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Cathy Engelbert

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33
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2025-04-24
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2025-04-24
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  1. “No, I think as you look at our new media deal, you look at the growth, you look at the quality of the game, the strength of the brand, what it represents. I wish three, four years ago I had invested, but obviously I couldn't as the commissioner. But yes, that's why we raised that capital three, four years ago. Those people who invested in us back then were believers in the future. And I think they're all going to be pretty happy. So yes, I would invest.”

    2025-04-24 · The David Rubenstein Show · Cathy Engelbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “I would say we have several challenges and several opportunities. One of our biggest challenges is certainly how do we globalize this game. There's a lot of opportunity outside the United States to build fandom, to build viewership, to make our players global stars. We continue to be challenged by being a women's league and therefore a diverse one. So therefore we continue to be challenged around the vitriol in social media against our players and the league. So we're working on a four-pronged strategy on that around a technology solution to help with the social media side, monitoring physical safety and mental health. So that's another challenge, but enormous opportunity as well in the league around so many areas expansion would be one of those. A lot of capital inflows coming into the league, finding places to invest that.”

    2025-04-24 · The David Rubenstein Show · Cathy Engelbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Definitely the growth, getting through the pandemic. We hadn't started our season yet because remember pandemic was March when Adam Silver shut down the sports world by shutting down the NBA play, then the NCAA shut down. Getting through that pandemic year, I'm probably most proud of it. It was like working on an IPO for a couple weeks because I had just come in the league. I didn't have a lot of relationships. We had to convince the players to play that we would keep them safe. We were at a time of racial crisis in America with the George Floyd situation. We got thrown in the middle of a political battle in the state of Georgia with one of our owners. So there was so much going on in that 2020 year. So I think I'm proud of the way we emerged from that such that just a year later in February of 22, we were the first women's sports property to raise capital at scale, $75 million. We probably could have raised more.”

    2025-04-24 · The David Rubenstein Show · Cathy Engelbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Yeah, well, certainly the WMBA, we're the longest tenured women's professional sports league at 29 years, now double any other. So, and part of that's due to our big brother, the NBA and everything they've done for us. And then at soccer, and then the PWHL is a new hockey league that has emerged. And they've had a lot, the hockeys had a lot of fits and starts has had soccer. We're blessed to have had continuity over 29 years. But I think there's some emerging sports like volleyball. But the problem is there's four professional volleyball leagues, so they probably need some consolidation.”

    2025-04-24 · The David Rubenstein Show · Cathy Engelbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Both. We have national league sponsored deals. We have global deals, and then there's local deals for teams to negotiate as long as it doesn't block a category at the national level. And so one of the things that's so interesting to me when I came in the league, and I didn't know this because I was off at Deloitte in a very different industry, is that someone told me my first day on the job that less than 1% of all corporate partnership money spent on sports is women's sports. And my first question, David, as a good prior accountant, was what's the denominator? Because if we were to move that a couple hundred basis points, how much do we have to move the numerator? And I would say we've moved that significantly up, probably to 10% or so, but the denominator's huge. Obviously, it's multiple, multiple, tens of billions of dollars.”

    2025-04-24 · The David Rubenstein Show · Cathy Engelbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “We've got players from Germany, Canada, Australia, France, Spain, Africa. Yeah, so we're starting to globalize our ranks, but they're not quite where the NBA has been, again, the NBA being 50 plus years older than us, but it's starting to increase. And I think the U.S.'s dominance in the Olympics, the women just won their eighth consecutive gold medal in basketball in the Paris Olympics. I think that dominance has helped lift other programs around the world such that France almost only lost by two to the US. So a lot of these programs around the world have invested in their grassroots and youth basketball such that they're getting really good.”

