What the WNBA can learn from other pro leagues' push for universal charter flights

The first NBA team to fly privately for road trips used VCRs to watch game tape. Depending on one’s own relationship with VHS, it was either an eternity ago or really not that long ago at all.

It was the 41st season in NBA history when Detroit Pistons owner William Davidson purchased a private plane for $2.5 million ahead of the 1987-88 season and flew his team “in style,” according to a headline in The Boston Globe. In one of the article’s anecdotes, four-time All-Star Bill Laimbeer brought barbecue to share on an 18-minute plane ride to Cleveland.

Two decades later, Laimbeer was back cramming his 6-foot-11 frame into the limited space of commercial airlines as a head coach in the WNBA. Forget barbecue for the league’s best team. In 2021, his Las Vegas Aces had to find food at a local Walmart following flight delays, missing luggage and traffic. Laimbeer joked he was “looking for the booze” because of the frustration of it all.

The lack of charter flights in the WNBA has remained an issue and took on greater urgency this week when Brittney Griner and the Phoenix Mercury were harassed by a “social media figure and provocateur” when they were flying from Dallas to Indiana on Saturday. The individual recorded the interaction with Griner, who was released in a prisoner exchange with Russia in December. She had been declared wrongfully detained by the United States government for 10 months.

The collective bargaining agreement requires teams to fly commercially as a way to level the playing field for less wealthy franchises. In the past, the WNBA has provided charters in a few sticky situations as they arose and during certain postseason series. This season, teams are allowed to use charters for flights between back-to-back games, for the Commissioner’s Cup game if they win the berth and for the full postseason.

The Mercury and WNBA worked together on a plan to travel safely and securely given Griner’s status as a household name beyond sports. They plan to evaluate it “periodically” with the Mercury “leading on that evaluation,” WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert told a group of reporters on opening night in Los Angeles.

Up until the incident, it was assumed, but unsaid by the team or league, that at minimum Griner would be mostly flying privately. The WNBA Players Association told ESPN there may have been uncertainty on if the Mercury were allowed to pay for the charters, though the WNBA told ESPN it told the team early in the year to “move ahead with any arrangements they felt were appropriate and needed, including charter flights.” It appears they did use a semi-private charter for their first road trip to Los Angeles to start the season.

Griner’s situation is a special case, but showcases how a professional sports league flying commercially can create dangerous situations in a time of social media in people’s pockets and heightened politicization of anything and everything. That’s particularly true for a league that has been defined by social justice and progressive views. And one that has seen viewership, interest and outside marketing flourish.

“There’s a lot of other players, Candace [Parker], A’ja [Wilson], a lot of players that get recognized on the street now,” Engelbert said. “It’s an outcome of something that was part of our strategy but you also want to make sure security is No. 1 and safety of our players.”

Engelbert has said charters are too costly and the economic model currently isn’t there to make it feasible long term. She estimated the cost at between $20 million and $30 million per year. A new, more profitable media rights deal would change that feasibility assessment, but it’s still a few years off.

Most of the major professional sports leagues in the U.S. have flown privately for decades without stipulations written into their collective bargaining agreements. MLS, the league to which the WNBA is most often compared, is the one looming exception. But even it has adjusted its policy in the most recent CBA to increase the use of charter flights every season after a push from the players and their union.

How the NBA adopted charter flights

The NBA travel guidelines in the 1980s were similar to how the WNBA currently works, but without limitations. They required teams to arrive the night before a game if they are off that day and if they’re playing a back-to-back, the team must take the first flight out to hopefully prevent the team from missing a game. The CBA at the time stipulated players must sit in first class when possible and if they can’t, the player will be paid the difference between coach and first class or purchase the seat next to the player. There was notably no requirement to fly commercial.

The Pistons first began flying privately at a cost of approximately $500,000 per season in 1987-88, according to the Globe and detailed in Power Plays. Adjusted for inflation it would be a cost of approximately $1.4 million, which is the current salary cap per WNBA team this year.

The Portland Trail Blazers also started flying privately and the two teams met in the 1990 NBA Finals. Other teams quickly followed their style and by November 1991, 20 of the then-27 NBA teams were chartering some or all of their road trips, per the Deseret News.

