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[URL]https://www.wsj.com/news/types/weekend-confidential?mod[/URL]=bigtop-breadcrumb]WEEKEND CONFIDENTIAL[/url]How Cathy Engelbert Steered the WNBA Through the PandemicIn her first full season as commissioner, she faced social upheaval and Covid-19—and made use of a ‘Wubble’ By Emily Bobrow / Wall Street Journal
March 12, 2021
Last March, Cathy Engelbert saw that her first full season as commissioner of the Women’s National Basketball Association wouldn’t go as planned. The pandemic promised to upend the league’s draft and game schedule, but missing a season threatened to alienate sponsors and fans. “It would’ve been existential to be out of the sports landscape for 20 months,” she says
.Ms. Engelbert says that her 33 years at Deloitte LLP, including a four-year term as CEO, helped prepare her for such uncertainty. Having worked at the accounting firm during the savings-and-loan crisis of the 1980s and ’90s, the dot-com bubble and the 2008-09 financial meltdown, she honed a knack for meeting unknowns with scenario plans. As the pandemic began, she mapped several ways forward and settled on putting all the players and staffers in a “bubble” at the IMG Academy sports complex in Bradenton, Fla., where the games would be played without fans
.“I said, ‘Follow the science,’” Ms. Engelbert, 56, says over the phone from her home in Berkeley Heights, N.J. For nearly 100 days, more than 300 people, including coaches and referees, submitted to strict protocols on testing, tracing and isolating in what was affectionately known as the “Wubble.” This allowed the 12-team league to play a truncated season of 22 games without incident.‘My next career could be in infectious disease.’“My next career could be in infectious disease because I learned so much about how the virus presents itself,” Ms. Engelbert says.
Players could have young children with them, and some had partners, but most of the athletes quarantined with their teams on their own. The sacrifice paid off. The WNBA’s average regular-season ratings across all networks were up 68% from 2019, and merchandise sales were up 50%. Though the league hopes to have teams play in their arenas for its 25th season this summer, Ms. Engelbert doesn’t rule out the possibility of another Wubble. “It was hard,” she says.
“But it was worth it.”This is an unexpected second act for Ms. Engelbert, who began leading the WNBA in July 2019 after her term as Deloitte’s CEO ended. The job suited her love of the sport—she captained both the basketball and lacrosse teams at Lehigh University—and her desire to invest in the next generation of female leaders.
Ms. Engelbert is the fifth boss of the WNBA but the first to be called commissioner. The title change came from Adam Silver, the head of the National Basketball Association (which partly owns the WNBA), whom Ms. Engelbert commends for ensuring that the women’s league is recognized as a professional sports organization. “It’s a seat at the table that you don’t get with other titles,” she says.She brings to the job a keen sense of the professional challenges that women face.
As a senior manager at Deloitte, where she began working after graduating from college in 1986, she admits that she “almost gave it all up” when she became pregnant with her first child in 1997. “I thought there is no way I can do this all,” she recalls. She stuck around after two male supervisors praised her potential and convinced her that the juggling act was possible; she had a second child a few years later. ‘There was a cultural shift at the time that made a big impact on me.’
In the early 1990s, the company’s CEO, J. Michael Cook, launched an initiative for the “retention and advancement” of women in the hopes of raising Deloitte’s share of female partners above 5%. “There was a cultural shift at the time that made a big impact on me,” she says. The firm began offering 16-week paid family leave while she was CEO.
Within her first week as commissioner, Ms. Engelbert met with the players’ union to discuss protections and rights. The league’s relatively low pay encourages around half of the players to seek work in China, Russia, Turkey and elsewhere in the offseason. Breanna Stewart, a Seattle Storm forward who won her second WNBA Finals MVP award in 2020, sat out the 2019 season after she tore a tendon while playing in Hungary.
“If you’re going to support working women, you’ve got to have benefits like what I was fortunate to have at Deloitte,” she says. The league went into its 2020 season with an eight-year deal that boosted the average league salary to nearly $130,000 (pushing it above six figures for the first time) and tripled the compensation for top players. The contract includes fully paid parental leave, more child-care support and a 50-50 revenue-sharing model based on revenue growth.
Veteran players who may have delayed childbearing can also get up to $60,000 for costs related to adoption, surrogacy, egg freezing or fertility treatment.Ms. Engelbert is now working on a revenue model that will pay for these costly benefits. She says that the investments will pay off. “If you want to solve your sales and marketing issues, if you want to build household names, you need the players motivated to help you market the league,” she says.
Another key ingredient in earning the players’ support last summer was the decision to dedicate the 2020 season to an array of social-justice issues, particularly criminal-justice reform. In a historically outspoken league in which nearly [URL]https://43530132-36e9-4f52-811a-182c7a91933b.filesusr.com/ugd/138a69_639f0723482e432d8e2dcd6829d9244c.pdf[/URL]]eight of 10 players[/url] are people of color, many in the WNBA thought the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others demanded special attention. “The emotions were so raw,” says Ms. Engelbert. “It became bigger than basketball.”
Players who were fined for their political protests a few years ago were suddenly staging walkouts and playing on courts emblazoned with the words “Black Lives Matter.” After a white police officer shot a Black man named Jacob Blake seven times in the back in August in Kenosha, Wis., the entire league came together for a candlelight vigil. “I couldn’t be prouder of how they showed up,” says Ms. Engelbert.
