New Zealand’s women’s basketball league has landed the biggest name in its short history. The Tokomanawa Queens have signed American guard Hailey Van Lith, an Olympic bronze medallist and a first-round WNBA draft pick, for the Tauihi Basketball Aotearoa season that tips off on Friday.
Van Lith is 24 and one of the most recognisable faces in women’s basketball anywhere. She spent five college seasons at Louisville, LSU and TCU, reached a Final Four with Louisville in 2022, and finished her college career by winning Big 12 Player of the Year and Newcomer of the Year in the same season, the first player to take both awards at once. She won bronze with the United States in the 3×3 tournament at the Paris Olympics in 2024, scoring the game-high six points in the medal match against Canada after the American side had opened pool play with three straight losses.
The Queens announced the signing on their Instagram account, describing Van Lith as a “relentless playmaker” who brings an “elite bucket-getting mentality to the Tokomanawa Queens backcourt”, as reported by RNZ. The club also pointed to her “lethal mid-range jumper, explosive rim pressure, and suffocating on-ball defense”, according to Yahoo Sports.
The deal came together through a New Zealander. Van Lith has spent this WNBA season at the Connecticut Sun alongside Charlisse Leger-Walker, the Kiwi guard who signed with the Queens at the end of August and who is bringing her own rookie year to a close in the United States. Leger-Walker was taken 18th overall in the 2026 WNBA draft, making her the first New Zealander ever drafted into the league and only the second to play in it, after Megan Compain turned out for the Utah Starzz in 1997.
Leger-Walker told Sport Nation Mornings on 3 September that her own move home began as a throwaway line with her older sister Krystal, who was already committed to playing in Tauihi. “It started as a joke and then it got really serious real quick,” she said. The two sisters will play together for the Queens, and now they arrive with a WNBA teammate in tow.
Basketball New Zealand chief executive Belinda Edwards said when Leger-Walker signed on 31 August that the return of a player of that profile mattered for the whole competition. “Having Charlisse playing in Tauihi is hugely exciting for the competition and for basketball fans around New Zealand,” Edwards said. “She has competed at the highest levels of the game, and now our fans will have the opportunity to watch her here at home.” She was speaking in a Basketball New Zealand statement. Edwards added that the signing spoke to “a competition where elite New Zealand players can compete at a high level against stars from around the world, connect with fans and inspire the next generation of girls coming through the game”.
The same logic applies to Van Lith, with one difference. She is not coming home. She is choosing New Zealand as an off-season destination at a point in her career when most WNBA players on the fringe of a roster head to Europe, Turkey or Australia for better money and longer contracts. That she has picked a five-team league in its fifth season, in a country of five million people, is the part the Tauihi organisers will be quietly delighted about.
Her professional start has been rocky, which is part of why the signing was possible. Van Lith went 11th overall to the Chicago Sky in the 2025 draft, played 29 games as a rookie, missed the last seven of them with an ankle injury and had surgery in October. This year she was waived by Chicago in early May, claimed by Connecticut days later, waived again at the end of the month and then re-signed on a developmental contract. Yahoo Sports reports she has appeared in 20 games for the Sun this season, averaging 5.3 points and 1.9 assists in just over 15 minutes a game. Connecticut’s last game of the regular season is on 24 September against the Minnesota Lynx, which lines up almost exactly with the start of the New Zealand season.
Tauihi has been trying to build this kind of pull since Basketball New Zealand launched it in 2022 as the country’s premier women’s competition. The league runs five teams, the Northern Group Tauranga Whai, the BNZ Northern Kāhu, the ProBuild Mainland Pouākai, the Southern Hoiho and the ANZCO Foods Tokomanawa Queens, across 30 games and 10 rounds. The Whai are the defending champions and open their title defence against the Kāhu in Tauranga on Friday 25 September. Semi-finals are set down for 5 and 6 December with the grand final on 13 December.
The Queens, who are based in Porirua and play out of Te Rauparaha Arena, won the inaugural title in 2022 and have not won it since, finishing runners-up in 2023 and 2024 and third last year. Their season starts on Sunday 27 September at home against the Kāhu. Van Lith and Charlisse Leger-Walker are unlikely to be available for that opening night given the WNBA calendar, so the club’s new-look roster will take a little while to assemble.
For a league that plays in modest arenas and gets a fraction of the television attention the men’s game receives, the value of a signing like this is measured partly in ticket sales and partly in eyeballs. Van Lith has 1.3 million followers on Instagram, a reach no player in the New Zealand league has come close to. Whether that converts into people through the doors at Te Rauparaha Arena on a Sunday afternoon in October is the question the league now gets to answer.
What do you make of Tauihi landing a WNBA first-round pick, and will you be watching this season? Leave a comment below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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