A Comunicano Sports Insight Report
Initial Read
I wanted to actually read this thing before I say anything about it. That’s rule one in my business: the moment you react to a headline instead of the underlying reporting, you’ve already lost control of the story.
So let me lay out what Front Office Sports actually documented in its piece on how WNBA teams are handling the league’s latest media storm, not what Twitter thinks it documented.
Sophie Cunningham made comments to ESPN in late July about wanting to protect young girls in sport. That set off a chain reaction: her teammate Caitlin Clark got asked and deflected, the WNBPA put out a statement, Cunningham made more comments after an incident involving a Seattle Storm fan and a team owner, and by this week Fox News host Jesse Watters was on air saying he’s tired of covering the league.
Layered on top of all that: OutKick, the Fox-owned conservative sports outlet, has been applying for game credentials and getting turned down by five different teams, with no consistent explanation given. That’s the actual situation. Now let’s talk about how it’s being handled.
Why This Is Being Handled Wrong
Here’s the first thing that jumps off the page at me: five different teams, five different outcomes, and no visible standard tying them together. Lynx, Fever, Atlanta Dream, Dallas Wings, and Washington Mystics all rejected OutKick. Phoenix and Portland approved. Phoenix initially said no, then reversed after OutKick pushed back and the team quietly opened up more seating. That’s not a policy being applied. That’s a policy being negotiated in public, team by team, under pressure.
I’ve participated in the conversations in meeting rooms where a decision like that gets made on a Tuesday afternoon by whoever happens to be in the office, and I can tell you exactly how it reads from the outside: arbitrary. And arbitrary is the one thing you cannot afford to look like when the accusation on the table is that you’re making viewpoint-based decisions.
Second error: “at capacity” as a stated reason with nothing behind it. That’s not an explanation; that’s a placeholder, and real reporters know the difference. When you give a non-answer to a credentialing question, you’re not avoiding the story, you’re writing the next paragraph of it for them.
Third: the Fire didn’t respond to a request for comment at all. Dead air is a headline. Every PR person who’s worked a real crisis knows that “declined to comment” or no response reads as guilt whether or not there’s anything to hide. You’ve handed the reporter the exact sentence they need to make you look evasive, and you did it for free.
Fourth, and this is the structural one: the WNBA put out one blanket policy memo before the season and then went silent exactly when that policy started getting stress-tested in real time. Team sources are telling FOS they’re in a “no-win” situation.
That’s a league office that built a tiered credentialing system, watched it collide with the hottest story in the sport, and did not update its own franchises on how to apply it. You don’t leave twelve comms departments to freelance a First Amendment-adjacent, culture-war-adjacent credentialing call on their own.
That’s how you get five outcomes for one policy.
Three Better Paths
- Reissue the standard, apply it out loud. The league goes back to every team with specific, written guidance on how Tier 1 and Tier 2 credentialing applies right now, this week, to outlets like OutKick, and teams are instructed to state the actual reason for a denial: capacity numbers, editorial criteria, whatever it is, in writing, every time. Rationale: inconsistency is what turns a routine access decision into “the league is targeting a network.” A published, uniformly applied standard removes the ambiguity that’s currently doing all the damage. Likely outcome: the credentialing story stops being newsworthy because it stops being mysterious. Boring is the goal here.
- Never leave a request for comment unanswered. Every team, including the Fire, gives a real, on-record response to every credential inquiry, even if the answer is simply “at capacity, here’s our attendance figure for that section.” Rationale: right now OutKick is the only party telling the story of these denials, because the teams are handing them silence. A one-sided record isn’t neutral; it’s a gift to whoever’s willing to talk. Likely outcome: denies OutKick a monopoly on the narrative and forces any “the WNBA is suppressing coverage” framing to compete with actual team statements instead of a vacuum.
