The WNBA is rapidly growing—to the point that last season’s finals series’ average viewership of 729,000 could very well be lower than an average Indiana Fever game come May 14, the start of the regular season.
With the biggest star in sports arriving in Indianapolis, fans from all across the country, who discovered a love for women’s basketball through Caitlin Clark’s illustrious career at Iowa, will surely tune in and help the WNBA see success like never before.
With that, though, comes a problem—Clark is a superstar, yet flies commercial airlines with her teammates to away games. In response, the league announced Tuesday, May 7 an unprecedented decision. Through the 2024 season, the WNBA will spend $25 million on private charter flights—an uptick of 525% when compared with the previous campaign.
Understandably, the league wants to do everything in its power to protect their stars from potentially dangerous fans and rivals, but this simply is not a smart decision by the front office.
For context, the WNBA is almost a subsidiary of the NBA, who own 50% of the league and provide their women’s counterpart with over $15 million annually. Because of that, and the lesser number of viewers, fans and interest, the WNBA struggles to provide its athletes with proper pay and benefits such as charter flights. That is where the issue with this decision comes in.
Instead of using these additional funds to truly benefit the players, and use it to help provide bigger salaries to the faces of the league, the money was spent on charter flights, something that saw little issues with just $4 million spent on it in 2023. An over 500% increase makes little sense when there are better objectives that this could go to—such as the players’ monetary well-being.
Students at Lower Dauphin agreed.
“I think if the WNBA finds extra money they should use it to pay their players more instead of getting better amenities,” explained senior Maddie Foreman.
Just 12 teams currently suit up in the WNBA and many owners have offered to step in when it comes to flying privately in the past. The New York Liberty faced over $500,000 in fines for this decision in 2023, but commissioner Cathy Engelbert has since expressed that penalties for flying privately would no longer be served. As a result, this decision continues to make less and less sense.
Considering the best player that women’s basketball has ever laid eyes on, a player that continues to influence the growth of the sport, will make just $76,000 per year across her first four seasons in the WNBA, this money could have been much better distributed.
Sophomore Cole Duffy commented, “It’s great to see the WNBA do things to try to better conditions for their players, but this seems like an unnecessary waste of money. I feel the money could have been put to better use in other areas, especially if it was added to the players’ salaries, something that they deserve.”
To see superstar athletes like Clark, Angel Reese and Kamilla Cardoso that have the potential to become some of the most influential athletes of all time making less than six figures is saddening, and the league must do better, starting with reallocating the charter flight funds to its players.
