In my time at The News-Letter, I have mostly covered soccer and motorsports, as well as Hopkins athletics. However, every day, there are several incredible stories around the world in competitive sports that simply do not get enough attention. For this edition of the paper, I decided to cover some of this past week’s biggest stories in leagues not usually covered by the sports section.
The first edition of the Surf Abu Dhabi Pro Event kicks off
The World Surfing League’s (WSL) 2025 Women’s and Men’s Championship Tours (CT) began this past month with the traditional Lexus Pipe Pro in Oahu, Hawaii, where North Shore local Barron Mamiya defended his title against Italy’s Leonardo Fioravanti in a controversial final at Pipeline, while the women’s event saw Tyler Wright upset reigning CT champion Caitlin Simmers to become the first woman in the Tour’s history to win two titles at the Banzai pipeline.
Continuing the tour, the athletes then left Hawaii and headed to an all-together new challenge: the Surf Abu Dhabi Pro, a new addition to the Championship Tour’s schedule, where the athletes competed in a 500-meter, 80 million-gallon wave pool. Interestingly enough, this event is the second-ever CT stop in a wave pool, the first being Kelly Slater’s Lemoore Surf Ranch.
And it’s safe to say, the inaugural Surf Abu Dhabi Pro did not disappoint. The women’s event saw Simmers dramatically claw back to the top spot in the ranking with a tightly contested win against Australia’s Molly Picklum, who kept the world champion on her feet throughout Sunday’s event, but lost out to Simmers due to a 0.4 point margin. This result has heightened expectations about the women’s CT title race, as it looks to be increasingly contested.
Additionally, the men’s event brought us an exciting match-up: on one side, a CT and Olympic champion Ítalo Ferreira, and on the other, Rio Waida, a talented surfer who became the first ever Indonesian athlete to qualify for the CT. Seeking his first victory on the tour, Waida had a strong performance throughout the tournament, culminating in a 14.50 final score. However, he fell short of victory due to a masterclass by Ferreira, as the Brazilian scored 8.67 and 8.6 waves, wrapping up the event with an impressive 17.27 and taking the top spot in the CT men’s rankings.
India’s Women Premier League (WPL) Achieves Massive Success
One of the most prominent stories of the past few years in competitive sport has been the wage disparity between male and female athletes in the same sport. In soccer, for example, a stark comparison shows that in 2024, the highest paid male player in La Liga (Robert Lewandoski) earned close to $35 million dollars a year, whereas the highest paid female player in Liga F (Aitana Bonmati) made around $1.05 million dollars. Although recent initiatives such as the U.S. national team’s equal pay deal have been highly publicized for making important progress in this subject, one of the most successful stories of gender parity in sports is the groundbreaking success achieved by the Women’s Premier League for cricket in India.
Established in 2023, the WPL has received an incredible combination of investment and widespread support amongst Indian society. The League is composed of five teams: the Royal Challengers Bengaluru, the Gujarat Giants, the Delhi Capitals, the Mumbai Indians and the UP Warriorz. Despite its young history, the league has attracted lucrative television contracts, as Viacom 18 paid over $116 million to guarantee media rights to the games for five years.
Additionally, players’ salaries have kept up with this rise in popularity, with the top players in the league on salaries of around $400,000. Considering that the highest salary in the Indian Premier League is around $2.92 million — while still unequal — club cricket in India is much closer to closing the salary parity between men and women than other sports around the world.
2025 NBA All-Star Weekend Comes to the Bay Area
One of basketball’s most awaited events arrived in style in the San Francisco Bay Area, as the stars of the National Basketball Association (NBA) flocked to California for a weekend of showing the beauty of the game. The tournament was composed of four teams: Shaq’s OGs, Chuck’s Global Stars, Kenny’s Young Stars and Candace’s Rising Stars. This weekend’s game was the first in a new format; instead of playing 4 quarters of 12 minutes as they do during the season, whichever team got to forty points first won the match. Moreover, the organizers also added the existence of two semi-final games, which then lead into a final game between two winners.
Although there were mixed opinions on this change, the event did render a variety of impressive plays and moments for basketball fans. In the first game, Shaq’s OGs, lead by Warriors frontman Stephen Curry, defeated Candace’s Rising Stars in a close contest that finished 42-35. Milwaukee Bucks point guard Damien Lillard was the highest-scoring player in this game, with nine points overall. In the other semi-final match, Chuck’s Global Stars defeated Kenny’s Young Stars 41-32, as Shai Gilgeous-Alexander contributed an impressive twelve points. The final game, a contest between Shaq’s OGs and Chuck’s Global Stars, saw the weekend off with a 41-25 victory for Curry’s team.
Juju Watkins shines as the University of Southern California (USC) beats the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
Things took an interesting turn on the West Coast as one of college basketball’s most famous rivalries played out in front of a sold-out crowd at Galen Stadium. The No. 6 USC Trojans forced the visiting UCLA Bruins to their first defeat of the season in an animated 71-60 match, ending their unbeaten 23-0 run. Undisputedly, the star of the game was sophomore guard Juju Watkins, who scored an incredible 38 points and made an outstanding eight blocks. Watkins also picked up her 15th career double-double, as teammate Kiki Iriafen — ranked the best power forward in the nation by the 2024 Katrina McClain Award — also contributed 13 points to the effort.
This game was a fantastic display of the excellence of the NCAA Division I Women’s Basketball series, which has a wide variety of exciting match-ups in the weeks ahead. On Thursday, Feb. 20 at 7 p.m., UCLA will take on the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a game that has the opportunity to shake up the order of the Big Ten conference. Another anticipated clash will occur as No. 2 Notre Dame University clashes with No. 10 North Carolina State University on Feb. 23.
