When Coyotes captain Shane Doan speaks of his sister, Leighann, it is always with reverence.

"The best athlete I've ever seen," he said. If she were male, "everybody in the world would know about her."

Leighann is the top women's basketball player in France.

We rarely hear such deference directed at female players in this country. When it comes to the WNBA, we've been unable to overcome a psychological chasm.

The announcement Monday that two of the Valley's most respected business leaders, Anne Mariucci and Kathy Munro, have acquired 25 percent ownership of the Phoenix Mercury is the equivalent of a winning half-court shot for the team and anyone with an interest in the health of women's athletics.

"Groundbreaking," team Chairman Jerry Colangelo said.

The appeal of sports has always been the physical warfare and the certainty that the strongest and fastest will win. The natural mental leap, then, is a comparison of men's and women's basketball.

The WNBA is doomed unless we shake that tendency.

Mariucci, former president of Del Webb Corporation, and Munro, former CEO of Bank of America-Southwest Region, will help do that.

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"It's a different product (from the NBA), but it's a good product," Munro said.

The pair believe in the product and the importance of its growth. These aren't two marketing whizzes brought in to con us. They're fans and season ticket holders who think the game resembles "the Red Auerbach days, when it was underneath the rim and had a kind of artistry," Mariucci said.

Just maybe, if the above-the-rim game of the NBA has made you Shaq-tose intolerant, the WNBA could be an option. No one says you can't like both.

Here's the thing: If two people with the impeccable reputations of Mariucci and Munro think the league is cool, others will, too.

This isn't just about expanding the Mercury's fan base. It's about helping the league survive. If you're female, or happen to know one, that's important.

It's important that 10-year-old girls know they can appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated without showing skin.

It's important that women have the opportunity to play basketball beyond college.

It's important to give the WNBA time to grow. The league has averaged more than 9,000 fans per game since its inception eight years ago. It took the NBA 28 years to eclipse a fan base of 9,000 per game.

Mariucci and Munro are coming aboard at an ideal time.

It's personal for these two. Mariucci's high school in Nebraska didn't offer girls basketball, so she worked the practices of the boys team - picking up towels, running errands - to earn the right to scrimmage with them for 30 minutes afterward. She went on to play golf, on scholarship, and basketball at Arizona.

Munro grew up in Alabama and attended Auburn. She's now an endurance athlete who recently took a trip with elite cyclists on the Tour de France course.

They're sports fans who happen to be really successful businesswomen.

That's great news for the Mercury.

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