For Cathy Engelbert, the decision to step away from her role as WNBA commissioner, which she announced on Friday she will do at the end of the 2026 calendar year, has been in the works for several years.
“I had only intended to do this job for three-and-a-half years,” Engelbert told The IX Sports in a one-on-one phone conversation earlier this week. “I did. It’ll be seven-and-a-half by the end of the year, and obviously, I turned 62 in November. [It] was always my goal to retire at 62, and I just feel like we’re in a really good place from a variety of perspectives on the league. Obviously, it’s been an incredible seven and a half years. It’s been a great privilege.”
Engelbert will lead a succession plan that she’s been working on for three years, and has already submitted a list of both internal and external candidates to WNBA owners and NBA commissioner Adam Silver, who will make the final determination on her successor.
The WNBA of 2026 is virtually unrecognizable from the viewpoint of the league Engelbert took over in July 2019, given an expanded set of powers and a title, commissioner, previously unavailable to leaders of the WNBA. (Previous heads of the league served with the title of president.)
The staff of the WNBA grew from 12 upon Engelbert’s arrival to nearly 100 today, with entire new departments created and previous ones, like marketing and business growth, going from having 1 person to as many as 30 or 40.
“When I came in, we were facing some serious questions about our long-term viability and sustainability,” Engelbert said. “But I knew the game was great, and I’m grateful now to be leaving the league in a strong position. And I think it’s no longer a league like when I came in. I think people thought it was a charity… we’re literally a premier global sports property now.”
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The WNBA has weathered an almost unfathomable amount of storms during Engelbert’s tenure. A CBA negotiation in 2019 led to an agreement in 2020, which was almost immediately subsumed within a global pandemic. The league survived 2020 in the “Wubble”, saw the Atlanta Dream players actively work to successfully defeat its own owner in her effort to run for U.S. Senate, worked tirelessly to bring star Brittney Griner home after she was arrested in Russia, all while expanding the league’s social justice footprint.
“When Cathy Engelbert stepped into her new role as the WNBA’s first-ever Commissioner in 2019, her arrival marked the beginning of a new era for the league,” Ginny Gilder, Chair of the Board of Governors’ Executive Committee, said. “Without Cathy, today’s WNBA would have been a mere shadow of what it has become, a sustainable, exciting business that puts its players at the center of everything, with a brilliant future.”
Amid those battles and many others, Engelbert changed the business scale of the WNBA in almost unfathomable ways. A series of new media rights deals increased the primary engine of the league’s economic growth by factors of 8x to 9x. The league’s geographical footprint expanded, from 12 to 13 to 15 to 18 teams now in place by 2030. That paved the way for a second CBA on Engelbert’s watch, which transformed compensation in massive ways, creating a millionaire class among WNBA players and lifting the minimum salary in 2026 above what had been the maximum salary back in 2025.
“So the league is literally set up for 10 more years after I leave with built-in growth because they all have escalators in them,” Engelbert noted of the media rights deal. “The explosion in franchise valuations, corporate partnerships are really strong… and the attendance, viewership, digital engagement, merch sales. So I think it’s a good time to hand the reins to someone younger.”
Engelbert, after four decades in business, highlighted by her WNBA tenure and, of course, her career at Deloitte that ended with a turn as CEO from 2015 to 2019, is eager to spend more time with her family, including two children, five brothers, two sisters, 33 nieces and nephews and her 90-year-old mother. And it was her family, she said, who were most eager for her to step away from the job, especially when attacks on her grew personal over the past year.
“Obviously, some of the noise more bothered my family… wanting to spend more time with me and support me,” Engelbert said of the various storms around the WNBA over the past year. “And I’m not going to lie about its impact on my kids, on my mother. And again, I have a huge family. My five brothers are like, ‘Get out of there, Cathy.’… I have pretty thick skin. I understand when you’re in these public facing roles that you become the target of a lot of the stuff. So, while I can take it, you know, some in my ecosystem can’t.”
Still, Engelbert made it clear that this was a decision driven by her own life circumstances. Others look to travel more in retirement. Engelbert’s excited at the prospect of flying less, after spending her WNBA tenure bouncing from market to market. She lost her close friend and longtime Deloitte colleague, Greg Durant, at just 67 this summer, and it forced her to take stock of exactly how she wants to spend her time, the unknown of it always inherent in the fragility of life.
“I advise people all the time, young people, not to be defined by your title or your job,” Engelbert said. “And somehow, in the last year, I got defined by that. When I want to be defined as Cathy Engelbert, someone who has advocated for women in the workforce for decades, and I want to get back to doing good work in helping young people and young women especially and young diverse women, to have confidence to compete in this male-dominated world like I had to learn when I got out of college in 1986.”
Accordingly, the moment she holds closest to her heart isn’t the closing of a media rights deal or an expansion into a new city. It is the WNBA Draft.
“I love when spring gets here and you start to see the budding of flowers and trees — that’s the Draft,” Engelbert said. “It’s like such a cool time. We get to meet a new crop of the next generation of players, and probably what I’m proud of the most is that these next generation of players are coming in, they’re getting endorsements, they’re highly followed, popular. They come into us and we turn them into a national and global star. Maybe in college they were local, regional stars, some of them national stars, but few, and then they come into the W and they realize their dreams.
“You don’t get to do that very often in life — give people help [for] them to reach their dreams, and we’re able to do that in the W.”
