Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Over 10,000 U.S. hotel employees went on strike, Joanna Geraghty's JetBlue is delaying the delivery of 44 airplanes, and women's sports are doing things differently. Have a wonderful Tuesday!
- Team players. This weekend, most players in the National Women's Soccer League became free agents. The Sept. 1 milestone was part of the league's recently negotiated collective bargaining agreement, which eliminated the draft in the sport.
The NWSL is now the first major North American professional sports league to get rid of its draft. It's a historic decision that commissioner Jessica Berman hopes inspires other leagues to reexamine their baked-in assumptions about how things have to be done. "Just ask the question of whether this serves [your] interests," she advises. "Once you ask the question, you're forced to really analyze what you're doing and why."
For the NWSL, the decision to eliminate the draft came down to two factors. First, there's the global nature of soccer; the 12-year-old American league competes with leagues around the world for talent, and those leagues don't have drafts, which means that players at all stages of their careers can choose where they play. Second, that "free choice," as Berman describes it, was deeply important to NWSL players. "We have moms in our league, we have players who have other interests that are part of how they define themselves," she says. "Psychologically for our athletes, it was really important to them to have free choice of where they're going to play."
The historic agreement is a reminder that women's sports aren't a monolith. As excited as fans are about growth across women's basketball, soccer, hockey, volleyball, and more, each sport and league is charting its own future—and what's best for one may not be for the other.
And the NWSL's pioneering decision is an example of how so many women's leagues today are willing to experiment, not just do things as they've always been done. The WNBA is reckoning with similar questions amid record viewership—where to replicate the formula of the NBA and where to chart its own path. Athletes are building from scratch with leagues like Unrivaled, a 3x3 women's basketball league, and Athletes Unlimited, a network of women's sports.
"There's been a default assumption that if you want to build a successful league, you have to build it like the leagues that have been around for 100 years. We know those leagues were built for men's sports and at a different time in history," Berman says. "The thing we're most proud of is being in a position to innovate and pressure-test the status quo."
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
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