WNBPA’s all-night negotiators at the Langham Hotel in mid-March: (L to R front) Brianna Turner, Erin Drake, Alysha Clark, Deborah Willig, (back L-R) Nneka Ogwumike, Breanna Stewart, Terri Carmichael Jackson, Michael Goldsholl WNBPA
Nothing good happens after midnight — except for the eight days that saved the WNBA season.
The clocks would strike 1 a.m., 2 a.m. or 3 a.m., with WNBPA Executive Director Terri Jackson sipping green peppermint tea and WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert hydrating with water, and there was no end in sight due to this thing called revenue share or this other thing called housing or this other thing called stubbornness.
There were eight days of give and take and take and give — from Tuesday, March 10, through Wednesday, March 18 — and when it appeared both sides would never get to the magic revenue share number of 20%, the union was convinced the league thought: “The players are going to cave.”
But somewhere around the Ides of March, in the middle of the night at a lush New York hotel called The Langham, 13-year pro and WNBPA Vice President Alysha Clark laughed all of that off. She looked over at the players doing yoga or crashing out on the floor with blankets — her being one of them — and said, “Do they really think they’re going to outlast an endurance athlete? This is what we do.”
So the stalemate was on. It should be a “30 for 30.”
In November, when the union was asking for 40% of league and team revenue and the league was dug in below 15%, Engelbert received a notice in the mail — for jury duty.
She didn’t mind it, actually. The commissioner considered it “part of my civic duty” and was prepared to check in at the courthouse — until the league’s lawyers told her no.
At the time, collective-bargaining tensions were palpable. The previous CBA had expired on Halloween, and there were labor talks during an ensuing 30-day extension period. The union was perturbed that the league would negotiate only in hour-and-a-half or two-hour pockets — “What if we wanted to keep going?!” Jackson says — and it would’ve been horrible timing if Engelbert was suddenly nowhere to be found, if she was in some New York courtroom listening to a random petty theft trial.
So, of course, her lawyers told her not to go. Engelbert requested a deferral and was fortunately given a new jury duty date, far, far, far down the road: March 16, 2026.
She’d certainly be free by then. Right?
November, December, January and most of February came and went — with no deal. You could have counted the issues on 10 hands, but the two core disagreements that would turn March into madness were revenue share and housing. One of them about math, the other about heart.
By late February, lines were being drawn in the sand or being blurred, depending what side of the table you were on. On or around Feb. 21, the league and the union had a rare in-person bargaining session with several players sitting in — such as Clark, WNBPA President Nneka Ogwumike and WNBPA Treasurer Brianna Turner — plus countless others on Zoom. But the league didn’t have them at hello.
Right off the bat, the WNBA placed a calendar on a screen that had the players seething. In a nutshell, the league was telling the union that if no verbal agreement was reached by March 10, the 2026 season schedule would be affected. Did that mean, if no handshake by then, the season wouldn’t start on time? Did it mean the union had to get on board or get locked out? Was it daring the players to strike?
With the clock ticking, the league certainly had, among other things, tickets to sell and sponsorship deals to close. It saw that March 10 deadline as necessary, while the union saw it as another “scare tactic” after previous nebulous deadline threats in December and January – and especially after the league had ignored the union’s December request for a 30% revenue share for six weeks.
“And so they opened that meeting with these dates, with this calendar that we’d never seen before, we’d never discussed,” Jackson says now. “Very off-putting, is one word. It was very frustrating because we’ve come in for a bargaining session and they’ve looked to start it with how to apply pressure very, very swiftly with a full audience of players.”
Kelsey Plum and Breanna Stewart were two of those players. But which side were they on?
March was finally here, and so was an ESPN report that Plum and Stewart (a vice president of the union) were essentially trying to submarine the WNBPA. Included in their three-page letter to Jackson was the insinuation that the union was freezing players out of the negotiations, with the accusatory statement, “We do not feel like we have an adequate seat at the table.” The letter was supposed to have been private.
“You know what it was,” Jackson says now, the implication being that Plum’s and Stewart’s agents orchestrated and leaked the supposed coup. Jackson and her team felt the agents wanted no part of a strike and that the league was working in concert with the agents to break the union. Engelbert and her staff didn’t dignify it with a response, but it reinforces how much trust there was then: Zero.
Still, the next 24 to 48 hours was a breakthrough of sorts, according to Michael Goldsholl, the union’s senior vice president for business and legal affairs, the kind of breakthrough that labor lawyers are dying to hear. After Jackson, Goldsholl and Erin Drake, WNBPA senior adviser and legal counsel, defused the so-called rift — with a joint statement of solidarity from Plum, Stewart and the executive committee — the results of a player survey came tumbling in. The union had already dropped its revenue share request from 30% to 27.5% to 26%, and a crucial survey question was whether to accept the league’s seeming non-negotiable offer of just less than 15%.
