The WNBL Development Player’s fallacy: Is there truly a pathway into the league?

The WNBL's Development Players are fundamentally crucial, but they internalise the pervasive sentiment that they are dispensable. It is the fallacy that needs to endure to keep the WNBL alive.

This is a guest post by Saraid Taylor — the original article was published in late September 2023 — on her journey as a WNBL Development Player.

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Credit: Cam Laird

I was five when I first started playing basketball. I decided four years later, watching the athletes of the Women’s National Basketball League (WNBL), that I would grow up to play professionally. I was serious by the age of thirteen: I missed almost every birthday party on the weekend, I trained most days after school during the term, I spent the weeks of school holidays working individually with coaches.

There was certain resilience required for elite junior sport. It was expected that I was a fourteen-year-old girl being screamed at by a sixty-year-old man and I would not cry. He might communicate that I was slow or fat or unintelligent and there was the understanding I knew this was for my benefit, so therefore I would nod and smile. So I did. I always nodded. I made myself smile. I did not cry.

Any pain was all for a purpose. For over a decade, each moment I was not at school, or university, or trying to write a novel, I was restlessly working towards becoming a WNBL player. It was what every part of me yearned to be.

On pathway 

Victoria has a clear, simple pathway towards Australia’s professional basketball league. I analysed it in this essay. It is methodical, but it can also be rigid. Development Player (DP) tryouts are advertised as the main way anyone without a scholarship to the Centre of Excellence (CoE), run out of the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS), makes it into the WNBL.

The WNBL consists of eight teams. There are ten contracted positions per team, but Basketball Australia (BA) stipulates that clubs ‘can have an unlimited amount of Development Players, providing opportunities for young local players to train with a team, and be exposed to what it means to be a professional basketball player.’ WNBL clubs commonly select anywhere from two to five athletes from those brimming outside the funnel of the CoE pathway, and consequently it is a rare privilege to be selected.  

I first attended a WNBL DP tryout when I was fifteen. I was successful when I was eighteen. I was in a WNBL squad, as a Development Player, for six years. Three years under the Jayco Dandenong Rangers franchise, and three years under the Jayco Southside Flyers franchise. I was signed on six separate ‘contracts’, officially termed as voluntary services agreements, and never elevated to a roster.

On youth  

My first year in the national league, I was paid nothing. It was presented, even though I had asserted my decision not to go, as keeping my options open for college in America. I only realised this concern translated to budget preservation later, when the older Development Players were horrified I had not been paid at least a couple of hundred dollars — but it was such an honour to be in a WNBL program, I said nothing.

I was given $500 the second year. By my third year, my contract had soared up to $750. The league’s ‘minimum wage’ increased to $13,000 the season after, and I was paid $1,000. In my fifth season, DP contracts were temporarily negotiated to $7,000 because the WNBL was being confined to an interstate hub for an indefinite number of months during the pandemic.

The hub contract was more money than I had ever made, in total, from professional basketball. 

At a similar time, my younger brother was drafted to the AFL and then delisted due to the pandemic cuts. Reverted to being a DP equivalent, he made four and a half times more in three months than I had in five years. 

For my sixth WNBL season, post-hub, the DP salary reverted back to its own minimum wage of $1,250 for 2021/22, though owner of the Jayco Flyers, Gerry Ryan, generously paid his four Development Players more than required with $5,000.

I gave six years of my life, and almost every part of myself physically, mentally and emotionally, for a total just over $14,000.

But I would have done it again.

I would have kept working jobs outside sport, taken my life and moved it to any state for the literal minimum of the contracted WNBL base wage — without provided accommodation, a club car or any form of per diem, effectively meaning that the entirety of the money would be cancelled out by living expenses — if there was any opportunity to do so.

At the end of my sixth Development season, I joked to my agent at the time that I would play for nothing if it meant being listed within a ten (i.e. tenth rostered player on a team), just for the pretence of progression. There were no available rostered positions. Somebody like Cheryl Chambers, my coach at Southside for three years, might therefore suggest I did not leave the WNBL for the AFLW. She might say I was, in actuality, delisted when she did not offer me a contract, but delisted insinuates a security that the WNBL does not possess.

Objectively, I would have been able to find another club, to be used to train for free. I just could not do it anymore. I wrote more about the grief here.

On illusion

In 2021, BA lauded an increase in base WNBL wage to $13,500 for the 2021/22 season and $15,000 for the 2022/23 season. At the time of writing, the league’s latest Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) had not yet been publicly finalised for the 2023/24 season, but a ‘number of key elements’ were agreed on which allowed for free agency to begin; it was rumoured this included the minimum wage rising again. 

