Why Angel Reese is the perfect fit for the ‘Hollywood of the South’ with Atlanta Dream

COLLEGE PARK, Ga. — Inside the main entrance of Gateway Center Arena, by a merchandise space known as the Drip Shop, everyone finds Angel Reese.

She is wearing an off-white sweatshirt and black leggings. Officially, the top is the Diamanté Atlanta Cropped Hoodie, part of the new “homegrown” collection. It has “Atlanta Dream” stenciled across the front. Dozens pass her on a Sunday afternoon in late May, many of whom sport jerseys and shirts bearing her name, and Reese looks on unblinking. She is front and center without needing to be put there, but front and center she is.

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Less than an hour before a game against the Phoenix Mercury, two fans approach for a photo. They return the favor for the fans who took their photo. Then a man in an Angel Reese Chicago Sky jersey steps in. Then a woman in a red Angel Reese Dream T-shirt, who has to wait because another woman snuck into position first. Then another fan in a Sky jersey. Then a fan in a Dream shirt, holding a cocktail.

Reese does not move. She cannot move. She is a poster.

A standalone seven-foot “Player Pillar,” in team marketing parlance. All told, in one 10-minute slice of human existence, 16 people stop for a picture with a picture of Reese. The most seismic acquisition of the WNBA offseason is, today and most days, unmissable. A video game and magazine cover girl, a Victoria’s Secret runway model and Met Gala regular with millions of social media devotees, a now three-time All-Star who would like to win a championship sooner rather than later … it doesn’t matter what order all this goes in. The emerging point, in the early days of her stay in this city, is that everything can be the point.

“I think you can see the joy,” is how the real-life Reese puts it.

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The feeling is mutual, based on jersey and ticket sales, surging corporate partnerships and a pizza featuring her number crafted out of cheese. The Dream have been around for close to two decades, but one trade in April became an inflection point for an aspirational athlete, a franchise on the cusp and a community increasingly attuned to women’s sports. This is only the start. Everyone is counting on it.

Few people here may ever know her, truly. But after a couple seasons in Chicago that ended with some tumult, Reese happily belongs to Atlanta. Or maybe it’s the other way around.

“We’re the Hollywood of the South,” says Renee Montgomery, the former All-Star guard who has been part-owner of the Dream since 2021. “ATL loves stars, and ATL loves winners. ATL has been the Black Mecca for a while now. I love the saying in the (city), ‘Atlanta influences everything.’ Because that’s what the culture does. And Angel Reese is the culture.”

In late September 2024, the building was abuzz. Atlanta-based rappers Latto and Mariah the Scientist were among the celebrities attending a Dream home game. Not coincidentally, the opponent that day was the Chicago Sky, who featured a rookie forward from LSU with self-assured feistiness that gained her notoriety and, in this city, adoration and famous friends. Afterward, a reporter asked Dream guard Jordin Canada if she had a message for the big-name recording artists on hand.

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“I’m sure they were here for someone else,” Canada said.

Like most WNBA franchises, Atlanta has pushed boulders uphill. It won four games in its debut 2008 season and has had seven winning seasons since. A scheduling conflict forced the team to move WNBA Finals home games to suburban Duluth in 2013. Seven years later, the players’ union demanded that then-Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.) sell her ownership stake after she criticized the league’s support for the Black Lives Matter movement. When the Dream’s new ownership hired Morgan Shaw Parker as team president in 2021, she inherited a staff of seven people. “In Atlanta, no one knew there was a WNBA team,” Shaw Parker says now. “It was that bad.”

There are now 70 team employees, and the franchise has sold out 52 games over the last three seasons. CNBC’s most recent study of WNBA team valuations ranked the Dream 14th in the league, at $330 million, ahead of only the expansion Toronto Tempo. It is also true that the franchise’s acquisition of Reese on April 6, 2026, changed everything.

As a basketball matter, trading for Reese was self-evident. Dan Padover, the Dream’s general manager, loved her as a college prospect. He had long since told the Sky front office to call if Reese became available. Eventually, she did. By the end of the 2025 season, the Sky had suspended Reese for a half-game for critical comments she made in a Chicago Tribune article. She then didn’t play in the team’s final two and a half games, citing an injury, and a separation became more or less inevitable. The cost for Atlanta — first-round draft picks to Chicago in 2027 and 2028, plus a swap of second-rounders in 2028 — was wholly digestible. Reese was an All-Star before turning 24 and hadn’t reached her ceiling as a player. A 6-foot-3 athlete with enough skill to facilitate offense while snatching boards (through 85 career games, Reese’s 12.6 rebounds per game ranks first in WNBA history) and adding defensive sandpaper to a talented core coming off a 30-win season.

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“There’s just an edge to her,” Padover says, “that I think really helps our group.”

His message on a video call with Reese after the trade: Welcome home.

That didn’t quite cover it.

“People don’t recognize me, and I’m glad,” second-year Dream head coach Karl Smesko says. “But anybody that even saw that I had Dream gear on, it was like, ‘Did you hear about Angel?’ I’m like, yeah. I heard.”

Immediately, the nation’s sixth-largest metropolitan area teemed with Angel investors. Within a day, the Dream’s initial allotment of No. 5 red Nike “Explorer” jerseys sold out. Their website saw a 700 percent increase in form stack inquiries — basically, anyone from anywhere reaching out for any reason — following the official trade announcement. The priority wait list for tickets to the 3,500-seat Gateway Center Arena swelled by 124 percent.

