CATHY ENGELBERT: Coming off of that draft, I think Caitlin’s jersey at the time was the most sold jersey of anyone in history on their draft night. This is the moment to make sure that you can sell as many tickets, bring in as many fans, and then keep them. I start out every meeting with my team with: “The bold will win. Everything must change.” Because we can’t think about the WNBA of the past. We have to think about the WNBA of the future.”

BOB SAFIAN: That’s Cathy Engelbert, Commissioner of the WNBA. Women’s basketball is seeing an unprecedented boom thanks to recent college phenoms like Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese. With the start of the WNBA season tipping off a week from today, I wanted to talk to Cathy about how she plans to capitalize on the buzz. If there’s ever been a time for the business of women’s sports to reach a new level of scale, it’s now. The former CEO of consulting firm Deloitte, Cathy shares her expansive strategy for this moment, plus how NIL deals have redefined the financial power of young stars, how she’s dealt with crises like the pandemic bubble and the detainment of Brittany Griner, and more. Let’s dive in. This is Rapid Response.

I’m Bob Safian, and I’m here with WNBA Commissioner, Cathy Engelbert. Cathy, thanks for joining us.

ENGELBERT: Bob, it’s great to be here. 

Capitalizing on the excitement around the WNBA

SAFIAN: So the WNBA is clearly having a moment. We’re a week before the start of the season, lots of excitement and expectations. I saw a report that 2 million people watched a fan’s live stream of a preseason game, which is kind of crazy. How do you think about this moment, and how do you capitalize on it as a league, as a business, as a sport? 

ENGELBERT: I mean, it really is the confluence of a lot of positive elements on both the business and basketball side. Obviously, huge rise of women’s sports, but we’ve been saying that for four years, and we haven’t quite figured out how to capitalize on it. And now with generational talent, with big followings because of social media, increased media coverage, increased asset valuations — whether it’s a patch on the uniform, a placement on the court, an ad buy, a media rights fee, evaluation of our teams. 

And then capital inflows. I think that’s what’s different. We brought in capital in February of ‘22. That’s allowed us to work on expansion, increasingly a global platform, marketing. We expanded by 20 times the number of marketers we have at the league since I joined. And the one thing I know, Bob, is that you need household names, you need games of consequence and you need rivalries because that’s why people watch. And as you think about the NCAA excitement, March Madness, they had all three of those. 

SAFIAN: You look back at the numbers for the WNBA, and there was like a high watermark several years back, and then it kind of receded, your audience numbers. So this moment is as much about the resources that you have around it as it is the talent, or is this really like, this is Caitlin Clark’s moment? And you know, that sort of sparked all this obsession. 

ENGELBERT: Yeah, I think coming off of last year’s NCAA championship where a rivalry was created, right? Angel Reese and Caitlin Clark, LSU and Iowa. And then this year, I mean, the Elite Eight is a rematch of last year’s national championship game with both those players and more. And then, leading into UConn, Iowa, where UConn with Paige Bueckers is a great rivalry building. And then Sunday was undefeated South Carolina and Kamilla Cardoso really emerging as a star, who now went number three in the WNBA draft. So I think it’s all these generational players with big followings, with great stories. And it’s been, as you said, quite a moment, but it is something that we have to capitalize on, bring that fan in, that big sports moment fan, that fan that once we get them in, we know they’re gonna stay because our data shows that the quality of our game is so good. And now all the rookies coming in with this generational class, so it’s great to have so many storylines to tell. Not just one or two. 

SAFIAN: The WNBA draft, which took place in Brooklyn, right near where I live and getting tickets was nearly impossible. It was like the Oscars but with an orange carpet instead of a red one. How do you think about the off-court cultural events as a way to drive attention? What was it like to be at that draft for you? 

ENGELBERT: Well first for me, the room I am doing this podcast in is the room where I did my first draft in my living room with my two kids as my stage hands and to walk out on that stage and to read a pick and have fans cheering was extraordinary. 

And then just the merch sales coming off of that draft. I think Caitlin’s jersey at the time was the most sold jersey of anyone in history on their draft night. And then Caleb Williams outdid that a couple of weeks later in the NFL draft. But look, a rising tide lifts all boats and we’re happy to be leading here.

Building a sustainable business model

SAFIAN: There’s been a lot of discussion from the draft and onward about the vast disparity in pay between NBA. So how do you think about changing the economics of the business so that there’s more parity there? Like, how patient do you, do the players have to be? 

