What must Cathy Engelbert do to better serve the WNBA and it’s players?
Yahoo Sports' Caroline Fenton and women's basketball writer Cassandra Negley are joined by Courtney Cox, sports scholar and author of Double Crossover: Gender, Media and Politics in Global Basketball, who gives her insight on how WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert could better handle issues within the league. Catch the full conversation on the "Hoops 360" podcast, and subscribe on Apple podcasts , Spotify , YouTube, or wherever you listen.
Video Transcript
You mentioned Cathy earlier, Cathy Engelbert, WNBA commissioner.
We have been critical of her on this show, and I think it's fair to be critical of a commissioner.
I don't think there's a single commissioner in sports that's 100% popular.
They all get booed.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But also, Cathy Engelbert was the commissioner that oversaw the most lucrative CBA in the history of the WNBA.
So I think there's a lot of good that you can say about Cathy.
There's a lot of criticism that we can give to Cathy Engelbert.
What does she need to do better at to better serve the WNBA and to better serve its players?
Cathy is important for a lot of reasons.
Before we had presidents of the WNBA, we had the commissioner was the commissioner of the NBA and WNBA.
So Cathy's important for a lot of different reasons historically just thinking about this move.
What that move looks like in practice is still a little bit, vague to me, in terms of where that shift in power happens in, in the day to day, right?
How, how is it different than Adam Silver being considered the commissioner of both leagues?
For Cathy, she has a really difficult job.
This is, this is my Cathy, apologist moment of, like, there's a really interesting way that you have to navigate a league that is so fractured in terms of ownership, whether, teams are independently owned or they're owned with an NBA team.
I don't envy that job at all because the ways that there's different-- And especially in this moment of expansion, there's a lot that is being juggled.
With all of this growth, all this visibility, what do you do with it?
I think that one of the big things Cathy has to decide is a policy thing.
These aren't like, "I'm gonna handle a crisis," or, "I'm gonna handle a headline."
How are we gonna move as a league when this happens?
So I think Cathy has to decide what happens when, athletes are threatened, what happens when athletes are harmed, what is-- what are we gonna do as a league?
How will we hold people accountable?
I'll talk-- the other side of this is we've also had very lenient kind of penalties when things like domestic violence happen.
How are we gonna have a really strong policy and understanding of that?
What happens when there's a discrimination when someone's pregnant and they are cut from a team?
So I think policy, having a strong semblance of policy that's not based on the whims of how people react on the internet, but saying, "This is what we do as a league, and this is how we move forward."