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The franchise had been in final sponsorship negotiations with Lendistry, a minority-led small business lender, and Reese’s arrival helped finalize the deal “at a much bigger number,” per chief revenue officer Andrea Bailey. Carter’s jumped aboard as a sponsor with a three-year deal in the seven-figure range. An agreement to stream games via Victory+, an over-the-top service less than two years old, fell into place. “Angel is not only one of the most recognizable athletes in sports today,” Bailey says, “but she’s a powerful cultural figure, and she brings a new audience into the ecosystem.”

The Dream had ambition before April 6. They had evaluated sites for building their own permanent performance center, in line with the league-wide trend. (The Dream currently use CORE4 Athletic Complex in suburban Chamblee when they’re not practicing at Gateway Center Arena.) Hopes for a new arena existed before a trade that grabbed everyone’s attention like a tornado siren.

But it’s easy to identify a before-and-after for franchise growth here, when an embodiment of having it all occupies both a roster spot and a marquee role in the women’s hoops zeitgeist. Six Dream games will take place at State Farm Arena this season. The latest addition: an Aug. 3 “Barbie Game Day,” nodding to Reese’s presence. “As an individual, she represents more,” Shaw Parker says. “And she’s very aspirational. She is the epitome of what we want young girls and young women of all races, of all backgrounds, to see have success.”

And, well, anything big goes faster when you add the right fuel.

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“Business,” Renee Montgomery says, “is booming.”

Why the city resonates with Reese, and why Reese resonates with the city, is not hard to figure out. Her first Dream home game took place at State Farm Arena, home of the NBA’s Hawks, as part of NBC’s debut national slate of WNBA broadcasts. Cameras trained on Reese in a tunnel as she waited while all Dream players received a pregame introduction. A would-be league icon looked like she had butterflies. Reese smiled and waved to 17,000-plus fans when her name was called second-to-last.

For a woman with prior addresses in Baltimore and Baton Rouge and Chicago, this was somehow a reunion. “I feel like I was around my cousins, my brothers and sisters,” Reese says. Indeed, on Juneteenth weekend, cameras filmed her singing along to “Lift Every Voice And Sing” before a game at Indiana, which she later described as a moment of deep appreciation. “My ancestors walked so I can run — I’ll never forget that,” she said then. “Every day I wake up and I’m very grateful. It’s not supposed to be easy. But I’m very, very grateful for this opportunity to be a Black woman … and to be in this space, to shine, and use my voice.”

For someone playing for a franchise whose name invokes an iconic speech from Atlanta native Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and using the city as a hub for personal universe-building, it is a reverberant perspective. “People like Angel Reese, who commit these sort of ‘cultural infractions,’ they’re not going to be thrown away in Atlanta,” says Dr. Michelle Hite, director of the honors program at Spelman College, the historically Black women’s liberal arts college in town. “You’re going to be given a chance to be heard by some people who have money, power and influence. Contemporary young people who are influencers, that’s what they want to do — they want to capitalize. It’s not a dirty thing in Atlanta.”

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Small wonder that Reese alludes to non-basketball possibilities in this market: “Off the court, I knew this was going to be the place for me.”

“I think everybody knows and sees my life, from my podcast to modeling to film,” Reese says. “I mean, Tyler Perry’s here. I would love to work with Tyler Perry. I would love to do a lot more things in the community. When I was in Chicago, I put a basketball court there. Hopefully I can do that, too, here. Probably going to try to do a back-to-school event.

“I have a lot of great things coming that I haven’t really spoken about yet. But I’m going to do a lot of great things for Atlanta. Because they’ve showed me nothing but love.”

To be fair, she is not everywhere yet.

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That might be an impossible ask in a teeming Atlanta landscape that includes multiple traditional major sports franchises, Georgia and Georgia Tech, the Atlanta United, two women’s pro volleyball teams and, starting in 2028, an NWSL franchise. In early summer, World Cup signage swallows downtown Mercedes-Benz Stadium, and giant digital displays focus on Team USA soccer and a summer concert series at Phillips Arena starring, among others, Shakira.

But drive 15 minutes east, to the cozy neighborhood of Kirkwood, and Reese looms. “It’s a team game, but there’s a lot that can happen because of one person,” says Chelsea Fishman, taking a break during the ongoing soft opening of her women’s sports-focused bar, Jolene Jolene. “She just brings kind of a spice to things, which is really fun. She’s someone you really love or someone you can’t stand, and I think that’s a lot of power as an athlete. I mean, I’m glad she’s on our team. I’ll say that.”

On the weekend before Memorial Day, Jolene Jolene’s staircase is lined with Dream pennants. For a Friday night game between the Dream and the Dallas Wings, with Reese sharing the same floor as Paige Bueckers and Azzi Fudd, it is standing room only. “Something about star power — it’s a really easy gateway into something you don’t know,” Fishman says. “For the average fan or the non-fan who doesn’t know WNBA, but they’ve heard Angel Reese’s name, it’s kind of like an entryway into the sport.”

Or creative menu items. Three minutes away by foot, Lisa Curtis sits on a barstool and explains a lifetime of events that precipitated the Angel Dream Pie, a dense Detroit-style bomb of double pepperoni, jalapeno, hot honey and mozzarella shaped into a “5.”