- Centralize the message, take it off individual players. The league office, not each team’s PR shop improvising in isolation, coordinates a single point of contact and a shared set of talking points for credentialing questions, separate from anything players are asked in a scrum. Rationale: Cunningham said flatly she wants to get back to basketball, and Clark deflected when asked, meaning the players themselves are signaling they don’t want to be the story. Right now the comms burden is falling on team sources and, indirectly, on the players, with no coordination between markets. Likely outcome: with thirteen games and six more cities left on the Fever’s schedule, this is going to come up again and again. A centralized protocol means the ninth time it happens, it’s handled in ninety seconds instead of becoming a new headline in a new city.
Working With the Media Is the Job
You do not get to opt out of the media. I’ve never once seen a team improve its position by trying to freeze out a credentialed or semi-credentialed outlet without a stated, defensible reason. OutKick’s entire operating model is clipping player reactions and pushing them out on social. If you deny them access without explanation, you don’t stop that content; you just guarantee it gets made from the outside, out of context, framed however they want, with your silence as the only quote in the piece.
The adage we’ve always advised clients with is simply this. “Absent information from you to the media will result in the media coming to their own conclusions.” That translates to “a great chance for the wrong perspective being shared.”
There’s also the old adage from the newspaper era: never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel. The wire services and the beat writers had the presses. You hoped that you could outlast a bad news cycle if you had to, because the presses ran on a daily deadline and eventually moved on to the next thing.
That adage needs a rewrite for this business now.
The digital-era corollary is: never pick a fight with someone who doesn’t need a printing press, an editor’s sign-off, or a deadline at all, just a phone and a publish button.
OutKick doesn’t buy ink by the barrel. It buys attention by the click, and it can post the clip before your comms department has even drafted a one-line statement. The old fight was about who controlled the means of production. The new fight is about who controls the means of distribution, and right now that’s anyone with a following and an algorithm that rewards conflict over context. You don’t win that fight by going silent. You win it, or at least you don’t lose it worse, by being in the room before the clip gets cut.
When the Story Becomes the Story
Look at what’s actually happened here. This started as a comment about locker rooms and youth sports. Three weeks later, the story running in Front Office Sports isn’t about that at all. It’s about which teams reject which reporters, whether “at capacity” is a real answer, and a Fox News host complaining on air about how many weeks he’s had to cover a women’s basketball league.
The original conversation has been almost entirely displaced by a second-order conversation about media access and media fatigue with the first conversation. That’s the tell. When the coverage of the coverage becomes bigger than the event, the institutions involved have lost the thread, and every additional silent non-response or inconsistent credential decision just adds another layer to the story about the story, further from the basketball, further from anything a team can actually control.
Footnote
Earliest in my career, I was on the other side of this exact question: I was involved in credentialing media for the Philadelphia Wings. My mentor, Sy Roseman, taught me something I still use fifty years later. He never just looked at an outlet’s name or its typical beat. He’d ask: who is this person, and why do they actually want to cover us, especially when they’re not a typical sports reporter. That question changed how we handled access, because it meant we were framing the story with them instead of guessing at it after the fact.
The best example I’ve got is Kiki Olson. She wasn’t a lacrosse writer. She was a well-known Philadelphia freelancer who regularly contributed to PHILADELPHIA Magazine and was a producer for the Mike Douglas Show. When she came around asking to cover the Wings, we didn’t fully know why.
Sy didn’t gatekeep it; he leaned into it.
What came out of that access was “A Woman Looks at Lacrosse,” subtitled “It’s Exciting and Sexy, Too,” a piece where she wrote about lacrosse’s appeal from a female fan’s perspective nobody else was covering it from, right down to the players’ off-field charm. It turned into something genuinely great, and it led directly to a ten-minute or so television appearance on the Mike Douglas Show, a nationally syndicated show.
That’s not a fluke. That’s what happens when you work with the media the right way instead of managing it defensively. You get a story you couldn’t have written yourselves, from an angle you didn’t see coming, and it outperforms anything a press release would’ve produced.
The credential decisions in front of these WNBA teams right now are the same question Sy taught me in 1974: do you know who’s asking, and do you know why? If you don’t, find out before you say no.