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WNBA Exhibits Growth, Diversity in Its Silver Anniversary Season Behind Commissioner Cathy Engelbert

Under Commissioner Cathy Engelbert's leadership, the WNBA has more than doubled visits to its website, set a record for video views and seen its merchandise rise by 50 percent.Ethan Miller/Getty Images; Norm Hall/Getty Images

Cathy Engelbert became WNBA commissioner on July 17, 2019. Four days later, she boarded a plane for the league’s All-Star Game—and her first collective bargaining negotiation. That CBA, agreed to Jan. 2020, included markedly higher salaries for players as well as many other benefits the players had been seeking.

Two months later, the global pandemic struck, throwing the 2020’s May-to-October season into tumult. The WNBA completed an abbreviated 22-game season in the “Wubble” at IMG Academy in Bradenton, Fla., all while its players took the lead on social justice issues following the death of George Floyd. 

The current 2021 season, meanwhile, is in the midst of its playoff semifinals following the successful return to home arenas and an in-season tournament broadcast by Amazon Prime Video -- the Commissioner’s Cup. The WNBA announced partnerships with tech titans Amazon and Google nine days apart back in May, as well as an expanded innovation deal with AT&T later in the summer. As of June, 99% of its players were fully vaccinated against COVID-19.

Engelbert doesn’t know what a so-called “normal” season might be like, But the former Deloitte chief executive—the first female CEO of a “Big Four” accounting firm—has been a remarkable steward of the “W’’ in her first two-plus years.

“I always had a philosophy when I was at Deloitte: ‘If you use your voice on every issue, you lose your voice,’” she said in the opening keynote of Wednesday’s Sports Capital Symposium. “So you have to find the issues and topics that are really important to your workforce and to your talent. You have to show them that you're an authentic leader.”

At Deloitte, Engelbert emphasized a people-first agenda to foster a diverse and productive workforce that spanned five generational demographics, from Baby Boomers to Gen Z. The business side of sports, she said, is very similar to other industries and “big business is about relationships.” Engelbert began her WNBA tenure with a stated player-first agenda. She intentionally took small, but symbolic, early steps to build trust with the league constituents, such as chartering a coast-to-coast flight during a playoff round with little time between games.

“All of that was about investing in something that originally you would say, ‘Well, that costs too much or we can't do that,’ ” Engelbert said. “But when you're trying to build trust and you're trying to grow a league—and that's what we're trying to do and transform a league—you need that trust in that player-first agenda first, and then you can get the harder things done.”

Engelbert says she tried to build culture around six inclusive behaviors or leadership traits: courage, cognizance of bias, curiosity, cultural intelligence, collaboration and commitment. Deloitte had an apprenticeship employment model with on-the-job training to make sure that everyone was put into a position to succeed, a trend she wants to perpetuate at the WNBA.

Cathy Engelbert wants to be a player's commissioner.

“A lot of my career, I got put in positions where the firm did a good job of preparing me for that -- years and years before I eventually became the CEO,” Engelbert said. “And I think that's what an apprenticeship model does. We need to think more about how you instill that into the culture, how you manage it, because we know you manage what you measure.”

Hand in hand with that is a regular dialogue with the WNBA franchises about diversity, equity and inclusion, especially with hiring practices—whether that’s coaches and general managers or ticket sellers and business executives.

 It’s important that the league is “building pipelines of diverse candidates, so that you can feed that into the next generation of leaders,” Engelbert said, adding: “The data for diverse workforces is unmistakable around growth and innovation and collaboration. The more diverse viewpoints that you have in a room representing your broader workforce, the better a company performs.”

As the WNBA grows—and this is its 25th Silver Anniversary season—the league is establishing its place in the sports ecosystem. The recent Fan Project, led by the Sports Innovation Lab, concluded that women’s sports were suffering from underinvestment and undervaluation compared to their true worth. 

Engelbert said she’s been told that women’s sports receive less than 1 percent of the industry’s corporate sponsorships and less than 5 percent of the media coverage. “So as a good former CPA and business leader, I said, ‘Well, tell me, what's the denominator?’” she said.

 That denominator is huge because men’s sports are so well funded and covered, so moving a few percentage points can represent significant growth. By following a strategy of digital transformation, the WNBA has more than doubled the visits to its website, set a record for video views, seen its merchandise sales grow by 50 percent and even had its signature orange hoodie crack the top-10 sales of the NBA store. 

“Ultimately, the ecosystem is broken,” Engelbert said. “The valuation model for women's franchises, media rates, fees, patch on the uniform, placement on the court—it’s all broken because it's based on decades-old metrics that are driven by spreadsheets that never yield a favorable answer for women, and I know this from being in spreadsheets my whole life.

“And so we're trying to disrupt it.”



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