A few years ago, when Cheryl Espinosa-Jones found out that her wife Deb put down a $25 deposit for Golden State Valkyries season tickets, she was skeptical. Cheryl told SFGATE she had “never, ever, ever, ever, ever” been a sports fan — “I’m the kind of person where if I sit near a ball, it hits me,” she said in an interview last week.

Deb Espinosa-Jones hadn’t even consulted her spouse of 29 years before springing for the deposit, yet Cheryl didn’t push back. “You could still cancel, at that point,” she said. Besides, while Cheryl had always made a point of leaving the room in her Oakland home during any Raiders or 49ers game, she wondered if this could be different. It was the inaugural season of the Bay Area’s first WNBA team; this was something “very curious.”

Two months later, Deb was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer that quickly spread to her brain. She and her family faced a devastating choice. Without treatment, she’d live two more months; with it, she had about a year. In response, Deb did not hesitate to pick treatment. She had two things she wanted to hold onto: meeting her newest grandchild when he was born and seeing the Valkyries play. 

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Deb Espinosa-Jones smiles while sitting at her seat inside Chase Center before a Golden State Valkyries game in the 2025 season.

Growing up in Richmond during the 1960s, Deb was the singular girl on the baseball field, allowed to join on the sandlot but barred from the actual team. With the WNBA coming to town, she felt she had to be there. “This is my thing,” Cheryl remembered her wife saying. Deb told her family: “I want to use my season tickets.” She matched that desire with a kind of extravagant, all-in devotion, filling her closet with violet team merch, memorizing details about the team’s new players, and converting scores of friends and family into fans. As Deb began a grueling course of blood transfusions and radiation treatment, the gates of Ballhalla — the name fans gave to the Valkyries’ home at Chase Center — opened onto a world she’d been waiting decades to enter. 

Meanwhile, the Valkyries were also building a new kind of audience. In their inaugural season, they averaged 18,064 fans per game and sold out all 22 regular season home games, a new WNBA attendance record. (It’s a number they matched in 2026.) Even more revealing was this: Only 5% of the 10,000 plus people to initially sign up for Valkyries season tickets also had season tickets to the Bay Area’s pro men’s basketball team, the Warriors. Established sports fans were not the ones making the Valkyries successful. It was people like Deb and Cheryl, who had never before felt particularly invited into their region’s pro sports fandom, but who saw themselves newly reflected.

Cheryl and Deb Espinosa-Jones smile for a selfie together........

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