PHOENIX — Brittney Griner opened up about the WNBA now promising to provide full-time charter flight service for its teams during the season.
"I always said that safety is the number one key. Our safety should have always been high priority," Griner said to local media on Thursday. "I understand we're a league where we're more accessible to our fans, and that's good to a certain extent, but I feel like we've hit the threshold now where it can be an endangerment."
"We intend to fund a full-time charter for this season,” commissioner Cathy Engelbert said in a meeting with sports editors recently.
She said the league will launch the program “as soon as we can get planes in places.”
Engelbert said the program will cost the league around $25 million per year for the next two seasons.
The WNBA is attracting more attention than ever thanks to rookies like Caitlin Clark, who helped the NCAA reach its best viewership in history for women’s basketball, with nearly 19 million fans watching the title game, along with Angel Reese, who went to the Met Gala on Monday night, and Cameron Brink.
Clark attracted attention walking through the airport with her new Indiana Fever teammates for a preseason game with the Dallas Wings recently. That exhibition sold out with fans lined up eager to get inside.
Minnesota Lynx forward Napheesa Collier said flying via charter planes is a safety issue as the names, stars and fans grow. She noted video showing Clark having bodyguards surrounding her at the airport and trying to protect Brittney Griner last year while traveling.
“All these players and these faces are becoming so popular that it really is about that as much as it is about recovery,” Collier said.
Flights have always been an issue for the WNBA and that only increased last year with the league working with Griner and the Phoenix Mercury. They had to go commercial air, and the All-Star center who had been detained in Russia for nearly 10 months was harassed by what the WNBA called a “provocateur.”
The WNBA said in a statement at the time that it was looking into the team's run-in with a “social media figure" whose “actions were inappropriate and unfortunate.”
"There are threats that are present that people know about. Last year we had somebody roll up on us and that situation could have went totally different," Griner reflected. "Luckily it wasn't as aggressive as it could have been. But we've seen in media times where that can go really bad really quickly. That's one less thing we can take off our radar and focus on the game, getting there, I think it's just going to be better for us."
Griner also said that she's thankful that the younger players entering the league won't have to go through the travel issues players before them experienced.
