Fireside Chat with WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert

Welcome to our junior NBA conference. Thanks to our friends at Under Armour. We are really delighted to have so many of you here with us. I would like to, you know, kick this day off with, you know, someone who is the perfect person to have our fireside chat with. As the first ever commissioner of the WNBA, Kathy Engelbert is charged with bolstering visibility for the sport of women's basketball, empowering WNBA players and enhancing fan engagement. In her time as commissioner, Kathy has executed a historic player first collective bargaining agreement, built and socialized a new economic framework to drive league revenue and owner success and led the league to a successful 2020 season through the COVID-19 pandemic. Prior to being appointed commissioner in July 2019, Engelbert spent 33 years at Deloitte, rising the chief executive officer in 2015. She was also named one of Fortune's most powerful women for four consecutive years. So to call her accomplished is an understatement. She's also a shining example of someone who is actively growing the women's game, and that is critically important to expand opportunities for girls and grow the game at the youth level. Please put your hands together for Kathy Engelbert. And as we begin our conversation, I would just like to make mention of her time to play the NBA and WNBA's global initiative dedicated to inspiring girls ages seven to 17 to play basketball in a positive and healthy way and championing change on behalf of girls and women. I just want to get, you know, make sure that people understand and and, you know, are aware of her time to play just as we lead into this conversation, Kathy, as someone who oversees athletes at the highest level. What do you notice are the necessary ways to getting and keeping youth interested and involved in playing sports? Yeah, it's great to be here, Cassie, and thanks for those. I see some orange hoodies out there, some WNBA hoodies. That's awesome. Well, we just celebrated 50 years of Title nine over the past year and pre-Title nine, one in 27 girls played organized youth sports. Now it's one in five. So we've made a lot of progress. But as we all know, youth girls drop out of organized sports at the age of 13, 14 at alarming rates compared to their male counterparts. So what we're trying to do through her time to play junior NBA, WNBA, and really just the WNBA players have a big focus on grassroots, a big focus on being in their communities in which they live and work. And really making sure that kids know that they can. They don't have to be the tallest kid. One of the things about basketball that's so frustrating. People think they have to be really tall to play it. And obviously, every every kid's growing at a different rate. I remember I coached my daughter's middle school travel basketball team, by the way, the hardest thing I've ever done in my life. So kudos to the coaches out there. And the girls in fifth grade who were the tallest were average or the shortest in eighth grade. And the ones that were shortest in fifth grade were the tallest by eighth grade. So, you know, it's that critical time, especially for young girls to stay in sports. And I'll tell a little bit about my story and how I got to where I was. And a lot of it was because of playing sports and how important it is. So the good news is we've grown the game just in the girls youth category from about six point six million girls playing in twenty one to over seven point five million playing in twenty twenty two. So we are growing the game at the younger levels. Ages six, seven, soccer and gymnastics are more popular. Basketball is a close third. But by the time you get to essentially ten to sixteen, basketball is the number one team sport for girls. And it's like, how do we get girls to stay in? It's these role models called WNBA players, the college players. I mean, look at the NCAA viewership this year. Ten million, on average, watch that final game on that Sunday. Raise your hand. Did you watch that final and the final four? Yeah, of course he did. Yeah, it was LSU and Iowa was must see TV and twelve over twelve million at the peak. So incredible momentum coming into our season. We had last year we had the most viewed season in 15 years, the most consumed season ever, if you think about the number of hours. And what's proving is if you can be this role model to these young girls and if the young girls watched, played, participated, they didn't have to be the star. But if they participate in sports at younger ages, they become fans of sport, particularly in basketball. So we have all that data, but it's really hard. One of the other gaps is women coaches. So, again, as a mom, I like showed up to my daughter's tryout in fourth grade and someone handed me a clipboard and said, oh, I heard you played basketball. You're running the tryout. And I'm like, I haven't been close to basketball in 20 plus years at that point. And so moms tend to think they have to be this expert in the sport. I think it's 28 percent of coaches are women of youth sports. I'm surprised it's that high because in basketball, it's a lot lower. So we have to work on that, too, because there's a lot of data that girls tend to stay in sports