WNBA Opening Night: Five Things Iowa Nonprofits Can Learn From Ballers
May 8, 2026
By Gordon Fischer
WNBA opening night is Friday, May 8. Three games Friday, three more Saturday, and a five-game Sunday slate.
Thirtieth season. Two new teams: Toronto and Portland. A new CBA the players actually voted for. The Aces enter the season having won sixteen straight regular-season games to close out 2025. Caitlin Clark and Paige Bueckers on the same floor Saturday (noon on ABC). I mean, come on.
Before I continue: if you like the W and you don’t already listen to the awesome podcast HomeStans, go subscribe. It’s a mother-daughter podcast, Mia Hunt and her mom Christine Selk, and they’re sharp, they’re funny, and they actually watch the games. You can find them on Spotify, on Apple Podcasts, and on Audible. Subscribe, listen, leave a five-star review. The review part matters more than people realize, as indie podcasts move up and down in the algorithm based on that stuff, and it costs you maybe thirty seconds of your life.
Anyway, the point of this post: I have been doing nonprofit law for a long time now, and watching basketball for longer than that, and at some point a few years ago it occurred to me that the nonprofits I was helping and the teams I was watching had way more in common than either group knew. So here are five things – five, because I had to stop somewhere, that Iowa nonprofit boards could stand to learn from a good basketball team.
1. Everybody has a position. Play yours.
You generally don’t see Caitlin Clark setting screens in the post. You generally don’t see A’ja Wilson running point full time. Not because either of them couldn’t do it. Ultra-elite athletes can do a lot of things, but because that’s not the job. The point guard runs the offense. The center protects the rim. Roles.
Most board dysfunction I see, and I see a fair amount, comes down to people not knowing what their job is or, worse, drifting out of position. The chair starts second-guessing the executive director’s day-to-day. The treasurer wants to weigh in on programming. A board member who is really passionate about the new website redesign starts emailing the staff directly. It’s all coming from a good place. It also breaks the offense.
If your board hasn’t sat down and written out, in plain English, what each officer does and doesn’t do and what the full board does versus committees versus staff, that’s the first thing. It’s not glamorous work, but it pays for itself the first time you avoid a turf battle.
2. Coaches coach. Players play. Refs ref.
Picture Becky Hammon grabbing the ball in the middle of a possession to take a shot herself. You can’t picture it because it doesn’t happen. The coach coaches. The players play. The refs do their thing, and we all yell at them, and that’s how it works.
Same setup at a nonprofit. The board is the coaching staff. They set the strategy, they hire and evaluate the executive director, they watch the financials. The ED and the staff are the players, they actually run the programs and do the work. Counsel and the auditors are, in this metaphor, the refs. They keep you in bounds.
The trouble starts when a board decides it wants to play. Editing the staff’s newsletter copy. Rewriting the program calendar. I once had a board chair tell me, with a straight face, that she liked to “drop in unannounced” at the office to see how things were going. Reader: do not do this. Govern the organization. Let the staff run it.
3. Have a playbook. (Yes, this means policies.)
I know, I know. Policies. The least exciting part of running a nonprofit, right behind “reconciling the bank statement.” But every team in the W has a playbook, because freelancing every possession is a really good way to lose.
Your playbook is your policies: conflict of interest, document retention, whistleblower, gift acceptance, financial management, public disclosure, executive compensation. Some of these the IRS asks about on the 990, others are just best practice, and all of them seem like overkill until the day they aren’t. A donor wants to make a gift that benefits a board member’s company. An employee gets fired and threatens to sue. A reporter calls. The IRS wants to chat. In every one of those moments, the policy you had a lawyer write, voted on, trained on, and actually followed is the thing that saves you.
Quick test: pick any board member at random and ask them to name three of your policies. If you get blank stares, that’s a clue.
4. Don’t skip the preseason.
WNBA preseason ran from April 25 to May 3 this year. Nine days of practice, scrimmages, and rookies trying to learn the system before any of it counts. Nobody walks onto the floor on opening night cold.
And yet, I cannot tell you how many boards I’ve worked with that recruit a new director, the director says yes, and the next thing that happens is them showing up to a meeting where everybody else already knows the issues, the players, the inside jokes. They sit there for 45 minutes trying to figure out what an FFA is or who Marie is or why everybody hates the landlord. By the third meeting they’ve checked out.
Onboarding doesn’t have to be elaborate. The articles, bylaws, and policies. The last couple years of financials and 990s. The strategic plan, if you have one (and if you don’t, that’s its own blog post). A coffee with the board chair. A coffee with the ED. A program tour. That’s a couple of hours of someone’s time, max, and it makes the difference between a board member who contributes by month two and one who’s still treading water at month eight.
5. Build a bench.
The Aces won sixteen in a row to end last season. Phenomenal. But A’ja Wilson can’t play 40 minutes a night for 44 games, and she didn’t, because Vegas has a bench. That’s the difference between a good team and a championship team, you can lose your starter and not lose the season.
So I’ll ask the question I ask every board I work with: what happens if your chair has to step down tomorrow? What if your ED gets a better offer? What if your treasurer, the one who actually understands the budget, moves to Phoenix? If the honest answer is some version of “oh god,” you’ve got a depth problem.
The fix isn’t fancy. A real succession plan for the ED, in writing, that everybody on the board has read. A vice president who’s being prepared to be president, not just somebody filling the slot. Committee chairs who are bringing along the next committee chair. Term limits that actually move people through the rotation instead of letting the same five people serve forever (and burn out and quietly resent it). You build the bench when you don’t need it. By the time you need it, it’s too late.
One more thing
None of this is rocket science. Honestly, none of it is even basketball science! It’s just paying attention to the boring fundamentals while the highlight-reel stuff is happening around you like the new building, the big grant, the gala, whatever. The fundamentals are what hold you up when the highlight stuff goes sideways, which it always eventually does.
Tip-off is Friday. Go Fever. Go Tempo. Go Fire. Go everybody! And if you get a chance this weekend, between quarters, or between games, take a hard look at your nonprofit’s positions, playbook, preseason, and bench, and ask yourself which one you’ve been ignoring. Then fix that one first.
If you work with an Iowa nonprofit and reading this made you wince about positions, playbook, preseason, or bench, I offer a genuine free one-hour consultation to any Iowa nonprofit. No strings, no pitch at the end, no funnel.
📧 Email gordon@gordonfischerlawfirm.com. Tell me which of the five you’ve been ignoring. We’ll work on it together.