The reasons behind flying private versus commercial were all largely the same as why WNBA players have spent years pushing for the change. Players are able to fly out immediately after games, rather than wake up in the early hours of the morning. They spend less time in airports, have more leg room on flights and can spend more hours on recovery during a tight schedule. And at the time, the state of the airline industry was shifting away from easier red-eye flights that NBA teams frequently used between most major cities, per The Associated Press.

More teams began purchasing their own planes and others began chartering their entire road schedule. As charters cropped up around the league, the Deseret News article highlights what proponents of allowing, but not requiring, charters within the WNBA’s CBA have highlighted:

“Opinions vary widely on how effective chartering is. Some executives consider it a gross extravagance while others say it is simply keeping pace with their peers.”

To stay competitive and improve their own product — which in turn boosts their own pocketbook — team owners could choose to change their traveling ways. The have-nots began to publicly call on their team owners to provide charters for at least some trips. In November 1991, San Antonio Spurs players led by center David Robinson were “finally fed up” and called out team owner Red McCombs in an open letter to the local newspaper for not providing them.

Robinson was the No. 1 overall pick in the 1987 NBA Draft and served his military commitment to the Navy before joining the Spurs in 1989, when he won Rookie of the Year. It didn’t help that San Antonio was not a major airline hub and the team often had to take connecting flights.

“It will just help give us an advantage in some games,” forward Sean Elliott said in the Tyler Morning Telegraph, via Power Plays. “I think you also have to consider how David [Robinson] feels, how he’s followed around and the center of attention at all the airports.”

McCombs quickly took bids from charter companies and the team began flying privately in the new calendar year. That same month in January 1992, rookie center Dikembe Mutombo followed suit and aired the issue in the newspapers as the Denver Nuggets were the only team without chartering some flights.

“We need a charter,” he said, via the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. “We need a plane. Put this in the paper. I can’t believe we are the only team in the league with no charter, man.”

In 1993, the Nuggets franchise acquired their “new weapon in their war against road losses,” as described in The Daily Sentinel in Colorado after the largest league disparity between home wins (28) and road losses (eight). By the 1995-96 season, only the Utah Jazz were not chartering flights full-time and that’s because of stipulations in their arena sponsorship contract with Delta.

Head coach Jerry Sloan complained. Players, including John Stockton, complained. And the Jazz began chartering, completing the league-wide movement to chartered road trips that was purely team and player-led over an eight-year span.

Most long-established North American men’s sports took this route of slow movement to fully chartered schedules. The NHL’s commercial versus charter flight conflict bubbled in the 1980s, when the St. Louis Post-Dispatch tabbed chartered flights as costing around $10,000 per trip. “Some [teams] charter often, others rarely,” hockey columnist Ron Cobb wrote.

In MLB, the New York Yankees were already using charter flights an estimated 90% of the time during 1980, per the New York Times News Service. With larger teams that require about 50 seats for players, coaches, trainers and “writers traveling with the club,” the charter cost made more sense. And with games played nearly every night, baseball would have more nightmares than most leagues if it continued flying commercial.

When travel budgets were being pinched in the 1980s due to inflation, rise in cost of aviation fuel and deregulation of airline ticket prices, the New York Rangers and NBA’s New York Knicks lowered the number of charter flights. To combat the costs, particularly for teams in the midwest and outside of hub areas, the NBA introduced geographical realignment for “natural geographic rivalries.” The NHL had similar conversations around the schedule and better travel routes to help ease the burden.

MLS and its fight for charters

MLS played its inaugural season in 1996, one year prior to the WNBA, and has had a similar plight over charter flights.

The league’s first CBA was signed ahead of the 2005 season and it ran through 2009. In Article 11, it stipulates that team travel greater than 250 miles “shall be by air on regular commercial carriers, when reasonably practical.”

“There shall be no obligation by MLS and/or a Team to provide chartered air transportation,” it stipulated.

Clubs played between 15 and 16 away matches in a time frame between approximately the start of April to mid or late October. They mostly played one match a week, making travel easier than a basketball schedule of two to four games in a seven-day span.

A new CBA deal was reached ahead of the 2010 season with the help of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, which was also used in 2015. The 2010 CBA increased the salary budget to $2.55 million with increases of 5% every year and a minimum salary floor of $40,000. That contract was apparently never finalized and the sides went off of a memorandum of understanding.