The wage did rise, although the specific figure was difficult to find in any official announcements. The minimum player payment was advertised as growing by 33% (becoming $20,000).

It is farcical; not for the players and the players’ association who have fought so hard for each increase, but that any of the increases would even be claimed as a minimum at all. It is not a ‘minimum player payment’ if not all players are being paid it.  

The minimum wage has never been $13,000, despite the WNBL’s inaugural CBA in 2020. It was not even $7,500 back in 2017 when a collective foundation salary was first agreed upon in a Conditions Agreement.

The highest the minimum wage has reached is, very recently, $1,500. 

A DP is expected to be there for every preseason, in-season and offseason training. For every practice and league game, every gym session, any unofficial individual sessions, season launches, awards nights, junior clinics, (rare) media appearances and, not to mention, all of the ‘non-compulsory’ time before and after team training and on off-days working out alone, trying to get ahead to make a list. Conservatively, DPs do almost the same amount of work as their contracted teammates; realistically, they do exactly the same amount as the ninth and tenth positions on the roster who also rarely get played.

Development Players are contracted WNBL athletes in every way except reimbursement and name.

No matter how old they are, they are signed on a voluntary services agreement with wages either promised as the ambiguous notion of ‘development’ and medical care, or described as an honorarium payment of $1,500.

They are consequently unable to call themselves WNBL players. 

There is feeble insistence Development Players are part of a team, or at least the squad, but it is also universally known that they are not. DPs are just, and the adverb is intrinsic to the label, a DP— that is their status and they are expected to remember it.

On progress 

It is imperative to recognise all of the women who, through their courage and work ethic, have led us here. Women have been, for reams of history, not allowed to compete in sport let alone be paid for it — and in some places they still are barred from participation. The WNBL, as Australia’s oldest professional women’s code, began in 1981, so the overwhelming percentage of its total athletes, despite illustrious careers, have been barely, if at all, remunerated, and never to the extent deserved.

In 2019, then Player’s Association WNBL President, Rachel Jarry, as part of an announcement for an increase in the minimum player payments was quoted as saying: “When I first started playing, we did it for the love of the game and many players had to complement their career with full time work as they didn’t receive a cent.

“It’s therefore important to acknowledge that there are developments that are improving outcomes for players and it’s a very positive move that the base payments have increased.”

I explored the precarious balance between gratitude, entitlement, and the push for equality in an essay that contends we can only honour the legacy of every girl and woman who have created the possibilities of today by continuing to advocate for progress.

Meaning, a number of athletes in the WNBL are now able to comfortably earn a living off their basketball careers, but many do not. The gap is still too wide. It seems to be only continuing to increase. It is not good enough.

There have been attempts to improve conditions and outcomes for the league’s most vulnerable athletes. In my first year, the Australian Basketball Players’ Association (ABPA) advocated for regulation in an attempt to protect Development Players. 

This was added to my voluntary services agreement:

‘If a Development Player is elevated at any stage to one of the 10 listed player positions or plays in more than three WNBL Regular Season games in which they play five (5) minutes or more, they must be engaged as employees and paid pro-rata the MPP (minimum player payment), or $357 per game inclusive of superannuation.’

From the bench at eighteen, I watched my older DP teammates begin to be subbed off abruptly, even in the dead minutes at the end of a game when the team was twenty points up or down – famed as often the only time a DP is played. I was mystified until I overheard one of them remark about it to another: it was, they presumed, to keep their total minute count on court under five minutes. 

I do not allege it is a systemic, deliberate coaching decision — coaches have enough to worry about with all the other factors in a game. But it is a convenient coincidence. The clause is not one particularly promoted, nor widely discussed. It is often difficult to find in full or, when shortened in a contract, ascertain its exact meaning; wording can be slipped between and left uninterpreted. 

It stipulates payment is required if a player is used in ‘more than three WNBL Regular Season games’ — so, that means at least four games? An athlete like Taylah Simmons played three games of over five minutes as a 2021/22 Development Player for the Southside Flyers: 6:05 minutes (15th January, 2022); 11.01 minutes (5th February, 2022); and 8:37 minutes (19th March, 2022). She also played two games of just under five minutes: 4:22 minutes (26th February, 2022) and 4:40 minutes (5th March, 2022). 

She would not, by a slim margin, qualify under the minutes component of the clause. She would, however, easily qualify under the elevation component, except that the phrasing ‘elevated at any stage to one of the 10 listed player positions’ is not explicit. I could have been one of nine athletes suited up and I would still know my place as the twelfth player. 

