WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert instructed CNBC on Friday she sees this 12 months's coronavirus shortened season as crucial for the league and fe
WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert instructed CNBC on Friday she sees this 12 months’s coronavirus shortened season as crucial for the league and feminine skilled athletes in all places.
“This might transfer the numerator for ladies’s sports activities,” she instructed “Squawk Field,” someday earlier than Saturday’s season opening video games. “It is existential for us to have a season, economically.”
With many sports activities leagues being curtailed for coronavirus security causes and tv networks ravenous for reside sports activities, about half of the WNBA’s video games can be televised this 12 months, in keeping with The New York Instances. That is a change from earlier years when males’s sports activities took precedence.
Engelbert, former CEO of Deloitte and a standout Lehigh College basketball and lacrosse participant, stated she hopes the Girls’s Nationwide Basketball Affiliation can capitalize on the chance for added TV protection.
“A part of this was to get extra publicity for these elite ladies athletes,” she stated. “Lower than 5% of all sports activities coated is ladies’s sports activities.”
WNBA motion begins Saturday, with three video games, tipping off a shortened season of 22 common video games, with playoffs.
Given the dangers related to taking part in basketball throughout a pandemic, the 12 groups and their help workers members are quarantining on the IMG Academy sports activities complicated in Bradenton, Florida, the place all video games can be performed with no followers. Placing gamers and staffers in a “bubble” is a technique additionally adopted by the lads’s Nationwide Basketball Affiliation and Main League Soccer in Orlando, and the Nationwide Girls’s Soccer League in Utah.
“There’s been lots of state of affairs planning, so lots of my enterprise expertise is coming in helpful,” Engelbert stated, noting that for the reason that preliminary quarantine at the start of July no WNBA participant has examined constructive for the coronavirus.
“We have been lucky, as a result of we all know this virus is difficult,” she stated. “We began with particular person quarantining, as gamers got here into Florida. We then went to only workforce actions 4 days later.”
“It has been a herculean effort, and a giant sacrifice from the gamers and the coaches,” she added. “Thus far, so good, however I do not need to jinx it.”
Engelbert, who additionally a board member on the nonprofit Partnership for New York Metropolis advocacy group, stated that classes discovered in WNBA “bubble” might be expanded to different places of work, as corporations navigate a return to work.
“I do assume there are classes right here to study, however they are not totally different from the general public service bulletins of carrying masks, and washing arms,” Engelbert stated.
“I notice not everybody can do the testing we’re doing right here,” she continued. “However one factor I’ve discovered over the three weeks right here is, in the event you comply with the science, it really works.”