INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — Chicago Sky co-owner Nadia Rawlinson knew security concerns were serious.
The Sky have physical security nearly 24 hours a day — around hotels, outside gyms, by buses and planes — but one of the final frontiers of player safety was the internet.
Earlier this month, the Sky teamed up with Moonshot Technologies to protect their players from threats and hate on social media, the first relationship of its kind in the WNBA.
“People think as athletes, we should take what comes our way,” Sky guard Ariel Atkins said. “We are human and some comments that people make are inhumane. It’s phenomenal of our organization to take care of us.”
Moonshot’s technology was created for use in counterterrorism; it's used by the U.S. government.
“It’s a great thing to implement right now,” said Sky All-Star Angel Reese, who has one of the most popular social media platforms among WNBA players. “It’s really important to be able to have that (protection), especially as a woman."
Moonshot monitors more than 25 social media and internet platforms, including those on which players do not have personal accounts. The technology shrinks the millions of posts it looks at every day into thousands of posts that contain direct threats to the athletes.
From there, Moonshot’s team of human threat assessors, from clinical psychologists to social workers, takes over. They look through the flagged posts and report them, if necessary — whether that’s to the social media platforms themselves for removal or, in more serious and imminent cases, directly to law enforcement.
They target actionable threats to the athletes, like the release of their personal information or possible stalkers.
It’s that human involvement that Moonshot co-founder and CEO Vidhya Ramalingam said is necessary to its success.
“This is not a problem that can just be solved by technology alone,” she said. “It’s fundamentally a human problem, and this is a human partnership.”
Rawlinson, who said her own experiences as a woman of color have informed her understanding of the issue, knew it was something she wanted to focus on.
“With the rise in women’s sports, the rise in attention, the greater fandom, the greater investment, all of it is historic,” Rawlinson said. “But there’s a dark side to that. At some point, you just want to play the game, so the goal is to remove some of the noise that happens off the court.”
After reading about Moonshot in a tech publication a few weeks ago, Rawlinson reached out to Ramalingam about a partnership.
It was a quick connection.
“It was really clear there was a values alignment,” Ramalingam said. “Some of that stems from some of our shared experiences as women of color in spaces where so often our voices are underrepresented, and the desire to actually do something about it and not just sit there.
“For far too long, I saw women like me, people of color, be overrepresented as targets and underrepresented in the solution,” she said.
AP WNBA: https://apnews.com/hub/wnba-basketball
Chicago Sky's Angel Reese poses on the orange carpet for WNBA All Star basketball events, Thursday, July 17, 2025, in Indianapolis. (AP Photo/Darron Cummings)
Glenn Hall, a Hockey Hall of Famer whose ironman streak of 502 starts as a goaltender remains an NHL record, has died. He was 94.
Nicknamed “Mr. Goalie,” Hall worked to stop pucks at a time when players at his position were bare-faced, before masks of any kind became commonplace. He did it as well as just about anyone of his generation, which stretched from the days of the Original Six into the expansion era.
A spokesperson for the Chicago Blackhawks confirmed the team received word of Hall’s death from his family. A league historian in touch with Hall’s son, Pat, said Hall died at a hospital in Stony Plain, Alberta, on Wednesday.
A pioneer of the butterfly style of goaltending of dropping to his knees, Hall backstopped Chicago to the Stanley Cup in 1961. He won the Conn Smythe Trophy as most valuable player of the playoffs in 1968 with St. Louis when the Blues reached the final before losing to Montreal. He was the second of just six Conn Smythe winners from a team that did not hoist the Cup.
His run of more than 500 games in net is one of the most untouchable records in sports, given how the position has changed in the decades since. Second in history is Alec Connell with 257 from 1924-30.
“Glenn was sturdy, dependable and a spectacular talent in net,” Commissioner Gary Bettman said. “That record, set from 1955-56 to 1962-63, still stands, probably always will, and is almost unfathomable — especially when you consider he did it all without a mask.”
Counting the postseason, Hall started 552 games in a row.
Hall won the Calder Trophy as rookie of the year in 1956 when playing for the Detroit Red Wings. After two seasons, he was sent to the Black Hawks along with legendary forward Ted Lindsay.
Hall earned two of his three Vezina Trophy honors as the league's top goalie with Chicago, in 1963 and '67. The Blues took him in the expansion draft when the NHL doubled from six teams to 12, and he helped them reach the final in each of their first three years of existence, while winning the Vezina again at age 37.
Hall was in net when Boston's Bobby Orr scored in overtime to win the Cup for the Bruins in 1970, a goal that's among the most famous in hockey history because of the flying through the air celebration that followed. He played one more season with St. Louis before retiring in 1971.
“His influence extended far beyond the crease," Blues chairman Tom Stillman said. “From the very beginning, he brought credibility, excellence, and heart to a new team and a new NHL market.”
A native of Humboldt, Saskatchewan, Hall was a seven-time first-team NHL All-Star who had 407 wins and 84 shutouts in 906 regular-season games. He was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1975, and his No. 1 was retired by Chicago in 1988.
Hall was chosen as one of the top 100 players in the league's first 100 years.
Blackhawks chairman and CEO Danny Wirtz called Hall an innovator and “one of the greatest and most influential goaltenders in the history of our sport and a cornerstone of our franchise.”
“We are grateful for his extraordinary contributions to hockey and to our club, and we will honor his memory today and always,” Wirtz said.
The Blackhawks paid tribute to Hall and former coach and general manager Bob Pulford with a moment of silence before Wednesday night’s game against St. Louis. Pulford died Monday.
A Hall highlight video was shown on the center-ice videoboard. The lights were turned off for the moment of silence, except for a spotlight on the No. 1 banner for Hall that hangs in the rafters at the United Center.
Fellow Hall of Famer Martin Brodeur, the league's leader in wins with 691 and games played with 1,266, posted a photo of the last time he saw Hall along with a remembrance of him.
“Glenn Hall was a legend, and I was a big fan of his,” Brodeur said on social media. “He set the standard for every goaltender who followed. His toughness and consistency defined what it meant to play.”
AP Sports Writer Jay Cohen in Chicago contributed to this report.
AP NHL: https://apnews.com/hub/nhl
FILE - Glenn Hall, second from left, stands with fellow former Chicago Blackhawks players Stan Mikita, former general manager Tommy Ivan, Bobby Hull, Bill Wirtz and Tony Esposito during a pre-game ceremony at the Chicago Stadium in Chicago, Ill., April 14, 1994. (AP Photo/Fred Jewell, File)
FILE - St. Louis Blues goalie Glenn Hall, top right, is pinned to his net waiting to make a save on a Montreal Canadians shot as Blues' Noel Picard (4) tries to block the puck while Canadiens' John Ferguson (22) and Ralph Backstorm wait for a rebound in the third period of their NHL hockey Stanley Cup game, May 5, 1968. (AP Photo/Fred Waters, File)
