WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert has come under significant backlash for the way she has handled some of the league’s most controversial issues over the past few months. Perhaps the biggest of them all was the incident involving Alyssa Thomas’s fist-to-the-throat foul on Caitlin Clark. That started as an on-court foul but quickly escalated far beyond basketball. It became a catalyst for online abuse and threats directed at Thomas, to the point where she publicly called out Engelbert for failing to respond to the situation in a timely manner.
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A number of other controversial issues have also surfaced across the WNBA in recent weeks. And the prevailing perception has been that Cathy Engelbert’s leadership has not handled many of them with the efficiency or urgency the moments demanded. It was these issues that the WNBPA, alongside Engelbert, addressed during a recent meeting. And amid everything discussed, one particular moment stood out to WNBA reporter Annie Costabile, the fact that Engelbert acknowledged where she had gone wrong.
“And then the other noteworthy aspect of this meeting,” Costabile said on Thursday’s episode of the No Offseason podcast. “Cathy did acknowledge her maybe missteps in terms of communication. I don’t want to say that she said sorry. But she definitely acknowledged her own missteps in terms of communication with players, and proactivity when it comes to her communication with players.”
According to Costabile, the meeting took place virtually and lasted approximately 90 minutes. In attendance alongside Cathy Engelbert were the WNBPA Executive Committee, the league’s Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion, JEDI Committee, and the head of league security. It was, by any measure, a significant gathering of the league’s important stakeholders.
Beyond Cathy Engelbert‘s acknowledgement of her own shortcomings, the meeting also covered a range of other pressing issues. There were discussions around better protecting players and expanding security resources available to them. The group also touched on the need for closer coordination with law enforcement and social media companies, a step that would directly address the kind of targeted threats and racial abuse directed at players like Chelsea Gray and Natasha Howard in recent weeks. According to Costabile, conversations also centred on strengthening and improving the existing measures already in place to respond to such situations more effectively.
This meeting, and the issues addressed within it, goes a meaningful way toward restoring some level of calm to a league that has experienced a deeply turbulent stretch. And with Cathy Engelbert openly owning her communication failures, it has also done something to ease the intense pressure that has been building around her position in recent weeks.
Hopefully, this meeting yields the positive impact it was intended to produce. That is translating into concrete, actionable steps toward addressing the excesses that have either gone unaddressed or have not been tackled quickly enough. The conversations were the right ones to have. Now comes the harder part, following through.