The National Women's Soccer League

Early Days

Baird's first official day as NWSL commissioner was Tuesday, March 10, 2020. Her priorities for her first 90 days included increasing the league's staff, signing more sponsors, and building trust with players and owners. She flew from New York to NWSL headquarters in Chicago where she met the league's staff.

The NWSL's 17-person front office was significantly smaller than other professional league front offices. The National Basketball Association's front office employed over 850 people. The front office support that U.S. Soccer provided the NWSL had been phased-out considerably since the league's inception, and by the end of 2020, U.S. Soccer would no longer manage the league.

Baird wanted to get to know each staff member and gain a better understanding of everyone's roles and responsibilities. She scheduled 30-minute, individual meetings. Those meetings typically lasted one hour. Recalled Kirsten Brierley, the NWSL's director of communications, "She came in with a vision, but she wanted to know what our vision was internally and how she could use those ideas and everyone's input to get us on the same path".

After meeting with the league's staff, she went to dinner with Whisler to talk about the upcoming season. Despite the fact that COVID-19 was dominating New York's headlines, it wasn't being talked about much in Chicago. In fact, during their dinner, Baird and Whisler did not discuss COVID-19, though it was in the back of Baird's mind. Earlier in the day, she received a call from a New York Times reporter asking what was happening with the upcoming season given the looming health crisis.

On Wednesday, March 11, Baird's second day, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. Baird flew back to New York, as scheduled, so she could meet with NWSL sponsor Budweiser on Long Island the next morning. Upon landing in New York, she learned that a Utah Jazz player had tested positive for COVID-19 and NBA commissioner Adam Silver had suspended the NBA season in response. The first domino had fallen. Unlike any other industry, the sports industry collectively and nearly simultaneously hit the pause button.

On her third day, Thursday, March 12, Baird sent out a press release at 4:00pm announcing that the NWSL was cancelling preseason matches. They were to begin in two weeks. The press release also stated that the league was monitoring pandemic developments and reviewing contingency plans for the regular season, scheduled to start on April 18. Reflecting back on that day, and the days that followed, Baird recalled, "I was trying to find the playbook for when there is a global pandemic which shuts down the world". She quickly discovered there were no playbooks, there were no best practices, there were no precedents.

In the weeks after Baird announced the cancellation of preseason matches, she held many conversations with the league's owners, players, coaches, and sponsors. She also spoke with other sports organizations and medical professionals at the University of Utah, which had been the U.S. Olympic team's medical partner. She wanted to know what a reconfigured season could look like, specifically one that prioritized player safety. Long work days extended well into nights. Baird asked for and accepted help along the way, weighing information from multiple sources. She sought a safe, yet cost-conscious way forward. "We have to be the most creative problem solvers in sports," she said of the NWSL, "because we don't have the resources other sports have. We have to be really scrappy".

The core principle for the phased-in play approach was safeguarding players' health and safety. But Baird and the staff remained unsure what the league was "phasing" into, exactly. Women's soccer in the United States had gained momentum after the USWNT's World Cup win in 2019. She worried cancelling the season altogether would slow the league's quest for stability and sustainability, perhaps damaging it permanently. As Dan Weinberg at CBS Sports noted, getting back on the field as soon as possible was Baird's north star goal. She told him, "We've got to get on the field this summer. We have to. It's too important for the visibility of the league to go dark for an entire year". Less clear was what type of season, where, and how. The virus wasn't going away. Baird could not guarantee players' safety, but it was her job to mitigate the risk.