Why should we believe what Cathy Engelbert says when it comes to charter flights and the WNBA?
Charter flights have long been a problem for the WNBA. Specifically, the lack of them and why teams aren’t allowed to use them on a regular basis, like just about every other professional sports league in the U.S.
And that history is part of the reason why the WNBA doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt now, as the league says it will start regularly using charter flights “as soon as [it] can.”
Players repeatedly have shared stories about the inconveniences of flying commercial — from not having enough space in seats as players fold themselves in half to being harassed in airports or being stranded for hours due to flight delays. In 2018, a game between the Las Vegas Aces and Washington Mystics was canceled because of travel woes.
This is something that simply does not happen in the 21st century in the NFL, MLB, NHL or NBA. Most Power Five women’s college basketball programs charter flights for games that are out of their state. When most players leave college for the WNBA, travel often becomes more complicated.
Charter flights became more of a public headache for the WNBA two years ago. Casual fans and folks in the mainstream media took notice in March 2022, when Howard Megdal reported a story for Sports Illustrated about the New York Liberty’s owners providing charters for the team for the second half of the 2021 season. Seen as a competitive advantage for the Liberty, the franchise was fined a league-record $500,000. The WNBA even threatened to take draft picks from the Liberty and terminate the franchise. Seriously.
This tug-of-war between owners who are forward-thinking and willing to spend and those of the old guard became even more complicated during the 2023 playoffs, when it appeared that the league’s promise at the 2023 draft of “charter flights for all postseason games” didn’t totally hold true. Also, during the 2023 season, All-Star Phoenix Mercury center Brittney Griner was harassed at the Dallas Fort Worth International Airport just months after being freed from unlawful detainment in a Russian prison.
Last week, talk of charter flights bubbled up again when the Indiana Fever and stars Caitlin Clark and Aliyah Boston arrived in Dallas and were met with paparazzi-like attention as people followed them through the airport — by baggage claim and all — snapping photos and taking videos.
This long preamble — a necessary one to understand the excruciating recent history of the saga surrounding charter flights in the 28-year-old women’s professional basketball league — sets up what happened Tuesday, when WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert blurted out to a room of sports editors in New York that charter flights are coming to the WNBA “as soon as we can get the planes in place.”
Sure. Great. Awesome. In my best Anakin-Skywalker-goes-pod-racing voice, “Yippee!”
But what does that mean? The regular season starts in literally one week. What’s the plan?
(A brief aside here: The WNBA continues to have a problem with disseminating meaningful information, from timing to forum to who that news is dispensed through. Why was an announcement like this made at an Associated Press Sports Editors meeting a week before the season starts? Why wasn’t a press release ready to go? Why wasn’t a formal press conference scheduled? Why wasn’t this made into an event? The way it all unfolded reeked of unpreparedness, which is, unfortunately, something people who cover the WNBA can say about it far too often.)
About two hours after folks started tweeting about Engelbert claims, the Associated Press published a story that offered some details but left a lot of questions unanswered too.
Let’s break it down.
“We intend to fund a full-time charter for this season,” Engelbert said Tuesday in a meeting with sports editors.
OK. How?
She said the league will launch the program “as soon as we can get planes in places.”
Sure. How long does it take to do that?
Engelbert said the program will cost the league around $25 million per year for the next two seasons.
Alrighty. Who is paying for that? Furthermore, if it’s only $25 million per year — which equates to a bit more $2 million for each owner — why has this taken so long? For most professional sports owners, that’s pocket change.
USA TODAY had more. Here’s Engelbert again:
“We’re going to as soon as we can get it up and running. Maybe it’s a couple weeks, maybe it’s a month … We are really excited for the prospects here.”
A couple weeks? A month? Which is it? What are we doing here?
Charter flights coming to the WNBA is, of course, great news and long overdue, but fans and folks following the league shouldn’t be so quick to celebrate something that seemingly has no implementation plan.
In its history, the WNBA has rarely done the right thing at the right time when it comes to players’ travel. We shouldn’t be giving Engelbert and the league the benefit of the doubt that Clark, A’ja Wilson and Breanna Stewart will be flying charter regularly within the next month. Simply put, Engelbert and the league have not earned that. Everything the WNBA says around charter flights should be treated with a grain of salt until players are traveling that way on a regular basis.
I’ll believe it when I see it.
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