    2025-04-24 · The David Rubenstein Show · Cathy Engelbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “The players, I think it does give you a little cred that you played the game, not at the level they're playing at, but playing for Muffet McGraw, Nay Smith Hall of Famer. My dad played for Jack Ramsey, Dr. Jack, who was a Naesmith Hall of Famer. So just having a little bit of that basketball DNA is helpful.”

    2025-04-24 · The David Rubenstein Show · Cathy Engelbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “It's a hard game. I took it up when I became the CEO of Deloitte. So I was 50 when I took it up. And it was because I would be in CEO's offices and they would be talking golf or they'd have golf decorations in their office. I'd ask them about it. Do you play? I played a little bit and then started playing a lot and got pretty good at it and got invited to the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro Am and the American Express. And now I just love being in that environment with all my former CEO colleagues. And it's a lot of fun now. But it is a great and I tell a lot of women, take up golf. You know, it's a great way to build relationships in the corporate world.”

    2025-04-24 · The David Rubenstein Show · Cathy Engelbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “I am on corporate boards. That was one of the things that was important to me given my long history at Deloitte. So I'm on the board of McDonald's. And one of the reasons I wanted McDonald's was not necessarily because I love hamburgers, although I do. I want a big consumer brand because now I'm running a consumer brand called the WMBA. It's been helpful to see their digital, their consumer base, their globalization and everything. And then on the board of Royalty Pharma, which is a public company as well. And then I play my passion now is golf.”

    2025-04-24 · The David Rubenstein Show · Cathy Engelbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Not really. Raising two kids, having a career. I did coach my daughters travel basketball team from middle school during middle school. I stayed connected that way, but just a big fan of sports.”

    2025-04-24 · The David Rubenstein Show · Cathy Engelbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “So I'd been at Deloitte for over three decades, 33 years, and I'd been the CEO for a little over four-year terms, four years. I took over a little earlier than usual. And then your terms up, and it's time to move on and could have stayed at Deloitte Senior Partner, but really wanted to do something in kind of a second act, and this was it.”

    2025-04-24 · The David Rubenstein Show · Cathy Engelbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Well, it's an interesting question, so it didn't seem to make a lot of sense to a lot of people unless you had come to my office at Deloitte and saw basketballs all behind me. So I played college basketball for now, Naysmith Hall of Fame coach Muffet McGraw, who went on to great success at Notre Dame. I went to Little Lehigh University. And my father was actually drafted into the MBA in 1957 by the Detroit Pistons. So we had a lot of basketball DNA in the family. And so when my term was ending at Deloitte, I really said, you know, what do I want to do next? I want to do something different, something with a broad women's leadership platform and something I had a passion for, thinking maybe it would take me to a college or university and then someone approached me about the WMBA commissioner job and I said definitely is something different. Broad women's leadership platform and certainly a game I have a huge passion for the game.”

    2025-04-24 · The David Rubenstein Show · Cathy Engelbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “So, my specialty back then was I worked in a variety of clients growing up, manufacturing SNLs back during the SNL crisis bank. I settled more once I had my kids in the pharmaceutical sector as well as consumer products. But I was a derivative financial instrument specialist at the firm, which gave me tons of valuation expertise.”

    2025-04-24 · The David Rubenstein Show · Cathy Engelbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “No, because I think at the partner ranks when I started, it was probably 5% women partners. So it was pretty new as far as the trajectory for women. Never thought that I would be the CEO, never aspired to be the CEO, quite frankly.”

    2025-04-24 · The David Rubenstein Show · Cathy Engelbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Well, actually, it all dates back to sophomore year when I was a computer science major, and I had to take a programming course in Fortran, and I said, I have no idea what that professor's talking about. Someone said, there's this thing called the business school, Kathy. You should transfer to it. And there's something called accounting. And it's the language of business, and you'll get a job because it was the big eight accounting firms back then. I didn't know who said it was the language of business. I found out later that was Warren Buffett. And you'll get a job. I got a job pretty easily back then and started with Deloitte.”

