'Something powerful': Toronto Tempo, president Teresa Resch go with flow as brand is unveiled

From the unveiling of the Toronto Tempo first thing on Thursday morning to her interview with CBC Sports in the early afternoon, media appearances for Teresa Resch were nonstop.

Yet through it all, Resch was still bursting with excitement at the introduction of the Tempo as the city's incoming WNBA team. The franchise will play its first game in May 2026.

"I don't mind repeating myself about a brand new team name and identity and colours and logos. You can talk about it over and over all day, every day. I hope actually that people talk about this over and over for years to come," Resch said.

Stationed at Makeway, a women's sneaker store in Toronto, Resch wore a team-branded letterman jacket and held court with multiple outlets Thursday after the WNBA team unveiled its nickname and logos earlier in the day.

But the long-awaited release wasn't supposed to happen this way — not exactly.

WATCH | Resch discusses how Toronto chose Tempo nickname:

The team was planning to publicly divulge its identity on Jan. 14. When Tempo was leaked as the nickname on a drop-down menu on the league's website late Tuesday night, everything changed.

Still, what may have felt hasty from the outside was anything but for Resch and her team.

In fact, the flexibility encapsulates the name Tempo itself.

Indeed, basketball is a game of reflex and reaction.

"It's sports — nothing ever goes as planned, right? So you just go with the flow and everything happens for a reason. So we had a plan to launch and we're really excited to press go. And we feel like we've been well-received," Resch said.

Anecdotally, reaction to the nickname Tempo has seemed mixed — which cannot have been a surprise to team brass, considering recent receptions to the PWHL teams, and the WNBA's Golden State Valkyries, and the NWSL's BOS Nation FC.

"If they can get half the audience to love it right away, that would be a landslide victory. But eventually people will like the name or the colours or they won't," John Lashway, a communications executive who helped launch the Raptors, told CBC Sports in November.

The WNBA Toronto team was open about its branding process throughout, with regular social-media updates on names — like the Towers, Traffic and 6ixers — which had been eliminated and a team-produced podcast going behind the scenes through the journey.