Micky Lawler, a Longtime Tennis Executive, Turns to Basketball

Micky Lawler knows a thing or two about starting over.

As a child, Lawler, whose father was an executive with a Dutch electronics company, lived in seven countries: the Netherlands, where she was born, Colombia, Argentina, Bolivia, Kenya, France and Belgium.

But the move that impacted Lawler the most came when she was 24 and returning to the Netherlands after finishing graduate school in Delaware.

“As the plane pushed back, I could see my friends, who had come to the airport to say goodbye, standing by the gate, and I realized that I would miss them much more than they would miss me,” Lawler, now 63, wrote in an email last month. “For me, this departure entailed closing a very important chapter and leaving behind everyone I held so dear.”

Lawler felt the same chapter-closing emotions when her position as president of the Women’s Tennis Association was eliminated last December, months after the WTA announced its partnership with the venture capital firm CVC Capital Partners. That ended a 38-year career in tennis, during which Lawler was instrumental in overseeing the growth of tournaments, sponsorship, marketing and broadcast deals for the largest women’s sports entity.

But Lawler has already moved on. In June, she was named commissioner of Unrivaled, a new women’s basketball league to debut next January.

Unrivaled is designed to be a complement, not a competitor, to the W.N.B.A. It was founded by, among others, Breanna Stewart, the New York Liberty forward, and her United States Olympic teammate Napheesa Collier, a forward with the Minnesota Lynx. The league features three-on-three play on a court that is about 70-feet long, two-thirds the size of a traditional basketball court. Each hourlong game consists of four seven-minute quarters designed to attract the devotion of younger, goldfish-attention-span fans. Media rights deals are still being worked out.