HARTFORD, Conn. — Natasha Cloud felt like she was playing the best basketball of her career to start the 2022 WNBA season. Then, after a road game against the Minnesota Lynx on May 8, the Washington Mystics star tested positive for COVID-19.
The flu-like symptoms only lasted for a few days, but Cloud has noticed a long-term effect. The way she recovers from playing isn’t the same anymore. Her body doesn’t respond as quickly as it once did to treatment. And she gets much more fatigued on a daily basis than she used to.
“It’s been really hard,” Cloud told the Hartford Courant last Saturday. “I went three years without COVID and because of how we travel and the ways in which we travel, I got COVID flying to our game in Minnesota. And that’s really tough because it doesn’t matter how much we abide by the protocols, how much we try to protect ourselves, with the lifted mandate of masks on public transportation we’re not safe.”
Travel conditions have long been a point of discontent for WNBA players. Flying commercial, as opposed to chartering flights like their NBA counterparts, has never been easy, but it has been especially challenging this year due to unique circumstances, including high risk of COVID-19 with the federal mask mandate lifted, frequent flight delays and cancellations, and managing recovery — all in a condensed 36-game season.
With the Connecticut Sun on a four-game West Coast road trip across three cities this week, the Hartford Courant took a deep dive into those issues.
COVID-19 issues arise in WNBA
Similar to Cloud, former league MVP Breanna Stewart contracted COVID-19 in early May following a road trip, leading her to call out the WNBA for its continued use of commercial flights.
The use of charter flights isn’t allowed by the league’s collective bargaining agreement, which states that teams can only provide players premium economy or similar enhanced coach seating on commercial flights.
After playing against the Aces in Las Vegas, Stewart missed two games on May 11 and 14, both of which the Seattle Storm lost. Cloud was out for two games on May 10 and 13, a stretch in which the Mystics went 1-1. They are two of 10 players who have entered the health and safety protocols so far this season.
The Mystics, Storm and Connecticut Sun have been especially hit hard. Alysha Clark is currently out for the Mystics as their second player to enter protocols. The Sun were without head coach and general manager Curt Miller, assistant coach Brandi Poole and forward Joyner Holmes for two games amid possibly their toughest stretch of the season — playing nine games in 17 days, including the start of their West Coast trip. Miller and Poole exited protocols on Wednesday. They recently signed forward Stephanie Jones, who was on the roster in 2021, to a hardship contract.
Five players have already been affected on the Storm. The team was without nearly a quarter of its roster in a 79-71 overtime victory over the New York Liberty last Friday, including WNBA all-time assist leader Sue Bird. Stephanie Talbot entered health and safety protocols last Thursday while Bird and Ezi Magbegor did so on Friday, marking the second time Seattle has found out it would be without a player on the same day it was set to play a game.
Under current league policy, players are only tested for COVID-19 if they are symptomatic. Their return to play is symptom-specific, but players are generally cleared after two negative tests, at least 24 hours apart. Until then, teams are able to temporarily replace those players with emergency hardship exceptions. The Storm quickly signed Kiana Williams and the former Storm guard scrambled to get to Seattle in time.
“As a team, we’ve really been trying to navigate the health and safety protocols and trying to be safe and do the right thing,” Stewart told reporters after the win over the Liberty. “Especially to find out all of this on game day and then still be told, ‘We’re going to continue to play the game, just find a hardship player.’ And Seattle is the farthest city in the country for someone to get to ... a little bit of some help and guidance from the WNBA would be nice.”
Though some of those cases arose during home stretches, including the latter three for the Storm, frequently going through crowded airports and flying on commercial flights puts teams at higher risk of contracting COVID-19.
“I can wear my mask, we can all wear our masks, but we’re sitting next to random people that aren’t wearing masks, and we don’t know who they are, we don’t know if they’re vaccinated, we don’t know anything about them,” Cloud said. “That’s a danger to us as players. And when you’re talking about just trying to do our jobs and put the best product on the floor every night, that makes it really hard.”
The impact of commercial travel
Less than a month into the season, flight delays and cancellations have already wreaked havoc across the league.
Air travel issues are more common than they were pre-pandemic as airlines face staff shortages. Only around three-fourths of flights from U.S. based airlines have departed on time in 2022, according to data from January to March recorded by the United States Department of Transportation, with over 4% of those being canceled.