“That survey said the 15% — or the not even 15% — was unacceptable,” Jackson says now. “It was a resounding: ‘There’s no way we’re taking this offer.’”
Goldsholl, the labor lawyer, put it this way: “I would say we had a mandate to get at least 20%. That was the mandate: 20%. At least.”
In other words, see you March 10.
So it was all set. The league and the union would meet at The Langham on Fifth Avenue, where — on the right day — you can get a room with a king-sized bed for $1,600 and change. But on March 10, the negotiators didn’t need beds; they needed a large conference room and two adjacent breakout rooms. The listed price online? $2,000 to $5,000 a day.
The key leaders on each side walked in that day around 5 p.m. For the league, it was Engelbert; WNBA general counsel Jamin Dershowitz; Dan Rube, NBA executive vice president and deputy general counsel; Jachele Vélez, WNBA deputy general counsel; and Bethany Donaphin, WNBA head of league operations. For the union, it was Jackson, Goldsholl, Drake and an advisory committee consisting of Deb Willig, managing partner of Willig, Williams and Davidson; sports and entertainment executive Tag Garson; and communications specialist and NYU professor David Cooper. Members of the WNBPA’s Executive Committee — Clark, Turner, Ogwumike and Stewart — would make a grand entrance, after getting in their workouts.
Alysha Clark on a floor blanket in between CBA talks that stretched into the morning hours. WNBPA
They settled in for the short haul, not knowing it would be the long haul. The first day of talks went an interminable 11 hours, with Jackson exiting at around 4 a.m. and Engelbert around dawn at 5 a.m. That was just Day 1.
By this point, Engelbert — whose jury duty date was only days away on March 16 — had already requested another deferral, only this time she says the NYC courthouse “only gave me a week,” meaning she had to show up in court, no ifs and buts, on Monday, March 23.
No problem, right? Wrong. The “elephant in the room,” as Drake puts it, was revenue share, but Engelbert says now there were more than 50 issues to negotiate, which began a week straight of days into nights and nights into dawn. “I think what was underestimated was the number of issues,” Engelbert says. “Everyone thought there was one. And I really think the players thought there was only one.”
That one sensitive, make-or-break, die-on-the-vine player issue was housing. Don’t be mistaken: Ogwumike was still savvy enough to be telling everyone “the big thing’s the big thing,” meaning revenue share. But the WNBA’s early decision to eliminate league-sanctioned housing — then only bending to allow it for first-year players — was the sore spot, whether Engelbert and her lawyers realized it yet. And during those first three days at The Langham, from March 10 through 12, housing wasn’t front and center yet. There was 401(k), retirement, health benefits, on and on and on.
So the players had to hurry up and wait.
“Stewy quipped in a fun way: ‘Now I know what I don’t want to do after basketball,’” Engelbert says. “‘Become a lawyer.’”
Everyone had a story about the all-nighters, the eight straight days of them. The union would send out for ice cream in the wee hours, and it would arrive with the security guards asleep on their chairs. The league ordered ice cream, too — but not necessarily coffee ice cream. Engelbert doesn’t do caffeine.
“I never had a cup of coffee in my life,” she says. “Water, water. People think I’m crazy, but water.”
She says she’s known for “not needing a lot of sleep,” and that obviously came in handy when she was calling or texting team owners across the country with 4:30 a.m. updates.
“Adrenaline’s a powerful thing, thankfully,” Engelbert says. “Everyone says you’ll sleep when you’re dead — we just didn’t want to die doing it.”
Across the room, Jackson says she’d given up coffee for Lent but was rescued by The Langham’s “great teas” — specifically the green peppermint. She would get a ride home generally about 3 a.m., sometimes later, and says, “According to my sleep app, I averaged four hours.”
Goldsholl says he averaged maybe two, because, just like Drake, his mind would be spinning with numbers and brainstorms and rebuttals. In some absurd way, the fatigue was exorcised from their bodies, with Drake saying, “We were in a vortex. I truly felt like we were in a little world all with each other. And that came with understanding the way that people are at 3 in the morning, the way people are at 10 in the morning, at 7 in the morning. What people like to eat, just the familiarity and the closeness, the proximity … I think I felt very vulnerable in that space.”
Ice cream became a small reward as days turned into nights. Late runs to nearby convenience stores meant plenty of Häagen-Dazs, shared among players, union staff and league officials. WNBPA
Drake described it as “just a level of care,” with people making runs to CVS for toothpaste or peanut M&M’s. It was the perfect time to be in the city that never sleeps, because they weren’t sleeping, either. They would DoorDash Chinese or Brazilian food at 11 p.m., from restaurants such as Cocina Del Sur, Wolfnights and Din Tai Fung.
