The WNBA’s Problem Is a Crisis of Leadership
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By: Daniel Johnson
As the Women’s National Basketball Association marks its 30th, and arguably best season to date, the league’s labor union delivered a landmark collective bargaining agreement in women’s sports. The transformative CBA had the effect of allowing the league’s athletic workers to continue the player-centric momentum which was started in earnest in July 2023, when two of the union’s senior leaders, Minnesota Lynx forward Napheesa Collier and New York Liberty forward Breanna Stewart founded Unrivaled, a three on three offseason basketball league. that exposed players who competed to a pay scale that doubled their WNBA salaries at the time and a range of benefits that included child-care, a beauty salon, and other amenities that their respective WNBA teams.
For months, the proposals from the WNBPA, the union representing the players, and the counter-proposals from ownership and the WNBA were litigated in public, on podcasts, and on social media. With negotiations threatening to delay the start of a season the league had just expanded, there existed real pressure to get a deal done. In the end, as with any argument between workers and ownership, a middle ground of sorts was reached. Players won significant gains in pay, ownership secured concessions of its own, and a transformative CBA was ratified just ahead of the start of the WNBA season. Everybody wins, right?
Well, not actually.
Not long after the league ratified its CBA, a group of conservative lawmakers sent a letter to the WNBA, demanding that it address “repeated acts of unnecessary physical hostility and violence” against Indiana Fever guard Caitlin Clark, whom they called the face of the league. The WNBA and Cathy Englebert, its Commissioner, have largely embraced that framing. In 2024, Englebert had to walk back comments she made that seemed to imply that racist attacks from fans were an acceptable cost of increased attention and revenue. Players condemned the remarks, and WNBPA executive director, Terri Jackson, demanded that the league confront the racism, misogyny, and harassment its players were facing.
Jackson was explicit. “This kind of toxic fandom should never be tolerated or left unchecked. It demands immediate action, and frankly, should have been addressed long ago.” But, the abuse continued.
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After a 2024 playoff game, Connecticut Sun forward Alyssa Thomas spoke directly to reporters about the racial abuse she faced as a Black player from Fever fans. Thomas became a target this season after she committed a hard foul on Clark. Fever coach Stephanie White condemned the abuse but stopped short of holding the team’s fans to account, blaming online agitators instead.
Perhaps, as a direct result of the league’s eagerness to hitch its wagon to the explosion of fans that arrived alongside Clark, there have been several instances of workplace harassment that have come up, often at the expense of the league’s Black, queer women who make up a majority of its workforce. In the league’s pursuit of the audience, money and attention surrounding Clark, its leadership has been far less willing to reckon with what some of that attention has brought with it.
That conflict has widened through Clark’s teammate, Sophie Cunningham who publicly opposed trans women playing in the WNBA and said she wanted to protect women from “biological men”. There are currently no trans players in the league. Cunningham’s comments drew protests and counter protests to Fever games, making games that have historically been a welcoming place for queer fans a new site for the same anti-trans politics playing out across the country.
The WNBA has now backed itself into a corner. The league wanted the explosion of attention surrounding Clark, and it certainly wanted the money that came with it. But, that attention has also brought people who see the league’s Black and queer players as targets, and league leadership has seemed far less interested in confronting them than it has been in keeping that new audience engaged.
Englebert and the league office have largely been silent, leaving players to respond to abuse and harassment themselves. Players have had to make their own statements and defend one another while the league struggles to say clearly what it will tolerate from the audience it has worked so hard to cultivate. The players keep demonstrating a capacity for collective leadership that league leadership lacks.
The players have been here before. In 2020, after Atlanta Dream co-owner and Georgia Senator Kelly Loeffler vehemently opposed the league’s decision to honor Breonna Taylor and other victims of police violence, Dream players banded together against her. Their activism helped cost Loeffler her Senate seat, and she later sold her stake in the Dream.
That history and the CBA fight exist on the same continuum. Players have had to fight ownership for better pay, fight an owner who turned against the league’s politics, and defend Black and queer players from abuse the league has been unwilling to confront with appropriate force. The WNBA is all too happy to market its players’ politics, its diversity and its growth when beneficial but has been far less willing to accept the obligations that come with protecting any of them.
The league wanted growth, and it got it. More viewers, more money, more relevance. But, growth without political courage has a cost, and the league keeps passing that cost down to the players. WNBA players have shown, over and over, that they know how to organize and protect each other. They should not also have to protect themselves from conditions the league is helping create. Now, as the league is set to enter its post-Englebert era at the end of the year, it has a choice to pick a commissioner that will have the latitude to correct this set of problems.
The league and its players deserve a responsive, proactive leader who doesn’t only care about the bottom line but also about protecting the players from undue abuse. For the game’s sake, let’s hope the WNBA Board of Governors and NBA Commissioner Adam Silver gets this one right. The players deserve it. The fans deserve it. The game deserves it.
Daniel Johnson is a freelance writer based in East Texas. His work can be found in Essence, Teen Vogue, Scalawag, Level, Black Youth Project, Black Enterprise, Texas Observer, and Prism.