if they have female coaches. So, again, lots of data to sift through and to try to determine how to get kids to stay in sports. And there is some momentum, as we're seeing over the years. But how do you see the future growing and the game evolving? And how do you view youth basketball, you know, having an impact on that future? Yeah, it's really important to our players. I know it's really important to us at the league and at our teams to grow the game, to grow the game at the grassroots, at the youth level. Again, to make young girls and boys feel like you don't have to be the six foot five, six foot nine. By the way, the average height in the WNBA is six two. We have like nine players, six, eight or above. And but you don't that's not what you have to be. We have Kelsey Plum and Courtney Williams. We have a lot of players that aren't like these giants. So so that there's a there's a place for every skill level, too, in the game. I also think 3x3, for those that don't know, that became an Olympic sport for the first time in Tokyo and the U.S. won the first ever gold. The women first ever gold medal in 3x3 basketball. And I think 3x3 is a place where, you know, even if it's in the school playground that you can get together, you only need six players, not ten. By the way, our U.S. women's national team for basketball next year in Paris will be going for their eighth consecutive gold medal. It'll be an all time record in the history of the U.S. in the Olympic team sport, by the way. So watch for next year. And but the rest of the world is getting better and they're all they all have their grassroots program and they're all growing. And obviously, we're about growing the game globally, but certainly in the U.S. as well. So I think there's a variety of things that we can do to invest in the sport at the youth level to make sure, again, kids stay in because we know it builds confidence, it builds resilience, it builds. You fail, you get up, you pick yourself up. There's so many lessons that I at least learn from organized sports that I carried into, you know, my life now, 36 years later. And and part of that is making sure you have the right leadership, the people who are invested in growing the game like yourself. And as someone who was the first ever female CEO of Deloitte and now the commissioner of the WNBA, you've had several leadership roles in several different parts of business. Given that perspective on leadership, how do you feel sports leadership skills build for the future for young people? Cassidy, it is a huge, huge advantage to have played, especially as a woman in business. So by the way, I was one of eight kids. I grew up with five brothers. My father actually was drafted into the NBA in 1957 by the Detroit Pistons. By the way, do you know what the salary was in 1957? A training camp salary, nine hundred and fifty dollars. And then he got a job at a company called RCA for about two thousand dollars and took that instead of playing basketball because the NBA wasn't what the NBA was back then, what it is today. So so I grew up in a very cold, male dominated world. I went to a college that was four to one male to female. I joined a profession that was 93 percent male in leadership in 1986. And then lo and behold, I become the first female CEO. But it was all because I gained all this confidence through college, high school and college. I played three sports in high school, two in college back when you could play, too. So I was recruited for lacrosse. I was a walk on for basketball. I walked onto the campus at a school in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, called Lehigh University. Maybe you know of a C.J. McCollum who came from there. So you've always been an underachiever is what you're. Yeah, not total underachiever. So I walked on and the coach, the new head coach was Muffet McGraw. Now, Naismith Hall of Fame coach. Great success at Notre Dame. She stayed at Lehigh five years, went to Notre Dame, two national championships. But you know what Muffet told me? Twenty seven years later, we almost cut you. Your freshman year when you were a walk girl, Michael Jordan story. And I said to her, well, that's good. You didn't cut me because I definitely wouldn't be the commissioner of the WNBA today. So so, you know, things happen in life. I built I entered college, probably one of the shyest people at Lehigh. Sports brought me out of my shell and taught me the confidence to compete in a very male dominated world. So you ask, what did you learn? Resilience, failure, pick yourself up. Greatness starts with fundamentals. Shoot when you're open. You miss 100 percent of the shots. You don't take those all. I actually wrote a blog well before I ever thought I'd be the commissioner of the WNBA. I wrote a blog for Forbes in the March Madness one year about how much sports and basketball particularly taught me about business and how, you know, in sports, you got to build that muscle memory when you're exhausted in the fourth quarter and the game is tied and you're on the foul line with nine seconds left. It's that muscle memory from all that practice. Same thing in business. It's practice. And anyone who knows me, I'd never walk into a meeting without being fully prepared because I got that muscle memory from preparing, from