How I Built This with Guy Raz - How I Built Resilience: Lisa Baird of National Women's Soccer League

Episode Date: March 18, 2021

Lisa Baird stepped in as commissioner of the National Women's Soccer League in March 2020 and just two days into her job the entire multi-billion dollar sports industry went dark. Lisa talks with Guy about the difficulties the league overcame to launch their Challenge Cup tournament last summer, and the need for equal coverage of women's sports. These conversations are excerpts from our How I Built Resilience series, where Guy talks online with founders and entrepreneurs about how they're navigating turbulent times.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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a Airbnb.ca.ca. slash host. Hey everyone and welcome to how I built this resilience edition from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. Each week on Thursday, we invite entrepreneurs and other business leaders to come onto the show to talk about how they've been building resilience into their businesses this past year. And you can join us each Thursday at 9 a.m. Pacific 12 Eastern on the How I Built this Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube pages to hear the conversation and ask questions as well. And today, my conversation with Lisa Baird, Commissioner of the National Women Soccer League. The NWSL was founded in 2012, and today it's got 10 teams across the United States. Lisa Baird stepped in as Commissioner of the League on March 10th, 20th. And just two days into her job, the entire multi-billion-dollar sports industry went dark.

And Lisa had to make the tough decision to also shut down the soccer league. You know, it was probably the hardest thing I ever had to do. And yet, you know when sometimes you're confronted with a decision and you know exactly what to do, even though it's incredibly hard. Yeah. That was the moment. I'd started my job and I went out to Chicago where our offices were and it was on Tuesday. And I remember I'd come from public radio and journalism. And so we were following it as a story.

And I'd gotten a text that day from a reporter at the New York Times that I'd known saying, hey, what are you going to do about COVID? And I was on my first day of work, I was determining things. I would literally flew back to New York the next day because I had to attend the meeting. And when I landed, my phone blew up, and it was because the NBA had suspended their operations. And what was amazing to me is the sports industry worldwide shut down in 24 hours. An entire industry just hit the pause button. And I literally got up on Thursday, and two days into it, I understood what the ramifications would be for our owners,

for our players, for fans, for everybody who is in our smaller ecosystem. But there was no hesitancy. I just shut down. And it was then a matter of actually really pulling together what we were going to do next. That was the thing that I was looking at going, okay, I understand we have to suspend, but wait a minute, this is beginning to just the sobering reality of how critical it was going to be. for the sports industry and just started to set in, like literally Thursday night. Wow.

I mean, it's that moment, right, where I remember because a week before, I was in Arizona with my family for spring training. We saw a Cubs game. We saw an Oakland A's game. It was incredible. It was just a regular, amazing spring training baseball. Then all of a sudden, as you say, this multi-billion dollar industry, the sports industry, in the U.S. alone shuts down. You know, spring training and then, of course, the NBA, and then, you know, the other leagues begin to follow.

And it's interesting. You said it was like a moment of clarity. It was like you didn't even have to kind of go through a decision tree. You knew exactly what you had to do. And those kinds of moments don't happen very often in our lives. But it sounds like you just, it was like it was crystal clear. It was crystal clear. And I think it was because, you know, we really.

realize, we understand, you know, you have live sports. And even in women's soccer, like, we are team sport or a contact sport. Literally, we're putting our athletes at risk until we understood what this was and what it was. So that's the moment of clarity was that moment of safeguarding health and wellness. But I think what was absolutely sobering was the few, the next few weeks out of it, the dawning realization that there was no game plan to come back. Like, Whenever, you know, there has to be a game plan for this, right? I kept, I called everybody. You know, I'm a small league.

We're very thinly resourced. So I'm calling the NBA. I'm calling people in the Olympics. I'm calling everybody I can figure out to say, okay, what's the playbook? And there was none. You gave an interview actually to NPR a while back, and you said, there was no rulebook. There was no playbook. And I had to make my own.

