Diary of a WNBA negotiator
Planet Money
NPR
4.6 • 30.5K Ratings
🗓️ 9 May 2026
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Alysha is the oldest player in the league – and when she started she was making a yearly salary of about $36,400. The players flew economy, the rookies in middle seats. They doubled up in hotel rooms. The league was just starting out, wasn’t bringing in money, and, as Alysha says, “That's just what you got.”
Jump forward to 2025 and fans are crowding into stadiums, games are on primetime TV, and the WNBA has a 3.1 billion dollar media rights deal.
So when the players’ contract came up for renewal, they had a once in a generation opportunity to change the future for all of women’s basketball. Maybe all of women's sports. Today on the show, we hear Alysha’s minute by minute account of what it’s like to be a rookie doing high-stakes bargaining. It came right down to the buzzer.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Planet Money from NPR. |
| 0:05.4 | There's this player in the WNBA, her name is Alicia Clark, who has kind of a reputation. |
| 0:11.4 | I think my teammates would describe me as a tough, gritty, winning, like a winner. |
| 0:19.1 | Can you go into winner a little bit? Like, what does that mean? |
| 0:41.8 | I'm going to be in the right position at the right time. I'm going to be prepared. Yeah, I just want to win at all costs. And whatever that looks like, whatever I need to do is what I'll do. So, and I have a track record of winning. Yeah, she's understating it a little bit., when we were talking to her, the only time she seemed kind of bored was when she was listing her accomplishments. |
| 0:43.9 | Going back to high school, like, I won a state championship. |
| 0:46.5 | She went on to win championships in college and in overseas leagues. |
| 0:50.0 | Then in the WMBA winning three championships with three of the, how many teams have I played for? |
| 0:56.4 | So just to be clear, we're talking to a three-time WNBA champion. |
| 1:00.5 | Yes. |
| 1:02.8 | Awesome. |
| 1:03.8 | But recently, she took part in a competition that had higher stakes than any game she's ever played. |
| 1:10.3 | Alicia knows long grueling workouts. |
| 1:11.9 | She's learned dozens of defensive schemes and offensive plays. |
| 1:15.1 | She's used to practicing, preparing, strategizing. |
| 1:18.4 | But this was a totally different kind of endurance challenge. |
| 1:21.3 | Because instead of running drills, she was studying contracts and labor law. |
| 1:25.8 | You know, taking the time to sit down and go through this 300-page |
| 1:28.5 | document and read, and if it was something I didn't understand, I googled it. And I'm like, okay, what does X, Y, and Z mean? Oh, okay, got it. And so then I would go back and reread a section. And then if there were questions, hey, I saw this. What exactly does this mean? She was doing all of this studying because for the first time in her life, she was going to be negotiating the contract for all the players in the WNBA. |
| 1:50.5 | And look, it's normal for players to be involved in collective bargaining. |
| 1:54.3 | When union workers sign a new contract with their employers, some of the actual workers have to be part of the negotiations. |
| 2:00.6 | So Alicia was going to be one of the negotiations. So Alicia was going to be |
... |
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