Kelley School, WNBPA partner to provide players graduate degrees
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More WNBA players could soon call themselves Indiana University graduates after a new partnership between the Indiana University Kelley School of Business and the WNBA Players Association (WNBPA) that is designed to offer graduate degrees and inspire more career opportunities after they’re done playing professional basketball.
Through the partnership, current and retired WNBA players and their spouses can pursue a Master of Business Administration, a Master of Science degree and certificates either online or in person through the school.
The graduate degree programs are customized and catered to make athletes both feel comfortable and study what is applicable to their post-WNBA career, IU said. Courses and focuses could include business planning, economics, management strategy and quantitative analysis.
Players will be able to apply for the programs later this year.
“Our members know all too well that the career span of a professional athlete is not very long and view an academic partnership with Kelley as a significant pathway to further their education and achieve economic empowerment,” WNBPA Executive Director Terri Jackson said in a news release.
The business school has similar partnerships with the NFL and Major League Soccer player associations, which Carolyn Goerner, soon-to-be faculty chair of Kelley Executive Degree Programs, says has gone well. She said one of the NFL players in her class told her he has been exposed to so many different professors, ideologies and ideas during his time at IU, all of which was tailored to what he and other players are seeking in higher education.
However, the WNBA sets itself apart from those leagues: over 95% of the W draft class has an undergraduate degree. That means many women are prepared for the next step already, Goerner said, and can move into graduate-level education.
“Athletes will bring a number of things to the table that are really positive,” she said. “There’s a lot of intellectual pieces of sport that I don’t think get enough credit, frankly, for what they develop.”
Goerner talks about the skills athletes have as students and how the school plays to their strengths.
Goerner said how Kelley educates students is incredibly similar to how athletes learn their team’s strategies. The school seeks to teach students their specialty as well as how the whole operation works in tandem, she said; sports are the same since a player needs to know their role as well as their teammates’ responsibilities to play together as a successful team.
What’s great about having athletes as students, Goerner said, is they are already equipped to work hard, focus and learn quickly. As a school, she said they want to aid in the sometimes difficult transition athletes have when retiring from their sport and moving on to a different or adjacent career. She said they work with the players associations, which have been very open and forthcoming about player desires and needs, to build curriculums, experiences and opportunities curated to their unique position.
Kelley will meet them where they are at, teach them how to translate their athletic soft skills and create a learning environment to accomplish their goals, Goerner said. A lot of athletes have insecurities with traditional classroom learning, she said, so they have them more agency to choose their pace and focus, especially with the online program.
“The difference with athletes is that they typically are really good visualization goal setters but don’t really get a lot of guidance on how to translate that into the classroom,” she said.
Different than the school’s previous partnerships, the athletes Kelley will be working with are, of course, women. Women — especially women of color— often face more roadblocks and difficulties in the professional world, which the school acknowledges.
While it doesn’t fix the systemic problem, Goerner said they believe providing this opportunity and awarding them with a degree from a highly-rated school is a way to give them instant credibility and open doors to more conversations they may not have without it.
“There are so many ways in which we know that women, despite being strong, competent, talented, often still have to prove themselves,” she said. “The more that we provide people with the skillset to just take charge and make the change that they want to see, the better off we are.”