reading, from knowing who's on the other side of the table, reading body language. I was all taught to me through playing organized team sports. I was also a point guard. And I'm like, point guards are the best because you revel in an assist. You don't want to necessarily be the high scorer. You see the whole floor. You actually find the role you have to play and you actually are the leader of the team directing the other players and their role to play on the team. And so a lot of analogies to business from what I learned in sports. But the number one thing was the confidence it taught me to survive and quite frankly, thrive in a very male dominated profession that I was in for 33 years before I came here. It's interesting that you said sports brought you out of your shell in terms of like your identity as an athlete. I'm curious, you know, being that point guard is you feel like that's where you hone your leadership skills or were you were you different on the court than you were off the court? And did it just help you kind of see through, you know, how to communicate with people in high pressure situations? Yeah, I think it just taught leadership skills and it definitely taught me to never give up. There were so many times then subsequently in my 33 year business career before I came to the WNBA to just persevere. And I can't overstate the resilience, word enough, and the confidence. I see so many young women today that lack confidence. I used to give a ton of speeches when I was at Deloitte and I'd be in a group of women and they'd be these. One time I was at one of the, you know, NBA programs, one of the best schools in the country, NBA program. And I'd be with a group of women. There are women in business group and a woman. I'd open it up for Q&A at end and a woman would raise her hand like this. And then she'd start the question with, I'm sorry. And I'm like, why are we always apologizing? And so I was like that one day. I would even call myself fairly introverted back in the day. And I would tell people there's there's hope for all of us to build that confidence and not start a sentence with I'm sorry. By the way, when that young woman did that, I kind of called her out on it. I said, and by the way, she asked a fabulous question. And I said, you just asked a fabulous question. But I can't get past the fact you started it with. I'm sorry. Like, why are you apologizing? And that's what we do as women, because we're showing our lack of confidence. Yet she asked the great a great question. So actually, she and I have stayed in touch over the years. So I didn't I didn't totally mortify her by calling her out. But, you know, one of the things that I one of the reasons I took this job at the WNBA is I wrote three things down as I was retiring from Deloitte. I wrote, I want to do something different, something with a broad women's leadership platform and something I have a passion for. And someone told me the average tenure of a WNBA player is like five years or less. So I said, and they're all college graduates because we don't have the one and donners, all college graduates. So I said, so they're twenty five, twenty six, twenty seven years old. Now, what they what do they do for the next 20 to 25 years? So one of the things I wanted to have an impact on is to help them build their skills so that they could become an entrepreneur, they could become a business leader, give them the confidence because they definitely have confidence on the court. But translating that off the court was really important to me. So, you know, we're working on and some of the companies probably in this room and certainly our corporate partners would love to have WNBA players in the offseason work for them or certainly when they retire from the game. And that's an important part of young girls seeing those role models go into whether it's government jobs, civic coaching jobs, broadcasting jobs like a Candace Parker and Chinay Agumake. All of those are so important to be future leaders. I love what you said about, you know, not calling that woman out for saying I'm sorry, but just bringing it to her attention. And, you know, you joke that you were your daughter's coach. But as someone in a leadership role, you are coaching people who are looking up to you and trying to find ways to be confident. Are there any other just things that you kind of point to or seek out when you're dealing with with people, you know, who you're leading, that strategies that you try to help them build their confidence with? Yeah, to develop developing. And this is one thing I think the pandemic set us back a little bit, is that interaction, that one on one developing, networking, camaraderie, the ability to sit down with someone on my team and talk to them about their performance and what I think they need to do. And now that we've been through kind of performance management cycles, a couple since the pandemic kind of eased a little bit. You know, people are coming to me saying, oh, why am I not getting promoted? Why am I not doing this? I said, well, one, nobody knows who you are. Two, you're not networking. You know, you need to get to know more people. You need to build that confidence to network with a broader set. And most importantly, you need to. The biggest thing I did