Miller said the Sun started booking flights for the season in December, at which point finding the right combinations to fit all players, coaches and staff was already an issue. A few days before the start of the season, Connecticut already had more than 40 different flight changes and cancellations; some were minor time changes but others forced them to find an entirely different flight, airline or airport. That number has only increased since.
Prior to the current West Coast trip, the Sun’s only long-distance road game was against the Indiana Fever in Indianapolis after playing the team less than 48 hours prior in Connecticut. Right after that Friday night game on May 20, the Sun stayed at an airport hotel in Hartford for flights at dawn that connected through Chicago, as they couldn’t find a direct one after six or seven flight changes. Players and coaches also had to go on different flights, Miller said, with the coaches’ arriving at the airport at 4:45 a.m., and the players at 6 a.m.
The Sun’s scheduled flight to get home from the game on Sunday also had issues, so they stayed overnight and left the hotel at 4 a.m. to fly out on Monday morning. As a result, practice was canceled and Connecticut lost to the Dallas Wings on Tuesday.
“You’re always a little bit anxious that travel goes well,” Miller said before the season started. “That’s the challenge of our league, is dealing with those changes, dealing with the uncertainty of airlines, and we have to pivot when we need to pivot.”
Later that week, the Mystics’ flight to face the Sun was canceled because of storms. With no other options, the team took a 4 1/2-hour train ride to Connecticut. Cloud said they didn’t arrive around 10 p.m., checked into their hotel, found food and tried to manage sleep before a morning shootaround and game the next day.
Though the Sun are based in a location harder to fly out of and to get to than most teams, this issue isn’t unique to them — players posting about delays and cancellations is a frequent occurrence. All of the travel chaos has an impact on players’ game preparation and recovery. Both of those things are especially important this season, which features the most regular-season games in league history (36) in a condensed 101-day window to accommodate the FIBA Women’s Basketball World Cup in September.
“It’s really, really tough on our bodies, man,” reigning WNBA MVP and Sun forward Jonquel Jones said of the condensed season. “The older you get, the more you feel it, so it’s gonna be challenging. And the teams that stay together and have chemistry and that are making sure they take care of their bodies are going to be the teams that are gonna have successful seasons.”
Along with things like ice baths, massage therapy and stretching, Sun head athletic trainer Nicole Alexander places a big emphasis on proper sleep and nutrition for her players’ recovery, but the travel conditions often make that incredibly difficult. She and Miller talk every day about how the team is doing under the current conditions and even work together to adjust practice schedules when travel takes its toll.
“That really helps us too, that him and I have that relationship to give and take,” Alexander said. “That is another thing that I think is underrated is the athletic trainer-coach relationship, that there’s that mutual respect from both of us.”
Trainers around the WNBA maintain a group chat where they exchange advice on how to best deal with the current conditions, Alexander said. Many have compared this year to the bubble season in 2020 in terms of the impact on players’ bodies, with an added strain because of all the traveling.
“There’s no time for proper care,” Cloud said, “and unfortunately, I think you’re gonna see injuries go up as the season continues to progress because we are in such a condensed season. It’s insane what we put our bodies through, so ... them supporting us with the traveling would help a lot more.”
Where does the WNBA goes from here?
With so many travel issues less than a month into the WNBA season, it’s clear this will continue to be a hindrance for teams unless something is done.
The WNBA has made its stance on charter flights clear, to the disapproval of players around the league. The New York Liberty were fined a league-record $500,000 after owners Joe and Clara Wu Tsai repeatedly bought and provided charter flights for their team throughout the second half of the 2021 season because it was considered a competitive advantage, Howard Megdal reported for Sports Illustrated in March.
According to that same report, the Liberty told the WNBA Board of Governors they found a way to have charter flights compensated for everyone in the league for three years, but the unofficial proposal “lacked majority support.”
Even if that support changed, it would be hard to arrange any such deal in time for the ongoing season. But given the extremity of the current conditions, Cloud believes the WNBA should take action to at least soften its rule.
“If we’re able to get a charter and there’s an issue with our travel, then we should be allowed to charter,” Cloud said. “I know that [the Mystics] are one of the teams that are blessed enough to have owners that would help take care of us if that was the case, but because of our CBA we’re not allowed to.
“I think that in the time of where we are with COVID and companies struggling to have employees, struggling to find planes and pilots, there needs to be exceptions to the rules. And the hope moving forward is that we don’t have to travel like this anymore.”