In conversation, she is quick to deflect praise and promote others—a leadership style that she says she cultivated on courts and fields. As a point guard in basketball, she wasn’t a high scorer, but she ran the offense and reveled in assists. Great leaders “understand how to surround themselves with great people,” she says.
March 12, 2021
Last March, Cathy Engelbert saw that her first full season as commissioner of the Women’s National Basketball Association wouldn’t go as planned. The pandemic promised to upend the league’s draft and game schedule, but missing a season threatened to alienate sponsors and fans. “It would’ve been existential to be out of the sports landscape for 20 months,” she says
.Ms. Engelbert says that her 33 years at Deloitte LLP, including a four-year term as CEO, helped prepare her for such uncertainty. Having worked at the accounting firm during the savings-and-loan crisis of the 1980s and ’90s, the dot-com bubble and the 2008-09 financial meltdown, she honed a knack for meeting unknowns with scenario plans. As the pandemic began, she mapped several ways forward and settled on putting all the players and staffers in a “bubble” at the IMG Academy sports complex in Bradenton, Fla., where the games would be played without fans
.“I said, ‘Follow the science,’” Ms. Engelbert, 56, says over the phone from her home in Berkeley Heights, N.J. For nearly 100 days, more than 300 people, including coaches and referees, submitted to strict protocols on testing, tracing and isolating in what was affectionately known as the “Wubble.” This allowed the 12-team league to play a truncated season of 22 games without incident.‘My next career could be in infectious disease.’“My next career could be in infectious disease because I learned so much about how the virus presents itself,” Ms. Engelbert says.
Players could have young children with them, and some had partners, but most of the athletes quarantined with their teams on their own. The sacrifice paid off. The WNBA’s average regular-season ratings across all networks were up 68% from 2019, and merchandise sales were up 50%. Though the league hopes to have teams play in their arenas for its 25th season this summer, Ms. Engelbert doesn’t rule out the possibility of another Wubble. “It was hard,” she says.
“But it was worth it.”This is an unexpected second act for Ms. Engelbert, who began leading the WNBA in July 2019 after her term as Deloitte’s CEO ended. The job suited her love of the sport—she captained both the basketball and lacrosse teams at Lehigh University—and her desire to invest in the next generation of female leaders.
Ms. Engelbert is the fifth boss of the WNBA but the first to be called commissioner. The title change came from Adam Silver, the head of the National Basketball Association (which partly owns the WNBA), whom Ms. Engelbert commends for ensuring that the women’s league is recognized as a professional sports organization. “It’s a seat at the table that you don’t get with other titles,” she says.She brings to the job a keen sense of the professional challenges that women face.
As a senior manager at Deloitte, where she began working after graduating from college in 1986, she admits that she “almost gave it all up” when she became pregnant with her first child in 1997. “I thought there is no way I can do this all,” she recalls. She stuck around after two male supervisors praised her potential and convinced her that the juggling act was possible; she had a second child a few years later. ‘There was a cultural shift at the time that made a big impact on me.’
In the early 1990s, the company’s CEO, J. Michael Cook, launched an initiative for the “retention and advancement” of women in the hopes of raising Deloitte’s share of female partners above 5%. “There was a cultural shift at the time that made a big impact on me,” she says. The firm began offering 16-week paid family leave while she was CEO.
Within her first week as commissioner, Ms. Engelbert met with the players’ union to discuss protections and rights. The league’s relatively low pay encourages around half of the players to seek work in China, Russia, Turkey and elsewhere in the offseason. Breanna Stewart, a Seattle Storm forward who won her second WNBA Finals MVP award in 2020, sat out the 2019 season after she tore a tendon while playing in Hungary.
“If you’re going to support working women, you’ve got to have benefits like what I was fortunate to have at Deloitte,” she says. The league went into its 2020 season with an eight-year deal that boosted the average league salary to nearly $130,000 (pushing it above six figures for the first time) and tripled the compensation for top players. The contract includes fully paid parental leave, more child-care support and a 50-50 revenue-sharing model based on revenue growth.
Veteran players who may have delayed childbearing can also get up to $60,000 for costs related to adoption, surrogacy, egg freezing or fertility treatment.Ms. Engelbert is now working on a revenue model that will pay for these costly benefits. She says that the investments will pay off. “If you want to solve your sales and marketing issues, if you want to build household names, you need the players motivated to help you market the league,” she says.
Another key ingredient in earning the players’ support last summer was the decision to dedicate the 2020 season to an array of social-justice issues, particularly criminal-justice reform. In a historically outspoken league in which nearly [URL]https://43530132-36e9-4f52-811a-182c7a91933b.filesusr.com/ugd/138a69_639f0723482e432d8e2dcd6829d9244c.pdf[/URL]]eight of 10 players[/url] are people of color, many in the WNBA thought the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others demanded special attention. “The emotions were so raw,” says Ms. Engelbert. “It became bigger than basketball.”
Players who were fined for their political protests a few years ago were suddenly staging walkouts and playing on courts emblazoned with the words “Black Lives Matter.” After a white police officer shot a Black man named Jacob Blake seven times in the back in August in Kenosha, Wis., the entire league came together for a candlelight vigil. “I couldn’t be prouder of how they showed up,” says Ms. Engelbert.
In conversation, she is quick to deflect praise and promote others—a leadership style that she says she cultivated on courts and fields. As a point guard in basketball, she wasn’t a high scorer, but she ran the offense and reveled in assists. Great leaders “understand how to surround themselves with great people,” she says.
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