    2025-04-24 · The David Rubenstein Show · Cathy Engelbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “So I actually played tennis, basketball, and lacrosse in high school, and I was recruited for lacrosse in college. I was a walk-on for basketball back in the mid-80s. You could play two sports in college at a D1 level. Today you can't do that, but back then I played both lacrosse and basketball.”

    2025-04-24 · The David Rubenstein Show · Cathy Engelbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “So, my father worked for RCA and was an IT guy in early, like we used to have the punch cards. He'd bring punch cards to him, an early IT kind of manager unfortunately died young in 1987, but my mom worked for 62 years for the same place for a pediatrician as their office manager as that business grew. So both my parents worked and my mom though, you know, was able to balance it all and raise eight children on the way.”

    2025-04-24 · The David Rubenstein Show · Cathy Engelbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Yeah, it's crazy, especially five brothers, three older. So I was their fourth in everything from Wiffleball to soccer to street hockey to basketball, grew up very athletic family, very competitive. Like my sister and I would compete. She and I are only 13 months apart, compete for everything, including food. And we'd hide food in our rooms because the brothers would steal all the food. So it was a fun upbringing continues to be very close-knit family.”

    2025-04-24 · The David Rubenstein Show · Cathy Engelbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Yeah, born in Philadelphia, grew up right across the bridge in southern New Jersey, and one of eight kids, five brothers.”

    2025-04-24 · The David Rubenstein Show · Cathy Engelbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Yeah, I don't think one of the things when I came in, I assessed kind of the strategy and the quality of the game and the importance of the brand. And the one thing that when I looked at the game, there's not much to tweak about the game. I mean, pure shooting, pick and rolls, great rebounding, great play, people who we've brought in those tens of millions of new fans have loved the game. So I don't think there's much to tweak in the game. Can we use more technology? Can the officiating advance and evolve? Yes. But the game itself, I think the quality of the game was something, you know, it was probably the only thing we didn't need to actually pick up a stone and totally change.”

    2025-04-24 · The David Rubenstein Show · Cathy Engelbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Again, we have NBA affiliated owners, independent owners. We have an all women ownership group, three women up in Seattle. We have diverse ownership at the minority investor level, obviously all the NBA teams are primarily owned by men, but we're making some progress there with diverse ownership groups. And again, as we look at expansion, we look for the diversification of that group.”

    2025-04-24 · The David Rubenstein Show · Cathy Engelbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Yeah, I think our teams are making enormous progress towards profitability. They're just growing, but what they're doing, which we love is because they have so much confidence in the growth trajectory, they're turning around in anything they might be making. They're investing back.”

    2025-04-24 · The David Rubenstein Show · Cathy Engelbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Yes, we do. We have a hard cap under the current CBA. Obviously, that CBA will be up after this year and we'll be negotiating a new deal.”

    2025-04-24 · The David Rubenstein Show · Cathy Engelbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Yes, it's something we've been working on since I came into the league. We've been chipping away at it. We offered it during certain games. Previously years ago, chipping away at it for full playoffs two years ago. And then last year, because I knew where we were tracking for the media rights. But we needed to build David an economic model to fund this. It wasn't just like you wave a wand and you can give a 20 to 30 million dollar benefit to someone through charter travel. So I felt very confident our owners felt confident that we had been building an economic model to sustain it over the long term because it also can't be you just offer it for a year or two. We need to think about it for decades that we're able to afford it. And so I felt good about that. And we did it outside of collective bargaining cycle.”

    2025-04-24 · The David Rubenstein Show · Cathy Engelbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Watching some games were TV linear. We would peak in the US. That's a US only number. That's not a global number. We have a lot of global fans too, and that's an untapped area of growth for us. But we continue to look at a huge increase in that viewership. I mean, even our draft at peak last year, over 3 million people watched the WMBA draft last year are all-star game, over 2 million people. These were all-time records. And remember, we don't necessarily compare ourselves with the NBA or other men's sports. They've been around the NBA's in their 78th year NFL, NHL, and MLB are all over 100 years old. We're going into our 29th season this year. So these comparisons to the men's league are tough. But certainly where we are today, I never thought we'd have as high viewership as we had last year.”