ENGELBERT: Yeah, I think, you know we try to do Business of Basketball sessions with the players every year to talk about how sports works from a revenue perspective and expense perspective. And this is my old life coming into handy. I’m a CPA, licensed in three states. And it’s hard for players and the media and everybody to understand what we’re building here and that we had to raise that capital to deploy it against things like marketing and expanding the league and working with our broadcast partners and globalization and bringing more fans into the funnel and a digital transformation. So it’s hard for them to understand on the face of it why we are where we are, but we’re also only going into our 20th season. You know the men’s sports leagues, three of the big four, over a hundred years old and the NBA obviously in their 77th year so they have a big head start on us. But we’re trying to build something big here.

We’re trying to drive an economic model that’s sustainable and that we’re viewed as a legitimate sports media and entertainment growth property. And ultimately we’re building a revenue model to sustain this league for many years. When I joined the league, I’ve been saying we were like just surviving. And now we went from survive to thrive mode. 

How much does viewership rely on broadcast schedules?

SAFIAN: Some of the complaints about WNBA struggles is in part because of the TV schedule that some people say is the worst TV schedule — the dates and times that other leagues don’t want. How much do you think about that? How much is the sort of plan about improving that? Or do you think that’s just like excuse when people talk about that?

ENGELBERT: No, it’s important. So again, I think in the last few years since I’ve been here, ESPN/Disney has really stepped up giving us better and great windows, giving us more ABC windows because we find when we’re on ABC because we attract a more lifestyle viewer who may not be watching ESPN all day, that we draw much better, and the viewership is much higher. And I think they saw that too, because they put I think for the first time last year and then repeated this year, the women’s final game on ABC on a Sunday afternoon in a decent window at three o’clock Eastern. 

So yeah, we work all the time with our broadcast partners. But still work to do because we compete in an environment in the summer with other sports as well. Right now we’re competing with both NBA and NHL playoffs right now and the start of the MLB season. So you’re always going to be competing with other sports properties. 

But again, when I joined the league, I was told less than 5% of all media coverage of sports covers women’s sports. I mean, if people can’t find you, therefore you’re at a disadvantage. So I think I heard the statistic the other day is 15%. So we’ve been helpful in moving that from 5 to 15, which is a pretty Herculean move, given the denominator of these percentages is so large. 

And, you know, the whole media landscape is being so disrupted. And you think about a digital native fan. I was struck by the fact that I was watching the NCAA on traditional linear. I haven’t cut the cord. And my son was in the other room. And he came in at one point, “Mom, did you just see what Angel Reese did?” And he’s just watching an eight second clip of that. And I’m watching the whole game. So we need to meet our fans and digital and social, and obviously linear and streaming. And we have to be very multidimensional in the way we think about meeting our fan where they are because we want to draw in that younger fan, make sure that they’re seeing our game too and our players.

SAFIAN: As you’re drawing in the lifestyle viewer, it makes me think of the way Taylor Swift has worked for the NFL about drawing in a different kind of fan. Are you looking at Caitlin Clarke as like your Taylor Swift? People are lining up for Fever tickets, whether they’re home or away, moving to new arenas to be able to get more fans in space to go watch her.

ENGELBERT: Yeah, I think that’s an important move by some of our owners to move some of their games to bigger arenas. This is the moment to make sure that you can sell as many tickets, bring in as many fans, and then keep them. And a couple of our teams have already sold out their season ticket holder allotment, and individual tickets are now going on sale, and they’re selling really well.  

And again, we have to think differently. So one of the things I’m proud of our owners thinking differently about how to approach this season. And Dallas just announced, for instance, they’re moving from UT Arlington where they play their games in a few years to downtown Dallas to accommodate more fans. It’ll have more seating capacity. 

And I start out every meeting with my team with, “the bold will win. Everything must change” because we can’t think about the WNBA of the past. We have to think about the WNBA of the future.

SAFIAN: Just as Caitlin Clark has to raise her level of play game after game, especially now that she’s a professional, Cathy has to get the whole WNBA league to keep raising its game. It’s a challenge every business has to embrace, that what got you here won’t get you there.

After the break, Cathy takes us through several crises she’s had to navigate, from Brittany Griner’s arrest in Russia to the pandemic shutdown. Plus, her lessons in making the leap from Deloitte to the WNBA. Stay with us. 