In that season, Taylah and I were both flown interstate on three separate occasions for four games, to Canberra (5th February, 2022), Tasmania (26th February and 2nd March, 2022) and Adelaide (19th March, 2022). There were twelve players who traveled for the Tasmanian trip, ten for Canberra and nine for Adelaide. We were never paid, but we also never asked to be.

I spoke to Jacob Holmes, CEO of the ABPA, to confirm the precise Development Player provisions when writing this article. He clarified the system:

• If a DP is elevated from the DP position to a Roster Position (e.g., replaces an injured player and/or is in the 10 players) for any home or away game, they are paid pro rata the WNBL Roster Player Minimum Wage for that game (even if they don't play any minutes);

• If a DP is part of the Team to any away game (travels with the team), even if they are not in a Roster Position (e.g., they are a DP as 11th or 12th player), they are paid pro rata the WNBL Roster Player Minimum Wage (even if they don't play any minutes); 

• If a DP is not covered by either of the above, but they play 3 games of more than 5 minutes - they are paid pro rata the WNBL Roster Player Minimum Wage for every game after the 3 games. This would come in if a DP is playing a home game but not in the Roster (e.g., 11th player) and is used by the Club to play minutes, they would be captured by this.

I would be interested to know the number of Development Players who have, since the implementation of the clause, qualified for additional payment. I would also be interested in the number who, on the chance they qualified, were ever paid for it. I am, perhaps ironically, not advocating for the rule to be enforced throughout the league. It is, at best, a liability and, at worst, damaging and counterintuitive. I would wager most clubs would travel to an away game with seven before they were made to pay out $357 to elevate a Development Player, which is not an aspersion because I know many franchises are navigating limited budgets, but it does speak to priorities.

I still consider it a privilege to be flown interstate, for any game in any sport. I felt lucky when I travelled on the road with Southside; it seemed like progression and I was never going to be asked to be paid. I knew what it would mean: next time, I would not be flown. Or, the time after that, when I was gone, it would be deemed unnecessary to take the current fringe athlete. The clause is designed to protect, but it compels the opposite.

It is an example of a rule, implemented with altruistic intentions, that is only a further impediment to the development of a Development Player.

It exemplifies an absence of perspective: there should be a Development Player representative among the ABPA’s delegates. If there is not yet at least one young athlete empowered enough to advocate, there should at a minimum be a specific representative appointed to act on behalf of all DPs, who can conduct welfare checks with each athlete across the eight teams, independent of the clubs. There should be a tenth position player among the ABPA’s delegates. There should be a ninth position, or an eighth. There should be feedback being received from each tier of the hierarchy. Any sporting union, and I speak inclusively, who does not access perspectives across all tiers is missing an opportunity for progress.

As part of that announcement for the 2019 minimum player payments increase, Rachel Jarry said: “While some players will receive a higher wage, we need to consider improving outcomes for development players and that will be our next focus.”

The athletes who are in the ABPA — epitomised by somebody like Rach — work tirelessly, often thanklessly, as the union does itself, but it is difficult to represent perspectives you do not experience and, as marquee athletes, are unlikely to fully understand. A union consisting of the tiny percentage of women basketball players who are able to survive off their basketball career alone is not representative of the wider collective of athletes who struggle.

On the label

Taylah Simmons, who first did time as a training partner with Southside before being promoted to a Development Player position, was, like me, not elevated to a rostered position at the end of her ‘development’ term, though was invited by Southside to remain on a voluntary services agreement. Taylah declined, was recruited to play overseas, and on her return was offered a professional contract with the Melbourne Boomers for the next WNBL season. 

Her circumstance can be extrapolated to a wider issue: clubs do not always bother creating an integrated path between their Development Players and their players.

The term ‘development player’ is therefore inherently ironic. It is manipulative. Development Players physically improve, because it would be impossible not to, training alongside some of the best basketballers in the world, but they are rarely given the opportunity to make that improvement conducive to their own progression. They are not rewarded with a genuine possibility of career development which, after essentially volunteering for so long, you would think is the least they might receive.

The reality instead for most Development Players, when they age and finally become old enough and brave enough to try to advocate for themselves, is they are churned through for somebody cheaper.

This is one of the profound cultural problems within the WNBL. The league has festered with it for a long time, and is comfortable with it. To have one of the most famous, powerful members of the WNBL, in discussions of potentially also raising the minimum wage for Development Players, rebuff by saying ‘they should be paid nothing’ and that ‘they should just be grateful’ exposes an insidious entitlement — not from the young marginalised athletes who often are only surviving off their innate gratitude, but from the institution that is exploiting the dreams of aspiring female athletes and using their bodies without adequate compensation. 

On reality

The WNBL is not built on the backs of its marquee players.