So that's what you do. You start to take it apart and say, okay, what are all the problems? that we need to start to solve. Well, the first one was, of course, we convened a medical task force of 15 doctors. By the way, you know, these are all doctors that, you know, are not subject matter experts in infectious disease, although they, you know, have access to the resources. So we just got to work to really try and understand what we needed to do to develop what then became medical protocols that governed every aspect of what we were doing. So that was one work stream. The second work stream for us was, you know, even before we got to competition, one of my biggest concerns is

we're a small league. We're very tiny. We're dependent on things like ticket revenue and sponsorship. And we needed to put together a short term and a long term plan to have the resources that we needed to continue to pay our players. Then there was, okay, once we can, you know, we can, get people back to training safely, which took us weeks to develop the protocol and get that done, what kind of competition are we going to do? What does that look like? And on and on. So it was solving for everything. And I think what I did is I created all of these different groups that were working on it. But I was in on every group because we're such, we had 17 people working at the league. And we had great staff at our teams, at our owners. But we did. We

just started to solve the problems, knowing that work or decisions in one group would affect the other. One of the decisions that was made early on was that the players would still be paid. The athletes would still be paid even if they opted out from playing, which you eventually relaunched the season. But the idea of continuing to pay the players, how is that made possible if there was no ticket revenue, if there was no ad revenue, if there was no nothing? You know, it was, this is the point of clarity and principle. And for me as a new commissioner, but also with our owners and importantly with our owners, you know, we knew that that was a critical component of whatever we were going to do is how we were going to safeguard our players, not only with the safety protocols, but also with the resources. And there wasn't ticket revenue. There wasn't, there wasn't, there wasn't the ordinary sources. So I started looking around again, no playbook. And we started to hear in late,

March about something that the federal government was going to do with the small business administration to offer a lifeline, which it was for us to small businesses who didn't have any resources coming in. And I started to research it. And literally there was nothing out there about it on the internet. You were just kind of hearing things from different people. I called our partner, J.P. Morgan, that's where we do our banking business. They didn't know anything about it. So I started to find out about it. I reached. out, found the person at J.P. Morgan who could help me understand it. Literally, I remember this on Monday, the Small Business Administration, and Steve mentioned this Treasury Secretary, said,

we're going to do this. By Thursday and Friday, there was an app that was completely untested in order to load your paperwork in to apply for this load. I was so nervous, guy. I literally was doing this because my director of finance had gone on maternity leave. She and her wife. wife were having twins. Wow. So she was gone. And the app came up on Saturday morning. And I spent Sunday morning.

I spent six hours on Sunday morning. We loaded in a thousand pages of corroborating documents to say, here's how we're going to pay our players and here's all this stuff that we need. What I later learned is that some people just loaded in one Excel spreadsheet and got their loan. But I was so worried that I wouldn't be able to get this loan to pay the players. And seven days later, we got the resource. that were needed to kind of bias the time to continue to pay the players. So it was a pretty

helpful instrument. Thank you to the Small Business Administration for doing that. The PPP loans really did was a lifeline for so many businesses. I know that that you started to talk about how can we bring this back. Obviously the NBA got a lot of attention. They were in Orlando and there was a bubble. And you began to think about how do we do this with women's soccer, and eventually you brought it back. You kind of created this bubble in a world, and you relaunched in Utah, the Challenge Cup tournament. Tell me about bringing women's soccer back. How did you guys begin to construct that? So you get your medical protocols and your doctors talking. You start to think about resources and what you can do. And we work on a fraction of the resources as other

leagues. So we started to think about ways to stage competition. And frankly, Guy, we iterated through, several rounds of could we continue to do, you know, kind of the home and away format that people wanted to do. I think, you know, we all wanted to think that fans would come back. And there was this dawning realization that we weren't going to be able to keep our players safe unless we went to a bubble. So we started to look at that. That required us to identify a host city with the capabilities and the facilities that would enable us to do it. We looked in Utah at that point in time when we started to look at Utah. There were very little incidents out in the west of the United States. It was, so there was low thresholds. I worked with the governor and the people at Real Salt Lake

that helped us put together facilities. And we were actually able to put together a very contained plan. So we had all of the training pitches. We had two competition fields. We had access to enough locker rooms because the important thing about a bubble is keeping the teams, they're called pods, keeping them separate. So we actually had to coordinate and develop the schedules so that one team was being fed in one hotel. They were able to go through the line from 615 to 658. And then we cleared, we sanitized, and then we brought the second team in. So it was all very coordinated and it sounds easy now when I'm talking about it. But at the time, none of this was tested. Yeah. I mean, I had to. On all 10 teams participated? So one team early, before we started

our bubble, one team, Orlando called me on Monday night and their doctors called and said, look, we've had an incident of a positive test. And remember, this was like very early on. So people were still understanding how to test people, what the cadence was, do you do one or two in a confirming test. There were things that we didn't know at the time, like what's a false positive? Right. We didn't know that. So the whole industry was learning what was going on here. And out of an abundance of caution, we said, and they said, look, we're going to withdraw from the tournament.

