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The NWSL’s CBA journey through the eyes of three player leaders

Current NWSL Players Association president Tori Huster oversaw the ratification of this year’s CBA. (Ira L. Black – Corbis/Getty Images)

When Brooke Elby found herself suddenly traded from the Utah Royals to the Chicago Red Stars in a three-team deal in 2018, she considered quitting the sport of soccer entirely.

Staying in a Chicagoland hotel room while her car sat in a Salt Lake City parking lot for weeks with all of her things, Elby reflected on her position in the NWSL, a 6-year-old league where player rights were not yet protected under a collective bargaining agreement.

“That was the first time I ever really felt like I was such a pawn in this league, and really like no one valued me,” she says.

During her stay in that hotel room, Elby reached out to a number of trusted friends to figure out what to do. One of the people she contacted was Yael Averbuch West, president of the NWSL Players Association at the time, who presented Elby with a different path: Instead of walking away, she could get involved.

The NWSLPA has had only three presidents in its five-year history: Averbuch West, Elby and current president Tori Huster. The PA hired Meghann Burke as executive director in early 2021 to oversee operations and negotiations, but only active players in the league can serve on the board.

The work those three have put in behind the scenes led to a landmark achievement to start the year. On Jan. 31, before the 2022 preseason, the NWSL and the players association ratified the league’s first CBA, ushering in a new era of player protections and compensation.

As all three know, the responsibility of balancing playing and litigating is something you can’t prepare for until you’re in the thick of it.

Averbuch West played in Women’s Professional Soccer for three years before the league folded in 2012, making way for the birth of the NWSL in 2013. When she founded the NWSLPA four years later, she had to focus on her game while making sure she could pay her bills and commit enough time and energy to getting a fledgling union up and running. It didn’t help that the average NWSL salary at the time was far below a living wage.

“There was relationship-building, there was education, there was organization — fortifying our own constitution and bylaws — and going to preseason to meet with the players to explain what a union is,” says Averbuch West. “None of us were part of a union ever before; we’ve not worked in other industries.”

The NWSL officially recognized the Players Association as an exclusive bargaining representative after the 2018 season, but at the time, both parties agreed that progress had to be made before they could sit down and negotiate a CBA. So, Averbuch West threw herself into the groundwork.

“Yael has a knack for getting things done,” Huster says. “Her ability to just figure out the small tasks that need to get done, and then mobilizing people, has been super important in starting what is a small business.”

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Yael Averbuch West playing with FC Kansas City in 2017, the year after she founded the NWSLPA. (Nick Tre. Smith/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

When Averbuch West suspended her playing career in 2019 and moved to an executive director role with the NWSLPA, Elby was ready to take over as president. In her second year in Chicago, Elby tackled administrative work with enthusiasm. She redid the website, opened a bank account, filed tax forms and created social media accounts for the NWSLPA.

The tasks were overwhelming for an active professional athlete, but Elby found solace in Averbuch-West’s support during the dark times, and the clarity that comes with a shifting of priorities.

“It was almost a freeing feeling,” Elby says. “I stopped caring if I had a job or not. If somebody was going to waive me, that’s fine. I cared about the players, and I was like, if I have to be the one to say something that nobody wants to hear, or that’s going to get somebody cut from a team, I’m willing to say it because this isn’t a career that I love anymore.”

In 2019, the NWSLPA began conceptualizing the CBA process knowing that, in order to make a contract happen, they’d need some outside help. Elby reached out to Becca Roux, executive director of the U.S. women’s national team players association, and Roux put the NWSLPA in contact with the NFLPA. The advice they gave to the NWSL players was simple: If you don’t yet have the legalities in place, you need to have the structure — and that comes with a staff.

With no extra income to work with, Elby started scouting outside sponsorships. Roux connected her with Hulu, a streaming platform that was already running a campaign with USWNT stars called “Hulu has Live Sports.” Spending the offseason in Los Angeles, Elby had the chance to stop by the Hulu offices and speak with executives, who wanted to help the players in any way they could. But because the NWSL unilaterally owned the name, image and likeness rights of all of their players, the PA couldn’t commit to a content deal alone.

“[Hulu] told me their vision for what they want to do with women’s sports, and my first answer to them was, ‘This is amazing,’” says Elby. “But as players, we had no rights to anything. So I can’t sit here and be like, ‘Yeah, let’s do content,’ because we couldn’t.”

