A week of wind can do a number on an oyster farm.

Sue Wicks found that out when she finally got back onto East Moriches Bay and saw cages tipped sideways, drifting loose — like the water had spent a week beating up her farm. There's no grounds crew for that sort of thing. So she got in her boat and started putting everything back where it belonged herself.

That's what retirement looks like for one of the women who helped build the WNBA.

Wicks Started Over At 50

Before Wicks became an oyster farmer, she was one of the best basketball players in the world.

She’s still Rutgers’ all-time leading scorer across both the men’s and women’s programs with 2,655 points — a record that hasn’t budged in decades. After college, she played overseas for nearly a decade, then came home and became the first player ever drafted by the New York Liberty in 1997. She helped push them to four WNBA Finals, which ended up being a lot of deep playoff heartbreak and almost-there moments.

She was an All-Star, a fan favorite, and eventually a Women’s Basketball Hall of Famer. And then, like it does for everyone, basketball ended — and she still had to figure out what came next.

So she tried a little of everything. Commentary. College coaching. A fitness startup that made sense on paper. Nothing really stuck the way she needed it to. Eventually, she found her way back to the water — which, in hindsight, probably shouldn’t have been surprising.

Wicks grew up in Center Moriches digging for clams with her siblings and her father. Her family has been working those waters for generations, long before she ever picked up a basketball.

At 50, she decided to start over again — for real this time.

It took two years and approvals from at least nine different agencies just to open Violet Cove Oyster Co. She learned currents, tides, salinity, wind patterns — all the stuff that comes with running the place successfully.

And then came the part no one can really prepare you for: actually farming. The cages need constant checking, cleaning, resetting. Storms don’t care what your schedule looks like. Oysters take their time, and if a season goes bad, you don’t just swap in a new batch and move on.

Really, it’s one thing after another with a new challenge popping up weekly... It’s just a natural rhythm that takes a long time to learn. It’s very similar to being a basketball player. You can be a superstar, but it’s going to take 10 or 15 years to get to that point as a veteran where you know not everything, but you know a lot.

The Second Career Wasn’t Optional

Wicks has been pretty open about the financial struggles after her playing days — she never made enough from basketball to stop thinking about money. When the WNBA launched in 1997, the average salary was around $28,000. Even the top players were making about $50,000. Nobody was building a nest egg. They were just trying to make sure the league stuck around long enough to cut the next check.

There was no grand plan for me to ever work on the water.

And that wasn’t just her story. A lot of players from that era had to figure out what came next in a very real, very practical way. Marissa Coleman went into restaurant ownership and fantasy sports. Devereaux Peters moved into affordable housing development. Some went into coaching or broadcasting if they were lucky. But for most of them, “retirement” didn’t really mean stopping work — it just meant starting over somewhere else.

Wicks ended up in oyster farming because she genuinely loved the water. But like a lot of people, the need for a paycheck had a way of narrowing the options.

Now, the league is finally changing what that looks like. Under the WNBA’s new collective bargaining agreement, the average salary is around $583,000 in 2026, with top contracts reaching $1.4 million. There are also recognition payments for retired players — the ones who helped build something that didn’t pay them much at the time.

Wicks’ life on the farm is still something she clearly enjoys. She’s even expanded into sugar kelp.

But it also sits there as a quiet reminder of what the first generation gave up. They built the WNBA from the ground up without ever getting the kind of financial freedom professional athletes should.

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