The WNBA will phase in league-wide charter flights for all their teams beginning with the May 14 start of the regular season, the league announced, with Delta Airlines as the primary operator of the program.
The program is expected to cost about $25 million over the course of the next two seasons, WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert told a group of sports editors earlier this week.
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“We are thrilled to announce the launch of a full charter program as soon as practical for the 2024 and 2025 seasons, a testament to the continued growth of the WNBA,” Engelbert said in a statement announcing the Delta news.
Sophie Cunningham, the player representative of the Phoenix Mercury, welcomed the charter flight news during the team’s media day interview sessions at Footprint Center.
“I will say the charter flights are key,” Cunningham said. “I don’t know why it hasn’t happened sooner. It should’ve. It’s ridiculous that it’s taken this long. Fans ask why we aren’t flying charter. ‘The attention is on you.’ But we finally got it done. We’re super excited.”
Teams had been primarily flying commercial flights prior to this. The change promotes comfort as well as safety, said the Mercury’s Brittney Griner, who was harassed at an airport in Dallas last year while the team was on a road trip. She was arrested in 2022 and detained for months after a drug-related incident at an airport taking a commercial flight while playing basketball in Russia.
“Our safety should always have been high priority,” Griner said. “As a league we’re more accessible to our fans, but we’ve hit the threshold where it can be an endangerment.”
Cunningham said there’s a conference call among the player reps for all 12 WNBA teams next week to go over details of the charter plans.
“We haven’t had that conversation yet with the union,” she said. “I don’t know the ins and outs of it. That meeting is coming on Monday. So, next time you can ask me. But I just want to say we’re grateful that we’re going to be treated like we should’ve been the past 10 years.”
Engelbert said that the league intended to unilaterally launch its charter flight program as soon as planes can be put in place.
In Thursday’s announcement, she added, “We have been hard at work to transform the business and build a sustainable economic model to support charter flights for the long term.”
Mat Ishbia, who bought the NBA Suns and Mercury last year for $4 billion, said that kind of expense should be incidental when it comes to producing a good product and taking care of the WNBA players, coaches and staff as they play the season. The league in 2022 raised $75 million to invest in numerous initiatives such as travel.
“Everything matters. Every inch matters,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s the middle seat, whether it’s walking through a big airport, whether it’s having a bus somewhere, I don’t know what the inch is, but we want to fix all the inches to give us a best chance and that’s what we want to do.
“We’re going to make sure we do everything within our power, within the rules to make it better for our women, so our players have the best chance for peak performance.”
Ishbia is also building a new separate from the Suns practice and performance center for the WNBA players downtown adjacent to the arena behind the organization’s new office complex. It’s targeted to open on July 1.
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