in my career was I raised my hand at various times to build capabilities that were not in my comfort zone. And people call it risk taking. I didn't call it risk taking. I called it like I wanted to do something different and I wanted to build my capability more broadly. But I also had some great sponsors throughout my career who took me under their wing behind the scenes. I didn't even know it. There was one male and it's OK, females out there to have male sponsors. In fact, they're usually a sponsor to someone in power sitting behind the scenes, determining whether you get promoted or how to build your capability. And there was one man who I had worked with for one day. I'll never forget. I went to his client, his client in Columbus, Ohio. I had built a derivative financial instrument expertise when I was at Deloitte. And so he asked me to come out to his client one day. This guy became a huge advocate for me inside. He was a powerful senior partner at Deloitte. Not that he ever thought I was going to be the CEO someday, but he saw something in me that had potential. And he actually had a dashboard on me. You know, Kathy needs to build her capability. She's already served big clients. She needs to be more technical. She needs to run a P&L. She needs to be an operator. And, you know, it was red, yellow, green. And after I became the CEO, he showed me the dashboard. And I'm like, wait, I wasn't red on that. And I wasn't yellow. He goes, this is why we didn't show it to you, because we figured you debate it instead of just kind of raising your hand to do different things, to build your capability. And I think that's what we need to be better role models about, is that we did take these risks and chances to build our capabilities so that we could rise in organizations. Ten percent of Fortune 500 companies are led by women. By the way, when I was a CEO, it was four percent. So we've actually made a lot of progress in a short. That's like five years ago in a short amount of time. But we still have to do a lot more. And it comes down to mentoring, sponsoring and developing our young people, young men and women, everyone who knows me as young men and women. But I'll vector more to women because I know they're not as confident to raise their hand to do something different. Any successful person, it takes, you know, a community to help lift up. And I always say, you know, if you work hard and you are a good person, people are going to gravitate and want to help you. And look, there's you have found so much success and you are finding a lot of success with the WNBA now in your can't even say it new role. Well, what should WNBA fans be on the lookout for this season and be excited about this summer? Well, first, you may not know this, but the WNBA is the longest tenured women's professional league in the United States. We're going to tip off our 27th year. That's double any other women's professional sports. And this year coming off a very active free agency period. So you may wonder, why didn't we have all this active free agency before? It's because our prior CBA didn't allow for it. So when we negotiated the new CBA back in 2020, we put in a more active free agency period, more movement to build household names, to build rivalries. So you have Candace Parker who moved from Chicago to Vegas. You have Brianna Stewart who moved from Seattle to New York. New York and Vegas are rumored to be super teams. But I actually think there's going to be a lot of parity in the league this year. We had an incredible rookie class led by Aaliyah Boston, who went to Indiana. And you should have seen the reception. She's already gotten there. And obviously, South Carolina being such a great feeder. UConn, Tennessee, Stanford, so many other schools, LSU, Notre Dame. So, I mean, it's really going to be an exciting season. And there's a big changing of the guard going on in the WNBA right now from Sue Bird and Sylvia Fowles, two legends retiring last year, handing the baton off to Asia Wilson, last year's MVP and WNBA champion. First ever championship for the city of Las Vegas for any professional sport. And then obviously, Stewie and so many other, John Quell Jones, so many other great players in the league, Diana Taurasi, the return of Brittany Griner. Let's give it up for Brittany. I spent about two and a half hours with Brittany out in Phoenix a month or so ago, and she's doing great. I mean, mentally, she's just so resilient. Such a great return to the game. She's she's obviously returning. She had lost a fair amount of weight over in Russia and muscle. So she's building all that back up. So that'll be a great story. But just so many great storylines, Cassidy. And this is the year coming off that great NCAA season for the W really to step up. I mean, if you haven't, you know, done so already, subscribe to the WNBA League Pass yesterday. Let's go. I didn't even tell her to say that, by the way. Watch the W, attend the games in your market. I took my daughter last year to a few WNBA games, and she still talks about it like almost every other day. It is an absolute best family experience. Make sure you go out. Also, look out for the upcoming launch of the new Her Time to Play curriculum and resources this summer. Everybody, please, please give a round of applause.