NEW YORK (AP) — The WNBA will once again pay for charter flights for the entire playoffs as well as for back-to-back games during the upcoming season that require air travel, Commissioner Cathy Engelbert said Monday.
There are more back-to-back sets this season with the WNBA taking a long break for the Olympics in late July and early August. The league spent $4 million on charters in 2023 and will do the same this year.
“No one wants (charters) more than I do for these players. We need to be in the right financial position,” Engelbert said before the WNBA draft Monday night. “Just a few years ago we were surviving, now we're going from survive to thrive. We want to do it at the appropriate time.”
Engelbert also said she hopes to have 16 teams in the league by 2028, up from the current 12. The WNBA is adding a team next year, when a Golden State franchise in San Francisco will join the league. Other cities or metropolitan areas that Engelbert said are in the running include Philadelphia; Toronto; Portland, Oregon; Denver; Nashville; and South Florida.
“Our plan and goal is to get to 16 teams in the next few years,” she said.
Engelbert said she got calls last week from two other cities the league hadn't been talking to.
Golden State will get a chance to built its roster through an expansion draft.
“It will happen before the college draft and we'll share more details when we get closer to that,” Engelbert said. “Talking to general managers and coaches and teams and owners, there will be an expansion draft this year and it will probably be in December.”
Engelbert knows this year's draft has more household names 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. Other well-known players being drafted include Angel Reese, Kamilla Cardoso and Cameron Brink.
The commissioner noted that the WNBA bought ads that ran during NCAA Tournament broadcasts, starting with the Sweet 16.
“I'm thrilled we have household names coming in,” Engelbert said. “We need to market around that.”
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WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert speaks to the media before the WNBA basketball draft on Monday, April 15, 2024, in New York. (AP Photo/Adam Hunger)
BOSTON (AP) — Boston College students held a protest rally against the Israel-Hamas war last week.
Bullhorns were banned, lest the noise disturb studying for finals. Tents weren't allowed. Students who'd been arrested at other Boston campus protests were barred. After an allotted hour, the students went quietly back to their rooms.
A student protest movement has washed over the country since police first tried to end an encampment at Columbia University in New York nearly two weeks ago. But while there have been fiery rhetoric and tumultuous arrests on high-profile campuses from New York to Los Angeles, millions of students across the country have continued with their daily routines of working their way through school, socializing and studying for exams.
The protests are demonstrating wide differences among Americans in 2024, even for groups that have tended to unite during divisive times such as the 1960s.
Take Boston, the city most identified with American higher education and a lens onto the diversity of student bodies' reactions to the Israel-Hamas war.
Students have set up encampments on at least five campuses, including Northeastern University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University. But calm has prevailed elsewhere in Boston.
“It’s just not the vibe at this school,” said Emmett Carrier, a junior studying biology at Boston College, a Jesuit institution with an enrollment of 15,000. “I don’t think they’re as committed to it here as they are at other schools."
Boston College faculty and students had addressed the Israel-Hamas war in class discussions, through a faculty vigil and at a rally last week, “all of which were civil and respectful,” Boston College spokesperson Jack Dunn wrote in an email.
“It’s an atmosphere where students are very polite,” said Brinton Lykes, a professor of community psychology. “They will discuss things, debate things intellectually, but they are shockingly rule-bound.”
Juliana Parisi, a sophomore who attended the rally, said she thinks a lot of students who want to protest are afraid of the repercussions but also believes many students don’t want to get engaged.
“I do think that there is a good amount of apathy on campus,” she said.
It's worth remembering that most campuses don’t have encampments, said Robert Cohen, a professor at New York University who has studied the history of U.S. student protests. Even at those that do, the number of students involved is often not enough to fill even a single large lecture hall, he noted.
A day before the Boston College rally last week, Lykes helped organize a faculty vigil where speakers talked about grieving those who had died in the conflict and the history of events in the Middle East. She said there were uniformed and plainclothes police at the event. She got requests to check university identification and to make people leave backpacks outside and found some of the demands ridiculous, she said.
At Boston University, a sprawling urban campus not far from Fenway Park with a student enrollment of more than 35,500, students have avoided encampments but set out chairs to represent Israeli hostages and held die-ins to bring attention to those killed in Gaza. On Wednesday, many students at the school were hunkered down over laptops in study halls and cafeterias gearing up for the end of the school year and looming finals.
“We have our finals coming up next week," said Matt Przekop, a junior studying engineering. "People, if they were passionate, they wouldn’t really let this bar them from protesting.”
Brandon Colin O’Byrne, a freshmen who is also studying engineering, said students debate the issue but aren’t sitting in tents on campus.
“We have the school involved, we have students involved, we have individual groups involved," he said. “We also have tension” between Jewish and Palestinian students, but it generates productive debates, he added.
A protest at Emerson College in downtown Boston ended when police forcibly removed protesters, arresting more than 100. Another protest at Northeastern was also broken up by police, who detained more than 100 protesters who had created a tent encampment on campus.
Other local universities have allowed protests and tent encampments, including MIT, Harvard and Tufts University, although officials at some of the schools cautioned that the protests can’t go on indefinitely. At Harvard, school officials opted to lock the gates to Harvard Yard — where protesters set up camp — to all but those with school IDs.
One thing that has remained consistent over decades of student protests, Cohen said, is that they are unpopular with the public. But the campus movement is raising public awareness of the Israel-Hamas war.
Cohen said he believes the protests will likely simmer down over the summer, as students return home. They could easily kick off again as the U.S. election season progresses, he said.
Perry reported from Meredith, New Hampshire.
FILE- Attorney Antonio Massa Viana with National Lawyers Guild representing students speaks as Emerson students appeared in court for an arraignment on Thursday, April 25, 2024 in Boston. Protest camps have sprouted up over the past two weeks at dozens of campuses across the nation. Some schools have set up encampments on campuses, including Emerson. Others like Boston College have been calm. (David L Ryan/The Boston Globe via AP)
FILE - Northeastern University Police remove and arrest protesters one by one as they sit in zip tie handcuffs at the tent encampment on campus in Boston on Saturday, April 27, 2024. Protest camps have sprouted up over the past two weeks at dozens of campuses across the nation. Some schools have set up encampments on campuses, including Northeastern. Others like Boston College have been calm. (John Tlumacki/The Boston Globe via AP, File)
FILE - A passer-by, right, walks through an encampment of tents, Thursday, April 25, 2024, on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus, in Cambridge, Mass. Protest camps have sprouted up over the past two weeks at dozens of campuses across the nation. Some schools have set up encampments on campuses, including MIT. Others like Boston College have been calm. (AP Photo/Steven Senne)
FILE - Students protesting against the war in Gaza, and passersby walking through Harvard Yard, are seen at an encampment at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., on Thursday, April 25, 2024. Protest camps have sprouted up over the past two weeks at dozens of campuses across the nation. Some schools have set up encampments on campuses, including Harvard University. Others like Boston College have been calm. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis, File)
Students walk on the campus of Boston College, Monday, April 29, 2024, in Boston. While many colleges and universities in the Boston area have been scenes of encampments and arrests, Boston College has been relatively quiet. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)
Students walk on the campus of Boston College, Monday, April 29, 2024, in Boston. While many colleges and universities in the Boston area have been scenes of encampments and arrests, Boston College has been relatively quiet. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)