There were other leagues that didn't do that. We were so concerned about keeping the bubble pristine that they actually took. took the courageous action to withdraw themselves. So we went in with nine teams and we were there for a month. We staged a full-blown single, you know, it was kind of single elimination, knockout round. The most intense competition you can do in soccer is what we did. And we emerged with zero COVID cases. Not a single positive COVID test.

It's incredible. I mean, you and how many, I mean, how many human beings were involved in this? bubble. I mean, I'm thinking what, at least, what, 20 athletes per team? Yeah, we had rosters up to 28, but then you have all the staff, you have coaches, you have supporting, you have facilities. Wow. So there were probably over 550 people getting tested every two to three days. You know, when we had something that happened, we were obviously doing backup testing. And so it was, you know, finding a testing provider that could, you know, handle the volume in the turnaround time. Because the the whole key with testing is you want it late enough where you're ensuring that you have the

most recent results, but you need it early enough so that teams can make their roster decisions, they can be appropriately preparing. So even like a 45-minute shift in when those testing results are coming back can influence something that's going to happen. So it was down to a level of like precision that, and no one had ever done this before. Yeah. And how did you I mean, it requires incredible discipline among the athletes and the staff. And, I mean, one person going out or breaking the rules. I mean, how did you guys ensure that everybody cooperated? Well, you know, I think two of the things I did was early on I put together a Zoom call, you know, with all my athletes.

And so we did it twice. One was so that we could answer their questions about the medical protocols. and they had very detailed questions. Like, what about this? How do you know this is going to work? So I sat there with over 230 players on Zoom calls twice. The second time was as we were going into the tournament, I wanted them to hear from me that Orlando had withdrawn

and why I wanted to reassure them that we could do it. But in actuality, we had a partnership up front with our PA that said, listen, this is the conduct that we are expecting you to do. You must stay with your team. you can't mix with other teams. You can't go out. If you're going to have something delivered, it has to be according to this protocol of delivery, contactless, et cetera. And, you know, it wasn't me that delivered the COVID-free environment. It was the players and their discipline and their care for their own health. And one of the things I was really proud of is that early on, as a women's

sports league, I realize what it's like to spend a month away from your family. And several of our players, our moms and have very young children. So we created a separate protocol just for the kids themselves. And those players were sequestered from their teams and their kids and their caregivers became part of the pod. So it was very challenging. Wow. That's why we called it. By the way, Guy, that is why we called it the Challenge Cup. It's amazing. I mean, that is just incredible. When we come back in just a moment, more of my conversation with Lisa Baird and how despite playing in front of empty stadiums, The league's television audience skyrocketed. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Resilience Edition from NPR. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This Resilience Edition.

When the National Women's Soccer League started their one-month single elimination tournament last summer, Commissioner Lisa Baird realized they'd be the first professional league back. And despite making no money from ticket sales and playing to empty arenas, the league saw TV ratings increase by 500%. We had an incredible response, and I think part of it was when we designed the competition. We were fairly far along in our planning, and the Olympics had been canceled. I sat down with our partners. We have CBS as a partner, and we have Twitch as a partner, and Twitch had our international rights.

So we sat down with them, and we said, listen, I know from my Olympic experience how exciting this single elimination, knockout round is to the public. It is exciting because there's something on the line every game. But it is an intense competition for the athletes and the coaches. And we were going into this with much, much shortened, abbreviated preseason training. But we all did it together. And the response from the fans was amazing on TV. You know, think about it.

It was a year and a summer when we were all consumed with the political news and the social activism news. everything was going on. There was a tremendous amount of uptick and news, and we weren't expecting to see the amount of intention with sports. I mean, we were going and going, this is what people are listening to. But when we got in there, and the fact is, by the time we had done all our protocols, all our planning, all our resources, we signed three national sponsors, when we were ready to announce, and I think it was like April 24th or April 25th, maybe 27th, we were ready to announce and we were announcing on, um, with our broadcast partner to CBS, it literally dawned on me that we were going to be the first league back. Wow. Like here was the little National Women's Soccer League, and we were leading all teams to return to competition. Wow.