The 2015 CBA dictated that teams could ease travel burdens by using charter flights sparingly.

“MLS shall continue its policy of allowing Teams to provide chartered air transportation for four legs of flights per year, and nothing in the CBA shall prohibit MLS, in its sole and absolute discretion, from providing additional chartered air flights.”

In the ensuing years, MLS teams ran into the same travel problems WNBA teams ran into. Wayne Rooney publicly chastised the stipulation in August 2019 during a summer of public frustration by players regarding travel as they dealt with CBA negotiations. There also appeared to be an issue of MLS team owners not actually using all of the four one-way charter trips available to them.

MLS Commissioner Don Garber said he would “be supportive of 100% charters,” but it had to be part of the sides’ mutual decision on “how an available pool of money is going to be allocated to a wide variety of needs.”

Expanded charter rules did come out of the pot for the current CBA, which was announced in February 2020, a month after the WNBA’s current one. Charter flights were the headline item alongside increased veteran minimum salaries ($81,375 in 2020) and Section 11.1 grew from one large paragraph to 1½ pages.

All playoff games as well as CONCACAF trips outside of the U.S. and Canada are required to be chartered. For MLS regular season games, teams were required to fly privately for eight legs of flights in 2020 and 2021.

That jumped by two to 10 legs this season, increasing by two every season until 18 in 2017. The CBA also requires MLS and team representatives to meet with the players’ union once a year to discuss charter priorities with consideration of travel conditions. It didn’t fully extinguish the problem out of the gate, but set the crawl toward full charters the more established men’s leagues experience.

How media rights deals play into the issue

The NHL, NFL and NBA have been around longer than either league and play more months of the year than the WNBA. They’ve increased their media rights deals over time, which has been the leading fuel behind their growth in other areas. The WNBA currently can’t say the same, even though its viewership is on par with other leagues.

The NHL’s deal with Turner Sports is worth $225 million per season and its deal with ESPN is reportedly $400 million, an increase from the combined $300 million deal it had with NBC Sports and Disney Streaming Services. The NHL averaged 373,000 viewers in the first half of its 2022-23 schedule, down from an average of 478,000 to that point in 2021-22.

MLS was partially able to write in required charters because of its media rights deals even before the 10-year, $2.5 billion agreement it signed with Apple in November 2022. In its previous agreements with ESPN and Fox, MLS brought in a combined $65 million from them per year, according to Forbes. The league averaged 287,000 viewers in 2021.

The WNBA’s deal with ESPN is worth an estimated $27 million per year (up to $33 million by 2025, when it runs out) and it averaged 372,000 viewers in 2021 during the same time frame of games. Engelbert has targeted the next media rights deal as a game changer for the league and the primary way to increase player salaries, benefits and more. The league also has deals with Prime, CBS and ION currently on the books.

Breanna Stewart made flying charter a part of her free agency reportedly in part because of Griner, and it could be one of the league’s most pivotal moments. She opted to sign with the New York Liberty, whose team owners, Joe Tsai and Clara Wu Tsai, were fined $500,000 in 2021 for secretly flying the team privately to games.

“When talking to Clara and Joe, they feel the same way,” Stewart said during her introductory news conference in February. “They’re fighting to elevate the standard. We’re hoping it’s not just a no, but can be a maybe and eventually a yes, when it comes to chartered flights.”

Las Vegas Aces team owner Mark Davis is also in favor of a travel change. He has found other ways to invest in his team, such as a new team-specific training facility, that arguably also creates unfair competitive advantages. New Mercury team owner Mat Ishbia advocated for charters in a story released the day of the team’s first home game, an emotional homecoming for Griner that brought out a heavy media presence.

The Liberty will take one regular season charter when they play in Las Vegas on Aug. 17 and in Phoenix the following night. The Los Angeles Sparks were the first beneficiaries of the new policy when they took a flight from Phoenix home to LA for a game earlier this month.

“Even if you just apply it to a select number of games, that’s just such a huge difference-maker, especially if you’re playing every other day in different cities,” Sparks forward and WNBA Players Association President Nneka Ogwumike said, via The Los Angeles Times. “I think there’s a lot of different ways to get creative about it.”