So, they got creative. Hulu agreed to donate one dollar to the NWSLPA for every juggling video posted with the company’s official hashtag, for a total of $100,000. While the production didn’t quite meet the vision — the fans generated somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 videos, boosted through the PA’s still modest social media followings — the Hulu execs stuck to their word and made sure the PA got the full $100,000.

“That was probably the coolest experience to be a part of,” Elby says, “just being able to talk to these executives who didn’t care about how it was going to benefit them directly, but cared about in the future, how this was going to benefit women’s sports.”

In 2022, revenue from group licensing largely covers the costs of the NWSLPA, and the union was recently able to hire former player Sydney Miramontez, effectively doubling full-time staff. As part of the new CBA, the NWSL has agreed to pay the players $255,000-$300,000 per year for group licensing rights. The PA also accepts direct donations from the public. NWSL sponsor Ally, which signed on as the union’s first official partner earlier this month, will match any contributions of up to $25,000 made to a recently established players fund.

Elby’s work in 2019 not only set the NWSLPA up to become a legitimate business, but also prepared the players for collective action. It was actually during that season under Elby’s presidency that the NWSL had its first, albeit brief, work stoppage.

In late April, the Red Stars and Reign FC had to make a call on whether to play an early-season match in Chicago, despite inches of snow covering the field. The league determined the game was to be played as scheduled, but after attempting to warm-up on the slippery surface, players weren’t so sure. Elby, acting as PA president, asked her team’s locker room and the Reign’s captain whether they believed they could play the game safely, and both sides expressed concerns about possible injuries.

“These are our bodies you’re asking us to use and to put at risk for a game that you just don’t want to reschedule,” says Elby, who called many members of the league office that night to make the players’ wishes known. The game was ultimately called off and rescheduled for the next day.

“It was all these women. They were the ones who really stood up for what mattered,” she says.

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Brooke Elby's trade to the Chicago Red Stars in 2018 was a pivotal moment in her career as an NWSL organizer. (Quinn Harris/Getty Images)

Elby retired from professional soccer at the end of the 2019 season, and Huster took over as president in early 2020. Instead of diving right into CBA talks, however, Huster began her tenure navigating the pandemic and fighting for player protections heading into the NWSL’s first-ever Challenge Cup.

The experience actually proved pivotal in setting the stage for the current CBA. The NWSLPA arranged guaranteed contracts for players uncomfortable with competing during the pandemic, a model the WNBA Players Association adopted ahead of the league’s 2020 Wubble season. They also maintained constant communication with leadership, particularly Managing Director of Competition and Player Affairs Liz Dalton, to ensure the proper protocols were in place.

The Challenge Cup successfully sheltered players from COVID-19, but even then, the fissures forming within the league began to crack. Players struggled with their mental health during a long month in a strict quarantine bubble, and the league failed to reckon with the conversation about racial equality that swept the nation during the summer of 2020.

Elby and Averbuch West shared the responsibilities of co-executive director until Burke came aboard officially in early 2021. That was when CBA talks became more serious, and the PA started interviewing outside legal counsel. Amid the instability of the 2021 season, with multiple abuse scandals rocking the league, Huster had to juggle playing, contract bargaining and standing in as a player advocate for basic safety.

“Through the entire process, I’ve just tried to be somewhat of a vehicle,” Huster says. “And we’ve had so many conversations even all through last season with the player group at large, and just trying to, through myself and through my position, reflect what it is that the players are trying to say.”

“She’s just one of those people who gets it,” Elby says of Huster. “She knows what all the players are thinking. She will put their opinions over hers first, she will always listen.”

For Huster, there are very few silver linings in what players had to go through last year, but she does find solace in the way players fought for each other and the progress they made along the way.

“These former players felt this pain, and we still can see their pain. And without their pain, this wouldn’t be possible,” Huster says. “We wouldn’t be where we are together as a collective, or able to come together as we did.”

It took the threat of a work stoppage to finally get the deal done, but in 2022, the players will enter their first NWSL season with rights protected under contract. Those include a 60 percent increase in the minimum salary and guarantees for maternity and mental health leave. Hanging over all of it is the understanding that the sacrifices players made for decades in women’s soccer led to this moment.