[AD BREAK]

SAFIAN: Before the break, WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert explained how she’s trying to capitalize on a moment of opportunity for the league. Now, she shares lessons on managing crises, from Brittany Griner’s jailing in Russia to pandemic shutdown. Plus the impact of college NIL deals, and the pipeline of opportunities she sees ahead. Let’s jump back in. 

How the WNBA was involved with Brittany Griner’s arrest in Russia

You mentioned that you sat down with players to help them understand the economics of the business. A lot of them had to or chose to play overseas in the offseason to be able to generate incremental revenue. How do you talk to the players about that piece of it? How did the Brittany Griner crisis impact you? Which was because she was playing overseas. Is that something you had to leave to the U.S. government? Or do you get involved in any of that?

ENGELBERT: Oh, we were hugely involved with the State Department, the Special Presidential Envoy of Hostage Affairs. I always tell people when you’re managing in a crisis, the lessons you learn in that you’ll be talking about for a decade and that was the case in the financial crisis when I was at Deloitte. That certainly was the case during the pandemic. And certainly in the Brittany situation, so you just never know where these roles are going to take you and who you’re going to be talking to. 

And we would get off the phone with the State Department, where we had a call once a week. And there’s certainly that narrative out there around why Brittany was there. Now, we’re never going to tell our players what they can do or not do in the offseason. So certainly it’s their prerogative to play and many of our players who may not get a lot of playing time in the W during the season want to and to make a roster the next year and they know they need to improve. 

But for stars like Brittany, it did provide an opportunity for her. I think the tide is changing given NIL and the college ranks and what players are able to do with building a big following and getting corporate partners before they even come into the professional ranks. So that’s changing a little bit, but we’re never gonna tell players they can’t do something in the off season.

We do have the opportunity now and have taken advantage of that to pay players in the off season, marketing dollars from the league. It was collectively bargained back in 2020. We have players like Arike Ogunbowale and Jewell Loyd under those agreements. They’re getting a lot of exposure to our corporate partners. You see them in commercial ad spots, whether it’s for AT&T or State Farm. So really excited about what’s happening with our players getting a lot more endorsements. 

Can college athletes make as much money via sponsorship as professionals?

SAFIAN: The new NIL rules, the name, image and likeness rules, means that some college athletes can make as much as professionals, or even more given that the size of the TV audience and live fans for the games are so enormous. Do you have to think about that differently? Like you’re competing with it? Or there may be players who are sort of earning less when they’re becoming professionals than when they played in college? Or is that not necessarily happening?

ENGELBERT: Yeah, that’s not happening because nobody ever looks at just a base salary in a proxy of a CEO. You look at base plus bonus plus stock compensation plus other. And the endorsements, all NIL is in the pros of endorsements. And Aliyah Boston has said this, I think Caitlin and Angel and Cameron Brink, who were big NIL wage earners, are seeing more opportunities when they come into the professional ranks. Because again, they have a more national and global footprint than they even had before. And without playing professionally, they don’t carry those into their professional. 

So I know you probably know that Caitlin just signed the reported deal with Nike. She already had State Farm, which was signed last year during her last year at Iowa. And I always wondered why our players didn’t have a lot of endorsements when I first joined the league, and I think the marketing angle of a WNBA player is very powerful, especially if 80% of every household consumer purchasing decision in the United States is made or influenced by a woman, why wouldn’t you want an endorsement with a woman and a professional athlete who is a great role model for both boys and girls? I mean, watching the NBA and NHL playoffs, you look at the ad buys by these brands, a lot of WNBA players are showing up.

Transitioning from Deloitte to the WNBA

SAFIAN: You took on the WNBA commissioner role coming over from Deloitte. That transition I imagine was fun, exciting, complicated. How has the journey been? What you expected? How did you go about making that transition? 

ENGELBERT: Yeah, it’s a really interesting question. And I’ve been very reflective of what I walked into, where we are today. Going from running a firm of a hundred thousand people where I had all the resources I could ever want in capital — human and financial. Coming into a league of 144 with very little human capital and financial capital was a little bit of a shock to the system.

However, I will say, sports is big business. Big business is about relationships. So the business side of this, building a business, a revenue model, a sustainable economic model, is not that different. The difference is the stakeholder groups are different. There’s a players association and then we have owners now 13 with Golden State, media, fans, officials. So the stakeholder groups are very, very different. But the business side is not that different. 