    2025-04-24 · The David Rubenstein Show · Cathy Engelbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “No, I think it's an option to take a look at the growth of the league, and if we continue on the growth trajectory, it's to provide more value, especially because ultimately that value goes to the players.”

    2025-04-24 · The David Rubenstein Show · Cathy Engelbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Yes, exactly. But after three years, we have an option to renegotiate around the price of that if we keep growing because we've grown the league enormously just in a couple year period. So we after three years have an option. We also have the option to enter an additional media rights deals. I call them our Tranche 2 deals. And we're in the process of negotiating those.”

    2025-04-24 · The David Rubenstein Show · Cathy Engelbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Yes, we actually negotiated our own deal, but along when you partner what I call go to market with the MBA, the MBA and WMBA are the only two major professional sports in the U.S. that have essentially opposite seasons. We're made October, they're October to June, but April is the end of their regular season. So we could provide, think about the disruption in the media landscape from linear to streaming to subscription models. And we together with the MBA can provide over $320 plus days of programming. So we hit all 12 months for programming for a streamer, even if it's NBC and Peacock or Amazon. So it was a huge advantage. We're much more valuable going to market with them on this deal with NBC and ABC ESPN, Disney, as well as Amazon. So that was a huge positive for us. And we had a great deal. It's historic for women's sports.”

    2025-04-24 · The David Rubenstein Show · Cathy Engelbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Yeah, I think that narrative became the narrative, but I think we have a really exciting, fast-paced physical game. The physicality, I think, surprised a lot of the new fans that came in. Game's pretty physical in college, but then when you come to WMBA and it's all the great players from the best colleges in one place, 144 of them last year with our 12 teams. We're expanding now. So I think it was very physical at first for a lot of new eyes on the game. I think there were unfortunately some inappropriate plays that happened, but over the course of the whole season, I think Caitlin really adjusted well. So did Angel because Angel was very physical for her at first two. And I think all of our rookies were Kia Jackson and Cameron Brink got hurt early in the season. But, you know, they all adjusted to the physicality of our game. And I think our fans didn't adjust as quickly. And then that narrative kind of got away from us.”

    2025-04-24 · The David Rubenstein Show · Cathy Engelbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “When I came into the league, people watch sports for three basic reasons for rivalries, for games of consequence, and for household names if you know the players. And we didn't have a lot of household names, even though we had amazing players back then and have amazing players beyond Caitlin and Angel. So rivalries are generally good for sports, and women's sports, sometimes it's complicated by the social media vitriol, which we denounce. It's terrible what some of these players have to endure. And so the hatred, the vitriol, the misogyny, the homophobia, the racism, there's no place we're in sport. And we like to be known in sport as a big uniter. So that's the negative part of that. But the positive certainly has been that people are watching. I mean, we brought tens of millions of new people into our sport last year because this rivalry came out of college.”

    2025-04-24 · The David Rubenstein Show · Cathy Engelbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Yeah, so we've announced team 14 and 15 in Toronto and Portland, and we have a process right now for additional teams where we have a lot of demand and a lot of ownership groups around the country interested.”

    2025-04-24 · The David Rubenstein Show · Cathy Engelbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “The new team is in the Bay Area, the Golden State Valkyries, and they're going to kill it this year off the court for sure. And on the court they'll be, they had an expansion draft, so it'll be interesting to see.”

    2025-04-24 · The David Rubenstein Show · Cathy Engelbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “So starting this season, there'll be 13 teams. We had 12 for a long time. 13 teams on our way to 16 or more. Who's the new team?”

    2025-04-24 · The David Rubenstein Show · Cathy Engelbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source