Outspoken Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham said the WNBA needs a commissioner who is bold and confident and not focused on themselves during an exclusive interview with USA Today that was published Wednesday.
Cunningham said the vision of WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert doesn’t mesh with moving the league forward.
Engelbert’s contract expires after the 2026 season. This is her seventh campaign at the helm.
“You do have to have a person in power who is bold, who is confident, who wants the best for the players and not maybe for themselves all the time,” Cunningham told USA Today. “So I do feel like, as a whole, that could be a position that’s maybe open at the end of the year, but that’s not my call.”
Cunningham noted that NBA commissioner Adam Silver will decide Engelbert’s fate. She said the league can be filled with trailblazer players and needs a leader who has similar thoughts and visions.
“With where our league is trying to go, I feel like you just want someone who also wants that,” Cunningham said. “That’s just a hard position to be in, in her shoes, us as players — we always want more, more, more because we see how good it can be.”
Engelbert has felt a lot of heat recently, including highly contentious collective bargaining negotiations that threatened to postpone the start of the season before an agreement was reached.
During the season, there have been other issues, one that became louder when Cunningham came out strongly in favor of women’s sports being solely for women.
Cunningham emphasized in her remarks last month that “girls should never have to compete with biological men.”
Since then, there have been rallies outside WNBA arenas involving people who are both pro-Cunningham and anti-Cunningham.
During an Indiana game in Seattle, Storm co-owner Celeste Keaton used profanity at two teenage female fans holding signs supporting the views of Cunningham. The WNBA subsequently suspended Keaton from attending five home games.
Last Sunday, the Fever visited the Atlanta Dream and two female Cunningham fans were told they had to cover their pro-women shirts. The WNBA since said, “this should not have happened.”
Cunningham, who turned 30 on Sunday, has described her words about protecting women’s sports as “common sense.”
Last year, a New York Times poll displayed that 79% of Americans don’t want men playing in women’s sports.
The issue was also in the news when the Supreme Court issued a ruling in June that states can ban transgender athletes from participating in women’s and girl’s sports.
Cunningham is surprised as how everything she says seems to have a life of its own.
“When you do have so many eyes on you … that people can use your words for the positive, ” Cunningham said. “People can weaponize your words. So that’s just how people are. That’s how human nature is. So, that’s not gonna make me dim my light any more.
“I try to just show people love and try to go that route, and when people actually talk to me in person, I think they feel that, and I’m arms wide open. So I can’t control how other people do stuff, but I do think that you just always have to see how your words can maybe be interpreted by other people.
“But at the end of the day, if you’re constantly doing that, you’re going to lose yourself, and so I just try to control what I can control.”
The 6-foot-1 Cunningham is in her second season with the Fever after spending her first six campaigns with the Phoenix Mercury.
She is averaging 8.8 points and 2.4 rebounds in 35 games (three starts) this season as Indiana’s sixth person and leads the WNBA with a 45.8% 3-point shooting percentage.
–Field Level Media