And it wasn't intentional. It was just the fact that we were maybe solving a smaller delegation, a smaller footprint, etc. But once we knew that, we wanted to use that attention to really introduce a, you know, America in the world to what I think of is the best women's professional soccer league with some of the best soccer that you could watch. Amazing. I mean, you know, we were talking off camera before this started about 1999. That was a turning point for women's soccer in the United States that year in Women's World Cup.

And, of course, U.S. national women's soccer is a huge sport with huge, huge stars like Alex Morgan and so many others. In a sense, do you think that what happened this summer with the National Women's Soccer League, a nine-year-old league, was a tipping point, the beginning of a real national interest in this league that could actually turn it into something much, much, much, much bigger? I do. I'm saying this with confidence, everything, but when we were putting together our plan for this summer, there was part of me that said, look, I've got to be as safe and risk free as I can. And then there was the other part of me that said, I've got to take risks, because this is a summer and this is an opportunity to introduce our league, our sport, our players to a much broader audience. So it was that, and I have to tell you, there were a lot of sleepless nights. You know, I know the name of this series is resilience. I had a lot of sleepless nights over this because it was that combination of being incredibly conservative but also taking risk. So at this point in time, we're now, we've announced our second challenge cup. We're going into a year where the best women's soccer players, both from the U.S. national women's team and also other of the best players in the world, Marta, DeBina, Rachel Daley, people from all over the world will be altering between going back and forth, between playing in our league and also playing in the Olympics in Tokyo this summer. And it's an opportunity for us to do something and put women's professional soccer on the same level playing

field as other premier sports. I mean, that's what I hope to accomplish. Lisa, you're also running a business and it has to be sustainables. And of course, at the beginning of the pandemic, you were, you know, you were applying for loans and concerned about whether you could sustain the league. Given the boost in ratings, was there a financial impact that, in a sense, made up for the financial losses? Or was it still, from a financial perspective, a tough year? It was a tough year because ticket revenue and that's a big part of any sports, but particularly ours resources. But what I think we did and we proved it is that the ratings we have are on the order of, you know, kind of not every men's sports league, but we delivered

and we delivered really strong ratings for advertisers. And we were able to sign Procter & Gamble, Verizon and Google as first time national sponsors. And we want to be greeted by the audience we delivered, by the engagement of our fans, just like ever sports. So I think people are going to take a hard look at us this year and look at it and say, you know what? Women's soccer is delivering what I need to, and that's going to give us the resources that we need to grow and kind of fulfill that destiny started in 1999 with women's soccer. It's like, we want to really be that independent, self-sustaining sports league. And remember, we're not affiliated with any other men's sports league.

We stand alone by ourselves. Right. We're getting some questions from viewers. This is a super insider question, but I think this is a super insider question. but I think this is an interesting one's from Danielle Lorenz. Daniel asks, do you expect players that have gone abroad, Rose, Muis, Dalkemper to come back and play in the NWS? Well, let me say if Rose or Kristen or Tobin are listening right now, you are absolutely welcome back anytime you want. The fact is that our sport operates within a global economy. We're not, you know, just like the National Football League or even the NBA, where most of the sport. of the players are playing in one country. Soccer is a global sport, unlike no other. So every year,

there is some back and forth. It's done via an organized process, frankly, of transfer fees, etc. This year, because of our abbreviated season, I know that several players did choose to go abroad and play abroad because they wanted more playing time. These are professional athletes, and this is their career. So Alex Morgan, for instance, went and played, I think for Tottenham this summer or in the fall. We were only offering abbreviated system, but she came back and she'll be playing for the pride at the start of the Challenge Cup. We're hoping that the rest of them come back and they're welcome anytime. As you know, the U.S. women's national team recently lost a, there was a legal battle, four-year battle where they were, you know, talking about

having been systematically underpaid by U.S. soccer in comparison to the men's national soccer team. How have you seen the results of that lawsuit play out in the industry? And does it seem like more and more people are paying attention to the issue of pay disparity? I can't comment on the details of the particulars because I'm, A, I'm not a lawyer, and I don't understand it. But what I will say is there, a big problem for us is the lack of media equality guy. We're, like if you think about it, only 4% of all media, this is not only, you know, broadcast, but, you know, press stories and social media. is against women's sports.