But for the music, they had Clark’s playlist to thank. While reviewing documents, they’d listen to Stevie Wonder, Alicia Keys, Erykah Badu, Jill Scott, Earth, Wind and Fire, Rufus — all courtesy of Clark. Those players were waiting for a deal, waiting for their million-dollar salaries, sleeping on Langham hotel floor blankets. They played pop-a-shot when the sessions moved to league headquarters over the weekend and ping-pong when talks shifted to union headquarters. They walked around with Excel spreadsheets. They cheered out loud on Sunday night, March 15, crowding around Clark’s laptop, when Michael B. Jordan won an Oscar for “Sinners.” And they waited and waited for housing, with an entire player membership in mind.
And when it came time, Brianna Turner was ready.
The sides were inching closer to a deal on that weekend of March 14-15, after Engelbert and the league drew up a T-account (a method perhaps from her Deloitte days) to give everyone a “you give, you get” mentality. They were chipping away. Next up was housing.
The league argument had always been: The max salary is going to be over a million, the average salary is going be over 500,000 — you can pay your own rent now. But Turner’s mic-drop moment was when she said: “What about 2028?”
Following a silent beat, a league official asked, “What do you mean?” And then she started in on it — that 2028 was an Olympic year and housing would be scarce and overpriced in L.A. that summer. How would the Sparks players cope? How would players find affordable short-team leases? Turner, whose nickname inside the union was suitably “Hidden Figures,” also mentioned that the league’s new minimum salary at that time of negotiations was below last year’s max of $249,000. She said if max players last year got housing at $249K, why not now? The league had no response.
“She annihilated it,” Drake says. “It disabused them of all of the assumptions they were making.”
Michael Goldsholl and Erin Drake (foreground) prep for negotiations at The Langham on March 11 as Executive Committee members (from left) Breanna Stewart, Nneka Ogwumike, Alysha Clark and Brianna Turner speak to other members on the phone. WNBPA
Engelbert admits now she had no idea how “emotional” housing was to the players, and Donaphin isn’t afraid to say Turner “was compelling” because she passionately represented the middle-class players. To Engelbert’s credit, the league gave back housing for the first three years of the deal, and, for players making less than $500,000, future years, as well.
The two sides were perhaps in the home stretch on March 16, as the big thing — revenue share — finally became the big thing. The league had been holding firm at about 15%, because if they’d agreed to the union’s original 40% request, they calculated over $2 billion worth of losses over six years. At 30%, the losses would have been $660 million, and at 27.5%, $460 million. They weren’t budging.
But the union, adhering to the player survey’s mandate, wasn’t blinking, either. As negotiations reconvened at The Langham on St. Patrick’s Day, after more than 100 hours of talks and a sense the 20% number was attainable, there was hope, doom, hope, doom — but also enough of a glimmer that two league staffers borrowed one of the WNBA board of governors’ cars and drove up and down 5th Avenue to find an open liquor store. To buy champagne.
“I don’t know,” Englebert says. “You’d feel really good at one point in the day and then five hours later you’d be like, ‘We’re never getting a deal done and we’re going to have to cancel games.’”
Finally, at 2 a.m., on March 18, with just one salary cap issue unresolved, the league walked in to tell Jackson, “All right, we’ll do it on your terms.” Jackson blurted, “Hold it” — and hustled to find the players in their side room, where Clark and Stewy, Ogwumike and Turner were on blankets closing their eyes or talking to family. It was all officially done now, at 2:22 a.m. Empty cartons of Häagen-Dazs were everywhere. Engelbert remembers hugging players. Jackson remembers toasts but isn’t so sure about the hugging.
The champagne popping probably woke up the security guards.
Everyone has a story. Vélez, who’s getting married in May, was able to make it to her bachelorette party in New Orleans the following week. She also says she exited The Langham with two mementos: a champagne cork and a floral Langham pen.
“I won’t ever write with it again,” Vélez says of the pen. “I’m just going to always hold onto it.”
Goldsholl grabbed a pen himself, though he definitely still writes with his. Jackson walked away with some of Langham’s green peppermint tea and engraved Langham notepads — her notes from the most historic and transformative CBA deal in women’s sports scribbled all over them.
Drake left thinking they’d taken down Goliath and says those eight days in March are “something I’m never going to forget and probably won’t ever stop talking about — because it was so intense and so beautiful. But also so hard in all the ways that make something that makes history totally worth it.”
WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert navigated the negotiations, and even a summons to report for jury duty, to reach a deal with the players. Getty Images
Engelbert? She pilfered some Langham paper herself … and then showed up at jury duty the following Monday. The court had no idea she was commissioner of the WNBA, fresh off of a sleepless marathon — and she didn’t tell them. They excused her, by the way.
It was the time of their lives. But had it dragged on nine nights, 10 nights, 11 nights, 12 nights, 20 nights, it might’ve been the worst time of their lives. Engelbert — thrilled that the WNBA’s 30th season is starting on time — chuckled and didn’t answer when asked how close they all came to a work stoppage.
“That,” she says, “will be part of the ‘30 for 30.’”