What Cathy Engelbert’s successor owes WNBA players

A photo remains in the memory of a time we would like to forget. During the pandemic-ridden summer of 2020, women locked arms and stood in matching black shirts, all carrying the same demand in white letters: “Arrest the cops who killed Breonna Taylor.” In the most powerful demonstration of a brief period of widespread activism in all of sports, these WNBA players took command with more boldness and clarity than anyone else.

The commissar did not inspire them to gather. They did not ask the league to approve their dissent. The players gathered inside a bubble in Bradenton, Florida — cut off from their families and their cities, but not from empathy — and decided what the moment required of them.

Gloria Steinem, feminist icon and self-proclaimed “social change entrepreneur,” died last week at 92. She spent a lifetime mapping out the destination the WNBA arrived at six years ago. “Power can be taken, but not given,” Steinem once said. “The process of taking it is just empowering.”

During the bubble season, players took their final steps in that power. They have long known who they are and what they stand for. That summer they made it impossible for the rest of the country to pretend not to notice.

Cathy Engelbert, who became the first WNBA commissioner in 2019, inherited the league as this enlightenment came. She entered a dressing room that was already self-actualized, no longer needing a leader to build its identity. It needed one with presence match that. Seven years later, as he prepares to leave his job in a few monthsher record reveals a commissioner who made a lasting impact by building the business around these women and a reserved spokeswoman who was often absent when the business needed her to stand beside them.

Despite all the drama and complaints about her management style, Engelbert did not let the players down. However, she never caught up with them. It is an unfortunate part of a mandate full of expansion, billions in media rights and two transformational collective agreements. And that reality is something her successor has to reckon with as soon as he gets hired. The priority of the new commissioner will manage the business and earn the respect of a workforce that now fully understands its power and expects a leader who can meet it where it rose.

The league is not just about its balance sheet. This is especially true for this one. Consider what the WNBA has accomplished in 30 seasons: sustainable, growing business with nine-figure franchise valuations in a country with a long and ugly history of disparaging women’s sports. The existence of the WNBA, or the NWSL, or any other such professional league, is not neutral. It never was. It never will be. The bubble reinforced that thought. For one season, before recovery and routine returned, the players stripped away all pretense and showed their heart and willpower. They did it as a plea to society. But as is often the case when a larger movement collides with a sport, an athlete’s participation in the larger movement inspires those same players to advocate for change within their own walls.

Resistance to authority and calls for improvement were inevitable, whether the issue was trial or travel and security. Even the most skilled leader would be challenged to manage a group that has finally realized the power of its voice. Engelbert’s shortcomings were as much relational as they were structural.

Then there was a twist. As America emerged from the pandemic, tolerance for unfiltered moral clarity cooled, outside and inside the league. The unique spirit hasn’t gone away, but the WNBA hasn’t seen that demeanor as something to cash in on. The players’ identities and ethical resolve continued to fuel incremental growth, and then along came Caitlin Clark’s rocket ship. Television viewership has increased. Arenas sold out. A wave of new fans discovered the league overnight.

But such growth, without a common purpose, only created a larger room full of strangers. Many of the longtime fans, who formed the cultural foundation of the WNBA, have seen themselves reflected in a league that is overwhelmingly black, openly queer and unapologetically political. Fans who rode the Clark Express came with a different motive: to watch one of the greatest college players they’ve ever seen take on the professional game.

For a third-year player in a small and extremely competitive sport, Clark has been phenomenal, but this is not a league that anyone can take over right away. For those who never truly respected the WNBA, this created tension. And there’s another disheartening reality: Some have chosen to use Clark, a white Iowa player, as a spearhead in a regressive culture war that has little to do with basketball and everything to do with what its success might symbolize for racist, homophobic and other divisions.

Caitlin Clark throws the ball to Aaliyah Edwards during the Indiana Fever’s game against the Connecticut Sun on Aug. 28 in Indianapolis. (Jeffrey Brown / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

Clark and the rest of the players did not make this fracture, even during their most contested, physical moments. Their competitiveness has been swallowed up by the reactions of two audiences with incompatible expectations, and some of that nonsense persists because no one at the top judged the discourse.

The inability to do so cost Engelbert her last years. Fans injected racist abuse into the Clark-Angel Reese rivalry, and Engelbert’s response was such that the players’ union had to step into the messaging vacuum. Players have revealed their concerns over harassment and death threats have reached traumatizing levels.

After ESPN profiled Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham and included her stance against transgender participation in women’s sports, bad actors turned a non-issue into the biggest story in the league. While it’s understandable that Engelbert and the league office were initially caught off guard since the WNBA has never had a transgender player, it’s also damning that they’re still tiptoeing around their message six weeks later.

But the goal here is not to fully account for Engelbert’s missteps. The biggest conclusion is that the job description has stopped matching the actual mission. The WNBA still needed a builder when Engelbert was hired in 2019. It was a big deal that, after hiring five presidents, the new leader was given the title of commissioner. At the time, NBA commissioner Adam Silver stated that the change was intended to signal that the WNBA was on equal footing with the other major professional leagues. But in practice, the autonomy isn’t quite at that level, not with Engelbert still reporting to Silver.

As long as the “W” comes with “NBA” as a command, the league will be grouped differently. It is a complicated financial operation. It is a support system, but also an anchor for those who dream of true independence. The league that Engelbert will soon leave behind in 2026 needs a translator, a bridge builder and a shield.

It takes someone with the gravitas to hold a fractured fan base under one roof without pretending the fracture isn’t political. That need someone close enough players that Minnesota All-Star forward Napheesa Collier doesn’t feel the need to draft another scathing indictment. It takes someone tough enough to step up to the silver lining when necessary and requires him to convince his NBA owners to provide the resources to bolster the league’s reputation. (The first tough conversation: the significant investment that will be required to truly fix the substandard officiating system.) It takes someone confident enough to represent ownership without neglecting the people who make the product a worthwhile investment.

What does the next commissioner owe these empowered players? The same thing that players keep showing: dimensions. Perhaps more than any other sport, in the WNBA, the whole person matters now. Back in Bradenton six years ago, the players realized this as they built the entire season around social justice. They found each other. They became the most complete, self-contained generation of hoopers this league has ever produced. The descendants of the seekers who had built this thing from nothing until then were taller than they could even imagine.

The players are not the problem that the next commissioner has to solve. They are the answer, and the league front office has to come up with an equation that equals their size. This is not a burden. It is a legacy that requires mental and social agility to unlock its full value.