The WNBA’s lucrative, long-term media rights are inked. The historic collective bargaining agreement between owners and players is complete. Team valuations are at an all-time high. The league enters its 30th season Friday with more fans than ever and star players who are newly minted millionaires.
To keep up with this growth, front offices around the league have had to rapidly hire new staff, in some cases doubling department head counts in as little as two years. The WNBA’s $75 million capital raise in 2022 helped the league front office roughly double the number of dedicated full-time league staff working on Fifth Avenue in New York, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Interviews with team owners, presidents and other executives at five franchises painted a detailed picture of how working within the WNBA has changed in recent years. Some front offices have evolved from scrappy startups to a polished, “well-oiled machine,” Las Vegas Aces COO/CFO Matthew Delsen told Sportico. Others, like the New York Liberty franchise, say they are still in hiring mode. Among new jobs created this year: vice president of commercial development for Ellie, the team’s popular mascot, with the possibility the Liberty “could seek an understudy for Ellie the Elephant as that part of the business grows,” according to CEO Keia Clarke.
The rate of hiring varied from team to team, but each has seen significant bursts this decade. Both the Aces and the Atlanta Dream underwent franchise sales in 2021, and both teams had just seven full-time staffers at the time. Today, their full-time staff stands at 70 and 65 people, respectively. The Liberty had 12 full-time staffers in 2019, the year that the Tsai family bought the franchise; that more than doubled to 30 by 2021.
Lisa Brummel, co-owner of the Seattle Storm, said the team’s full-time staff has grown approximately 50% over the past four years. Two years ago, the franchise hired two full-time recruiters because “the volume of people who are applying for our jobs is off the charts,” she said.
Altogether, the maturation of WNBA front offices has turned them into a competitive place for career development within the sports industry.
“There was a time and place where you looked at the W as a stepping stone, as in, your foot in the door if you’re trying to get into sports and you’re trying to move over to the NBA as soon as you can,” said the Liberty’s Clarke, who has worked for 19 years within the league. Now, she said, “I have four people on my staff alone who came from the NFL, who literally said, ‘I want to work for the Liberty.’”
Adam Fox, president and chief executive of the Chicago Sky, said “In the beginning, you’d get people applying who’d say, ’man, I just love basketball.’ That wasn’t really a prerequisite for when you join a front office of a sports team.” These days, “it’s people who are focused on, ‘this is the skillset I’m going to bring to the organization.’ It’s very rarely, ‘I love basketball.’”
One factor that differentiates the W from other professional leagues is that it isn’t independent. The league was founded in 1996 by the NBA, which still holds a minority stake of roughly 42%. Today, eight franchises, including the Liberty, share ownership with NBA teams, which means teams may share back-office staffing in departments such as finance, legal and human resources. Other teams with independent ownership, such as the Sky and the Storm, have had larger staffs to begin with, since there was no cross-functionality.
Standardizing staffing levels, particularly in basketball operations roles, was a “point of emphasis” in negotiations in the most recent collective bargaining agreement, according to Elizabeth Williams, an 11-year WNBA veteran entering her third season with the Chicago Sky this year.
“I don’t think you can really compare from my first year in the league in 2015 [to now], the size of the front office staff, and even medical staff, performance staff” on W teams, Williams said.
While WNBA players have now secured significant pay raises through the CBA, team executives said adjusting front office salaries in line with the league’s growth is “a jigsaw puzzle” that’s still being solved, according to Clarke.
“Now we’re moving at rocket speed, and people are expecting larger salaries. It’s happening really quickly, and we’re just trying to keep up,” she added.
Among the pieces the Liberty have to fit in the proverbial puzzle: New York’s expensive cost of living, the competition for other pro sports jobs across the metro area and preventing disparities in pay even within the larger Brooklyn Sports and Entertainment company. “I can’t have [the salary of] a communications person on the Liberty at 30% less than a communications person on the Nets because we’re right here together,” Clarke said.
Morgan Shaw Parker, president and chief operating officer of the Dream, is among the tranche of executives who saw a job at the W as a career opportunity. “I didn’t leave a very good job as the CMO of a prominent NFL team to take a step down,” Shaw said, referring to her decision to leave the Atlanta Falcons for the Dream in 2021.
“The conversation that I had with [owners] Larry [Gottesdiener] and Suzanne [Abair] when I took this job was, ‘we are not going to pay employees subpar,” Parker said. “Something Suzanne said really struck me. She said ‘we don’t bet on women, because when you bet on something you expect to lose your money. But when you invest in something, you expect a return.’”
Other franchises say their investment in young staff before the so-called Caitlin Clark boom has paid off. Delsen, the COO and CFO of the Aces, said the team had a “startup” hiring mentality when he joined in 2021, looking for young and hungry employees who could grow with the franchise. Five years and three championships later, “we’ve really done our best to push our younger staff upward, and it has paid dividends. We have people who were at the manager level who are now at the VP level, we have VPs who are now at the C level,” he said.
When Delsen joined the Aces, “We were always behind in the hiring process,” he said. “We’re no longer at that point.”