“I don’t think there was any point that I was like, ‘Well, I wish this existed when I was there,’ but I can be like, ‘This exists now because I was there,’” Elby says.

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NWSL players came together last year to take a stand against abuse within the league. (Jesse Louie/Just Women's Sports)

Even with the huge milestone behind them, for all three women, the work goes on. Averbuch West has transitioned into a new role as general manager of Gotham FC. She envisions a future where players are part of the decision-making process and work with ownership to create a better league for everybody. Elby is currently in business school at Columbia University, expanding her knowledge base before returning to the world of women’s soccer (she’d love to be commissioner one day).

Huster is rehabbing an Achilles tendon injury and hopes to be back on the field with the Washington Spirit in 2022. In the meantime, she knows that a ratified contract is just step one. Unless teams are held accountable to the terms, the contract is just a piece of paper. Huster intends for the PA to serve as a support system for players whenever they need help.

In that sense, the work will always be bigger than soccer.

“I really think it’s not supposed to end,” Huster says. “I think we have to continue to adapt, and just be ready. Things are constantly changing and evolving, and if we don’t, we’re gonna potentially get left behind, or somebody will get left behind.”

“I think that’s the hardest balance that I’ve seen Tori and Yael manage so well,” Elby says. “You’re not just doing something for you, but you’re doing it for your friends. And they’re not just your co-workers, they’re your life, the people who are going to stand next to you at your wedding.”

Advocacy for a group of over 250 people will never be simple, and as the league expands, the hurdles ahead are daunting. But as the NWSLPA continues to evolve in the image of its first three leaders, the next generation of players can feel more secure in their freedom to get involved.

Claire Watkins is a contributing writer at Just Women’s Sports covering soccer and the NWSL. Follow her on Twitter @ScoutRipley.

WNBA Playoffs Pit New York Liberty Against Phoenix Mercury in Game 3

New York Liberty center Jonquel Jones reaches for the opening tip-off during Game 2 of the first round of the 2025 WNBA Playoffs.
The New York Liberty's WNBA title defense hopes rest on a win over Phoenix in Friday's Game 3. (David L. Nemec/NBAE via Getty Images)

The first round of the 2025 WNBA Playoffs ends on Friday night, when the No. 4 Phoenix Mercury and No. 5 New York Liberty return to Arizona for a winner-take-all Game 3 — with a trip to the semifinals on the line.

"The message is, 'Everybody keep our heads up. This is a series, and Phoenix is a tough team,'" Liberty star Breanna Stewart said ahead of Friday's matchup.

Still battling an MCL sprain in her left knee, Stewart hopes for more quality time on the court to help New York bounce back from the Mercury's Game 2 blowout win.

While neither team has successfully defended at home so far, Phoenix will look for a boost from the Mercury fans as they try to oust the defending WNBA champs.

"It's just nice for everyone to get a home game," said Mercury forward Alyssa Thomas. "[But] in order to win a series, you got to win on the road."

"You see how competitive, how balanced this is," said Stewart, commenting on the league's new home-away-home first-round format. "How important it is for these kind of series to be going back and forth."

How to watch the New York Liberty vs. Phoenix Mercury in Game 3

It's win-or-go-home for both the No. 5 New York Liberty and No. 4 Phoenix Mercury in Game 3 of the 2025 WNBA Playoffs on Friday.

The high-stakes matchup will tip off at 9 PM ET, with live coverage on ESPN2.

A’ja Wilson and Alanna Smith Share 2025 WNBA Defensive Player of the Year Award

Minnesota Lynx forward Alanna Smith defends a shot from Las Vegas Aces center A'ja Wilson during a 2025 WNBA game.
Las Vegas Aces center A'ja Wilson and Minnesota Lynx forward Alanna Smith are the first athletes to share WNBA Defensive Player of the Year honors. (Candice Ward/Imagn Images)

The 2025 WNBA Defensive Player of the Year race ended in a tie on Thursday, as dominant seasons at both ends of the court saw Las Vegas Aces center A'ja Wilson and Minnesota Lynx forward Alanna Smith each receive 29 of the media panel's 72 total votes.