So, it is different though, again, hitting the pandemic right after I started. Then George Floyd, a racial crisis in this country. Then we got thrown in the middle of a political battle in Georgia with one of our owners. Then Brittany Griner. And now it’s like, now it’s basketball. It’s basketball. It’s the players’ personalities. It’s the storytelling. And I’m thrilled with where we’ve come from.

Lessons from leading during times of crisis

SAFIAN: When you go through that list of crises over the last few years, like, are there things that you learned that were different than what you had learned in your time running Deloitte? Or are you applying the things that you learned at Deloitte?

ENGELBERT: Yeah, really good add there, Bob. Because I think one of the main things is in a crisis, all your weaknesses get amplified. But it’s also a time to fix them, because everybody else typically is dealing with their version of whatever crisis is. 

But you definitely learn things. You learn that it might be a time to invest. It might be a time to do things that are counterintuitive. And I was so blessed to have a 33 year career at Deloitte and learn how to scenario plan. 

I’ll never forget when the pandemic hit, my team’s like, “well, we can’t have a season”. I go, “Oh, no. We’re going to put five different scenarios together. We’re going to present it to the players, the owners”. Obviously, it was existential for us to have a season that year because we don’t have a season and we’re out of the sports landscape for 20 months? We may not be, I may not be the commissioner right now. We may not be around at all. And there’s nowhere for Caitlin and Angel and Cameron and Rickea to play. 

So yeah, in the middle of those crises, you draw on everything you ever learned. I always said those first couple months right after the NBA shut the sports world down, I never worked so hard in my life. I was working so hard. You know, you pull all nighters when you do an IPO or some kind of big transaction with your clients when you’re at Deloitte. Yeah, this was like that, but for two straight months. 

And I’m not a hugely emotional person, but pretty emotional about what’s going on in women’s basketball today as a result of now giving these players a professional sports platform here in the U.S. And look, it comes with great responsibility to be the longest tenured women’s professional sports league in the United States, the WNBA, double any other, entering our 28th season. So yeah, I didn’t really process it at the time, but yeah, that was pretty big.

On the verge of “the golden age of the WNBA”

SAFIAN: And when you talk about existential threats, it almost sounds like you’re a start-up, even though you’re around for 28 years. And I know that that was a pandemic moment. But in general, do you think about the business of the WNBA being like on that cusp that you always have to think about survival that you can’t necessarily take anything for granted?

ENGELBERT: Oh, I still do. My team knows I’m never satisfied, you know, we’ll have a great financial year, great business and basketball year. But I’m like, “Oh, no, let’s keep going. Let’s stretch. Let’s make sure we’re not resting on anything”.

Because when I joined women’s sports, someone said to me, “Cathy, this is like pushing a big boulder up the hill. And you’re going to inch and inch and inch. And you’re going to feel like you never get it to the top of the hill.” Well, we’re pushing it to the top of the hill and hopefully we’re going to experience, I think over the next decade, a kind of the golden age of the WNBA.

And by the way, it’s not just Caitlin and Angel in this class. Think about next year we have Paige in her class, then Kiki Rice of UCLA in her class, and then Juju Watkins and Hannah Hidalgo and whoever else emerges over the next three years who were freshmen this year, breaking records at their respective universities. 

So I am so blessed to be in women’s basketball to see this pipeline because I do see the next decade being a total moment for this league to continue that momentum and to continue to bring in more fans both here in the U.S. And we have a lot of low hanging fruit globally too. Especially for young girls to see role models like WNBA players playing professionally is a really important thing because we know the one thing I know that, I played two sports in college, lacrosse, I was recruited for lacrosse, I was a walk on for basketball, that, you know, girls who play sports end up being leaders.

I think there’s a stat out there that 90% of the Fortune 500 female CEOs played organized sports, at least through high school. it builds your agility, it builds your ability to team, it builds leadership skills, and mostly because now I see this 38 years into my career, it builds confidence in young women to again compete in an otherwise very male dominated world.

SAFIAN: Well Cathy, this has been so great. Thank you so much for doing this.

ENGELBERT: Thank you, Bob. Tip offs coming up — May 14th!

SAFIAN: I’m really rooting for the WNBA. It’s amazing how far the league has come, but also how fragile it still is. Every business, every brand, can struggle with making the most of an opportunity, and can find themselves reliant on a handful of key talent. But those moments of lift-off are also often the most exciting. I’m sure going to watch a lot more WNBA this year. We’ll see what happens! I’m Bob Safian, thanks for listening.