It is built on the backs of the players at the bottom of the list. The league does not survive without them: cheap, humble, ambitious but silent, prepared to stand patiently on the sideline for hours out of their weeks to watch a session until it is time to scrimmage, or ready to spontaneously train for the full two hours when the rostered numbers have injuries, or illness, or are just too tired.

The Development Player is fundamentally crucial, but they internalise the pervasive sentiment that they are dispensable. It is the fallacy that needs to endure to keep the WNBL alive.

Basketball Australia requires Development Players to train and play for free to allow them to pay everyone else. It relies on uncompensated labour, so it can publicly celebrate increasing the WNBL minimum wage.

There are some clubs that prove that Development Players can be elevated to rosters and then make up an important part of teams. Somebody like Steph Reid, who I reference more here, proves what can be done with work ethic and resilience meeting eventual opportunity. There are also franchises that do try to prioritise local talent, but when that is not structural, when not every club is following those growth targets, there are many players who are caught between the junctions then fall through the gaps, and it weakens the league overall.

No athlete, especially a female athlete, expects to go into a professional system and be coddled. And no Development Player, after crawling outside the state team and CoE pathway, has any expectations — they already know sport is brutal.

There is a difference, though, between the natural brutality of elite sport and a fundamental lack of sustainability.

Codes like the AFLW should be perceived as the threat they are, because if the WNBL does not strengthen its alternative development pathway, if it does not find a way to create more viable opportunities, if it does not begin to enforce respect for the Development Player, some young athletes will have no choice but to leave for better opportunities after trying for years, and others will just not bother trying at all.

On humility

I waited for somebody else to write this article, but mostly I waited for myself to be elevated to a roster so I could. I knew the optics of speaking as a Development Player. I was aware of the coiling dynamics of power. You are only taken seriously if you speak against the injustice of a system from a position of influence. It makes you generous and empathetic. You are bitter, desperate and illegitimate if you speak out when you are the one disenfranchised by that system. 

This is the power of shame. There is so much shame and it is thick and potent and silencing. ‘Leave quietly,’ it whispers. ‘Say nothing. Be grateful for what you got. You were never good enough anyway.’

I call bulldust. I call bulldust about my own ability and potential, and I call bulldust for all the other athletes too. I open myself up to the critique of writing this article even though I never made it, and I try to carry that shame for everyone, because it is necessary. I am obviously cognisant of my own experiences but I am fuelled more by a collective sense of injustice: the unique, cyclical, preventable stories of every WNBL Development Player, countless, starting from whenever that delineation in rank first emerged over the league’s forty years of existence; some mentors, friends, counsellors, leaders; all who, after sacrificing years of their lives, never had an opportunity to move forward because there were simply no opportunities available.

They did not just deserve respect, they deserved appreciation. Any of them could have been significant, long-term contributors to the sport if given the chance, but we will never know.

It can never be proven.

Therefore it is easy to look around and shrug that if they were capable enough they would have made it, or cite the talent that is currently in the WNBL. It is also convenient and cheap. The talent in, and legacy of, the WNBL is irrefutable. It is Australia’s oldest professional women’s sporting league and it is literally world-class; its athletes have historically achieved in major international tournaments, from the Olympics to, more recently, 3x3 World Cups.

I would counter if that is how much success there has been with the systems as they are, imagine how much we as a country are missing out on. The counter also augments as a warning against complacency.

The WNBL will continue to lose players if it does not evolve. 

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That was the conclusion I used when I finished writing this article, suggesting I was an athlete the WNBL would regret losing, and then I was cut from the AFLW.

I faltered in finalising the edits. I stopped researching publications that accepted unsolicited submissions. I retreated, but then that felt cowardly so eventually I returned to the work and amended the last paragraph:

‘I was delisted a month ago by Richmond, but I have chosen to stay within their program essentially as a Development Player, and play a season of VFLW instead of returning to basketball’s version of NBL1. I can at least see a future, professionally, tangibly, in football.’

The delisting, despite being another brutal and awkward juncture in my sporting career, felt perversely satisfying to admit. It was a confession of further failure and yet it strengthened the argument of this essay. I believe it is an important detail to retain, even though I only played five games of VFLW before I was recruited back into the AFLW by the Melbourne Demons. It accentuates the depth of the disillusionment. The prospects seemed better starting, from scratch, in another professional sport than remaining in the code I had played since I was five years old.

This article has been written as the most loving of indictments: even if I no longer will benefit, I hope change can be catalysed in the WNBL.

I would like my failure to be conducive in ensuring nobody else, no other young player, has this same avoidable experience. The league requires thorough, confronting introspection because I am not the first athlete to leave and if nothing changes, I will not be the last.

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