After finishing first this season in blocks per game (2.3), total rebounds (407), defensive rebounds (316), and combined steals and blocks (156), Wilson became just the fourth player in WNBA history named Defensive Player of the Year at least three times — adding this year's title to her previous 2022 and 2023 honors.

As for Smith, who picked up the award for the first time this year, the Lynx star ranked second overall in combined steals and blocks (135), third in both blocks per game (1.9) and total blocks (80), and tied for 10th in total steals (55) on the season.

Also snagging votes were Seattle Storm forward Gabby Williams, who came in second with nine votes, as well as Phoenix Mercury triple-double phenom Alyssa Thomas and fellow Minnesota Lynx star Napheesa Collier, who received three and two votes, respectively.

The win by both Wilson and Smith marks the first time in history that the WNBA Defensive Player of the Year honor has ended in a tie, reflecting both the top-notch level of talent on display across the league as well as the hyper-competitive nature of the 2025 end-of-year awards race on display across multiple categories.

Next up on the league's awards docket is Saturday's Sixth Player of the Year announcement, followed by the highly anticipated reveal of the 2025 WNBA MVP on Sunday.

San Diego Wave vs. Portland Thorns Mid-Table Clash Headlines NWSL Weekend

The San Diego Wave walk across the pitch during a 2025 NWSL match.
The San Diego Wave have just one win in their last five NWSL matches. (Stan Szeto/Imagn Images)

The NWSL promises a tense mid-table battle this weekend, as the No. 4 Portland Thorns take on the No. 5 San Diego Wave with both teams looking to keep late-season lags at bay.

After strong starts, the Thorns and Wave each have just one win in their last five games, with San Diego aiming to snap a two-game losing streak after falling to Gotham last weekend.

Even more, both clubs currently sit in a four-way tie for points on the NWSL table, giving Saturday's match extra weight in potentially shifting the standings this weekend.

"It's a really important moment for us as a team," said San Diego head coach Jonas Eidevall. "Because adversity will happen to people or teams at various points, and everything about now is how we respond."

Portland will also look to regain ground, perhaps drawing inspiration from the past after announcing Wednesday that the club plans to retire legendary forward Christine Sinclair's jersey in an October 4th ceremony.

Sinclair established herself as the Portland Thorns' all-time leading scorer, retiring last year with 79 goals across all NWSL competitions — the second-most ever scored by an NWSL player.

How to watch the Portland Thorns vs. San Diego Wave

The No. 4 Portland Thorns will host the No. 5 San Diego Wave at 10 PM ET on Saturday, with live coverage of the NWSL match airing on ION.

Las Vegas Aces Oust Seattle Storm to Book 7th Straight WNBA Semifinals Ticket

Las Vegas center A'ja Wilson celebrates the Aces' first-round series win in the 2025 WNBA Playoffs with her teammates.
A'ja Wilson led the Las Vegas Aces to their seventh straight WNBA semifinals on Thursday. (David Becker/NBAE via Getty Images)

No. 2 Las Vegas narrowly avoided a 2025 first-round postseason series upset on Thursday night, defeating the No. 7 Seattle Storm 74-73 in a deciding Game 3 to advance to the Aces' seventh-straight WNBA semifinals.

Aces star A'ja Wilson put her team on her back with another dominant performance, posting 38 points — including 25 in the second half — to outscore the rest of the Las Vegas lineup entirely.

"I am so proud of my team, we were resilient, that's what we need to be in these playoffs and I love each and every last one of them," Wilson said postgame.

Las Vegas got off to a slow start this year, but a late-season surge fueled by a renewed focus on depth saw the 2023 WNBA champs take the No. 2 playoff seed — and book yet another trip to the WNBA semifinals.

"I remember Chelsea [Gray] saying in a timeout, 'There's no time for my-bads anymore,'" said Wilson. "We have to play perfect basketball."

How to watch the Las Vegas Aces in the 2025 WNBA semifinals

Up next for No. 2 Las Vegas is a No. 6 Indiana side punching above their weight.

That said, the Fever did score a 2-1 record against the Aces in the 2025 regular season — and Las Vegas's lone win over Indiana came back in June.

"They haven't seen the real Aces yet," Las Vegas head coach Becky Hammon said of the Fever. "They caught us when we were a bit in turmoil."

The Aces will take aim at Indiana in Sunday's 3 PM ET semifinals opener, airing live on ABC.

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