For WNBA commissioner, growing league is team effort
Amid a sports landscape that generally tends to neglect female athletes, WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert is leading a full-court press to bring more attention to her league.
“Less than 1% of all corporate sponsorship dollars go to women's sports,” Engelbert told a luncheon at the National Press Club on Tuesday. “And less than 4% of all media coverage covers women's sports.”
Engelbert, the first woman CEO of Deloitte, cited those statistics as one of the most shocking discoveries she made after stepping into her current role last year.
“I didn't know that when I came in,” Engelbert said. “I came from a world where we only had 5% women CEOs in the Fortune 500, so that was surprising to me.”
To counteract these numbers, Engelbert touted a holistic approach to raising the WNBA’s profile, one that includes better marketing, providing more merchandise and ultimately expanding to a younger fan base.
“I have people come up to me who have daughters who say ‘I want the first professional basketball game my daughter goes to be the WNBA and not the NBA,’” Engelbert said. “‘Because I want her to see the role models of the WNBA players.’”
While she acknowledged that she’s facing an uphill battle, she’s nevertheless undaunted.
Her optimism is fueled by the support she’s received from the league’s players, owners, and advocates, including late NBA icon Kobe Bryant, who mentored the league’s players and was seen wearing a WNBA hoodie in one of the final photographs before his death this January.
Societal trends, Engelbert acknowledged, are also boosting her mission.
“[The league is] taking advantage of this momentum around a women's empowerment movement that we all feel every day,” she explained. “We see more people stepping up and asking ‘how can we help?’”
Engelbert’s taken solace in the fact that while the league is in its 24th year, it’s expanding at a more rapid pace than the NBA in its early days.
While the NBA rose to prominence based on high-profile rivalries between players like Magic Johnson and Larry Byrd, plus the star power of Chicago Bulls legend Michael Jordan, Engelbert believes that the WNBA could soon be on the cusp of a similar moment.
Monumental Sports & Entertainment CEO Ted Leonsis, who joined Engelbert at the Club’s dais, echoed Engelbert’s concern, adding that failing to elevate women’s sports runs the risk of excluding new audiences.
“For us not to be supporting, in the same way, women's sports as we do men's sports is bad business,” he noted. “It's not just the wrong thing to do as a, as a dad or a leader. It makes no economic sense.”
Leonsis’ company owns several of D.C.’s top sports franchises, including the Washington Mystics, 2019's WNBA Champions.
Beyond growing the franchise, Engelbert emphasized that a core goal of her tenure is ensuring that women players are treated with the same respect as their male counterparts.
This has taken the shape of a successful collective bargaining rights agreement that secured higher pay, maternity leave and upgraded travel.
It’s also, she said, reflected in how the WNBA assesses their players.
“Whenever someone's valuing a WNBA asset, guess what? It gets put into a spreadsheet or an algorithm that values a man's asset,” Engelbert pointed out. “So my new quote is ‘no spreadsheet’s every yielded a good answer to the WNBA — or for women for that matter.”
During Engelbert’s appearance, the WNBA Championship Trophy was placed prominently behind her. Toward the end of Tuesday’s event, Club President Michael Freedman asked Engelbert what the league’s top prize meant to her.
“To me," she replied. "It’s the trophy that’s won by the greatest female athletes in the world."