This week on The IX Sports Podcast Basketball Edition, hosts Jackie Powell and Howard Megdal discuss the crisis of player security in the Women’s National Basketball League.
They waste no time jumping into the topic, with Powell recapping an incident in which someone sent the Las Vegas Aces’ Chelsea Gray a message containing a racial slur. Gray posted the message to Instagram. Fans took matters into their own hands and found the LinkedIn of the person who sent the slur; the person was fired from their job.
“This is real, this is really happening, and it is going to happen more to WNBA players by definition,” Megdal said, emphasizing that Black and queer women are more likely to face harassment.
Megdal and Powell then took the time to outline their own WNBA Security Plan (pictured below).
The league should hire a full-time employee to be the point person on security, coordinating with teams and the league.
The league has provided players with software that can monitor social media for threats, but not all players have chosen to use it, citing privacy concerns with allowing a third-party company to access their social media accounts. The software also doesn’t work as well this year as it did last year, according to players who do use it.
The league also should be more proactive in communicating the efforts it is making to protect players, they argue. Megdal said fans likely jumped to take action on Gray’s behalf because they felt like the league wouldn’t do anything.
“There needs to be an end to player prop bets,” Megdal said, pointing out that most of the threats to players come from gamblers — not fans.
“And leave aside that, from a gambling perspective, you are asking for a gambling scandal by having player prop bets exist anyway, you are also putting your players in danger by having player prop bets exist, and you are putting a league of marginalized people in greater danger because of the very nature of who makes up this league,” Megdal said.
Tune in to this week’s episode to hear more about the ongoing security discussions around the league.
Make sure to subscribe to The IX Sports Podcast for in-depth coverage of women’s soccer, hockey and basketball; and tune in each weekday morning for a quick overview of the biggest headlines on Women’s Sports Daily, like WNBA news and PWHL expansion updates.
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