Today the WNBA season tips off, but Dallas Wings veteran forward Alysha Clark has already won a high-stakes competition. She \u2013 and a Nobel Prize winning economist \u2013 were on the team that negotiated a ground-breaking contract for the players. And Alysha wrote all about it in her journal.<\/p>\n
Alysha is the oldest player in the league \u2013 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\u2019t bringing in money, and, as Alysha says, \u201cThat’s just what you got.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
So when the players\u2019 contract came up for renewal, they had a once in a generation opportunity to change the future for all of women\u2019s basketball. Maybe all of women’s sports. Today on the show, we hear Alysha\u2019s minute by minute account of what it\u2019s like to be a rookie doing high-stakes bargaining. It came right down to the buzzer.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Our book:\u00a0Planet Money: A Guide to the Economic Forces That Shape Your Life<\/a>\u00a0is in stores now.\u00a0<\/p>\n Subscribe to Planet Money+<\/a><\/p>\n Listen free:\u00a0Apple Podcasts<\/a>,\u00a0Spotify<\/a>,\u00a0the NPR app<\/a>\u00a0or anywhere you get podcasts.<\/p>\n Facebook<\/a>\u00a0\/\u00a0Instagram<\/a>\u00a0\/\u00a0TikTok<\/a>\u00a0\/ Our weekly\u00a0Newsletter<\/a>.<\/p>\n This episode was produced by Emma Peaslee and Willa Rubin. It was edited by Marianne McCune. It was fact-checked by Vito Emanuel and engineered by Jimmy Keeley and James Willets. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer.<\/p>\n Music: NPR Source Audio – “Nights Like This,” “Funk Dive,” and “Tropical Heat”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Today the WNBA season tips off, but Dallas Wings veteran forward Alysha Clark has already won a high-stakes…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":657387,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[629],"tags":[49,48,82,630],"class_list":["post-657386","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wnba","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-sports","tag-wnba"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/657386","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=657386"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/657386\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/657387"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=657386"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=657386"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=657386"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}