s done. You guys don’t have to say anything else. It’s a done deal.’”
Hamby was a part of
the group of five WNBA athletes who signed endorsement deals with Jordan Brand last December. Jordan Brand’s WNBA roster is now comprised of eight athletes, the most in company history. Those athletes — Maya Moore, Kia Nurse, Asia Durr, Jordin Canada, Satou Sabally, Crystal Dangerfield, Te’a Cooper and Hamby — have achieved excellence on and off the court. For example, Moore, who became Jordan Brand’s first WNBA signee in 2011, is as well known for winning four WNBA championships as she is for her efforts to reform the United States justice system through her organization,
Win With Justice.