4%. That's not even close to being equal. So for me, if we can continue to do the things that we did this summer and put our incredibly talented athletes front and center with women's sports and start to make a big dent in that coverage, in the business of sports, then that's going to develop us into the kind of powerhouse sports league where competition. compensation will grow and needs to grow. There's no question we want to see our women athletes. And, you know, that opens up big endorsement deals. It opens up all that we need in order to be sustaining. We're not at this moment of time. So I'm focused on that battle right now, which is the battle to earn more of the attention of the media and the broad exposure. But it really sounds like you're on the precipice of change that you're...

Yeah, I know. Although I don't like the word precipice. I guess that's a scary word. Yes. You're right at the edge of, you know, right, a huge change. Yeah. I think we're seeing something really exciting happen. And I talk to, you know, I come from a broader sports world. And I'd seen it in the Olympics. If you think about it, the Olympics kind of led the way here. Right. When you watch the Olympics or even the Paralympics, you're kind of watching women's sports and men's sports, maybe not equally, but pretty equally, right? They're pretty balanced in terms of the coverage. And, And certainly, you know, if you look at the performance of some of the bigger countries, like England and the U.S. and the women are starting to win more medals than their male counterparts. So, of course, you want to watch gold medal winning teams. But I think what we're seeing right now is women's sports coming into its own. And this summer, a lot of what I heard anecdotally and even saw in our numbers is that kind of mass sports fans started watching women's soccer. It wasn't just our avid-engaged. fan base like Danielle just answered the in the no question it was wait a minute I just turned this on and I saw this sport and I went damn that's good yeah and part of what we did in the fall series which we did with CBS is we were able to take advantage of some broadcast windows that it opened up

because some collegiate sports elected to suspend or delay their sports season so we created a whole new format. I worked with CBS to take those windows. And you know, you might have been turning on your TV expecting to see college football. And you saw some incredible soccer. Notice I did not say women's soccer. I just said soccer. Do you think that within 10 years that women's soccer will be, will have the media attention that equivalent men's sports and soccer receives? I do. And I know that's kind of a bold, brave statement to say when we're only four percent. of the coverage today and we're certainly not anywhere near the massive audience or revenues that some of our men's leagues have. But I think we and other women's sports leagues are on

that prepos that not only here in the United States, but abroad as well. Lisa, when you think about this past year and what you've had to do, and you came into this job with tremendous experience, you'd worked with the NFL and the Olympic Committee, You worked at WNYC in New York, which is the biggest public radio affiliate in the country. You've had big jobs at Fortune 500 companies. So you've come into this job with a tremendous amount of wisdom and experience. But of course, this year sort of supercharged that for everyone. What have you learned this past year that you want to take with you into the future as you continue to lead the National Women's Soccer League?

Well, look, you know, I want to say something because I just want to say, I think, you know, people in our industry, media, sports, et cetera. We work really, really hard. I mean, there's no question. I worked harder than I ever did at any of those jobs this year to solve problems that I never thought I would have to say. What I will say, though, is, and I say this pretty humbly, I realize how privileged I am to be at the helm of a sport that's growing and a sport that was able to nimbly and adroitly take advantage of some horrific circumstances that the world went through and is going through with this pandemic. So, you know, I'm always going to be humble and say, listen, you know what, I've had enormous privilege and ability to do this. What I hope that I have taken away is to use that podium or

the microphone in this instance to kind of help the world understand that. If you are nimble, if you kind of have the right moments of clarity when you need them on what to do, even if you don't have the resources that other people do to do this, that just band together and figure out a way to get it done. And I think that's the meaning of the word resilience, isn't it? Is that you kind of don't look around for the game plan to be handed to you by someone else. you make sure that your staff, your players, your owners, everybody in your trust circle believes in what you're doing, and then you just go out and get it done. That's an excerpt from my live conversation with Lisa Baird, Commissioner of the National Women's Soccer League. If you want to see the full interview or any of our past live interviews, you can find them on the How I Built This Facebook page or at YouTube.com slash NPR.

And if you want to join our conversation live and maybe even ask questions, they happen every Thursday at 9 Pacific noon Eastern. If you want to find out more about the How I Built This Resilience series or other virtual NPR events, you can go to nprpresents.org. This episode was produced by Liz Metzger with help from Farah Safari, J.C. Howard, Will Mitchell, Bruce Grant, Elmanion, Gianna Cappadona, John Isabella, Julia Carney, Neva Grant, and Jeff Rogers. Our intern is Janet Ujong Lee.

Thanks for listening. Stay safe and I'll see you in a few days. I'm Guy Raz and you've been listening to How I Built This Resilience Edition from NPR.