We Are the Leaders, Issue #18, Napheesa Collier

by BREAKTHRU Team

March 6th, 2026

Dear Leaders,

March Madness is about to begin. That felt like a good time to talk about basketball and one player in particular. This week, we are focusing on the one and only Napheesa Collier.

As a former college athlete, still an adult basketball player, and now a youth basketball coach, I spend a lot of time thinking about how success actually happens. When you coach young players, the differences in skill levels are obvious. Some kids are natural scorers. Some can barely dribble. Others become your defensive stoppers. Winning rarely comes from the most talented player.

A good team is not built by forcing everyone into the same role. It is built by helping each player understand how their strengths contribute to the group and by creating enough trust so the ball moves to whoever is best positioned in that moment. When that happens, the game changes. The team becomes something more than the sum of its parts.

That idea sits at the center of my BREAKTHRU Leadership book. In it, I argue that the future of leadership should look much more like a basketball team than a traditional organizational chart. Instead of power flowing from the top down, leadership moves dynamically across a group based on expertise, awareness, and trust. When people understand their leadership identity and how it fits within a larger system, teams move faster, adapt more quickly, and solve problems collectively. In other words, the strongest groups do not rely on a single leader. They lead together.

We do not always operate this way. Most institutions were built on hierarchy. But the conditions of the modern world, complex problems, rapid change, and connected networks, make collective leadership more possible and more necessary than ever before.

Which brings me back to basketball and Napheesa Collier. Yesterday, the Unrivaled League wrapped up its championship game.

Unrivaled, the new professional 3-on-3 basketball league, founded by Napheesa Collier and Breanna Stewart, was created for a very specific reason. It emerged from the growing gap between the exploding demand for women’s basketball and the pay structure in the WNBA. Right now, the appetite for women’s basketball has never been greater. College arenas are packed during March Madness. WNBA viewership is climbing rapidly. Games featuring stars like Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese, and A’ja Wilson regularly sell out major venues, including Barclays Center in Brooklyn.

The demand is real. But the economic structure surrounding the players has not yet caught up to the value they are creating.

To put this into perspective, the highest paid WNBA players earn roughly $240,000 per year. Rookie star Caitlin Clark earned about $76,000 in her first season. Meanwhile, top NBA players earn $50 to $60 million annually, with total contracts that can exceed $300 million.

Structurally, the path forward is not a mystery. The WNBA is majority owned by the NBA, and the men’s league has already gone through this evolution. Today NBA players receive roughly 50 percent of basketball related revenue through collective bargaining agreements negotiated over decades. In other words, the model already exists.

Professional basketball has faced a moment like this before. In 1964, during the NBA All Star Game, players led by Bill Russell and Oscar Robertson threatened to refuse to take the court unless the league recognized the NBA Players Association. Salaries were modest. Pensions did not exist. Owners held nearly complete control over contracts.

The players understood something fundamental. The game did not exist without them. With television cameras waiting and the broadcast minutes away, the league conceded. That moment marked the beginning of modern player rights in professional basketball for men.

Today’s WNBA negotiations carry echoes of that same story. But this moment has one important difference. Players are not only negotiating within the system. They are also building something outside of it. That is the genius of Unrivaled.

For decades, many WNBA players spent their off seasons overseas to earn a sustainable income, playing in Russia, Turkey, or China, often year round. Unrivaled offers something different. A U.S. based offseason league where players hold equity and ownership in the enterprise they are building.

One of the central figures behind that idea is Napheesa Collier.

This Week’s Reflection: Napheesa Collier

Napheesa Collier (also called “Phee”) grew up in Jefferson City, Missouri, the daughter of a teacher and a physician. Her mother coached many of her early teams, which meant Collier grew up around the game not only as a player but also watching how teams are built. Discipline, trust, and preparation were part of the environment from the beginning.

At the University of Connecticut, one of the most demanding programs in college basketball, she developed a reputation coaches value deeply: steadiness. Under coach Geno Auriemma, Collier became known for her reliability, discipline, and decision making, the kind of player coaches trust in every moment of the game. She finished her career at UConn as one of the most accomplished players in the program’s history, ranking among its all time leaders in scoring and rebounding.

After being drafted by the Minnesota Lynx, she became one of the most complete players in the WNBA. She is an Olympic gold medalist, a multiple time All Star, and one of the most respected voices in the league.

Then in 2022, she became a mother. Like many professional athletes navigating sports and parenthood at the same time, that experience sharpened her focus on the future of the league, not just for current players but for the generations coming behind them. Not long after, in February 2023, her peers elected her Vice President of the WNBA Players Association, placing her directly at the center of negotiations about the league’s future.

Leadership often emerges in moments like that. Not because someone seeks the spotlight, but because the stakes become clearer.

Collier put it plainly during the recent negotiations:

“The players are what is building this brand and this league. There is no league without the players. We feel like we are owed a piece of the pie that we helped create.”

She has also been clear about the timing of this moment:

“The time for change is right now. We have the most leverage we’ve ever had as WNBA players.”

Within the Spectrum of Leadership Empowerment® framework, Collier exemplifies what we call a Guide. Guides are steady, thoughtful leaders who create clarity and direction for the group. They may not always be the loudest voice in the room, but they help others see the path forward. That kind of leadership is exactly what we see in Collier, on the court and now off of it.

With the Unrivaled season now finished and WNBA negotiations still underway, we are watching something larger than a sports story. We are seeing women test a new model of power for women. One where the people closest to the work, the ones creating the value, help shape the structure around it. And if this moment teaches us anything, it is that when the people doing the work begin to shape the system, the entire game changes.

From Reflection to Action

Where in your organization does leadership still operate like a ladder rather than a network?

What would change if leadership moved more fluidly, like a basketball team passing the ball to whoever has the best shot?

What might become possible like Unrivaled, if more women saw themselves not just as participants in a system but as leaders with the power to shape it?

Because the best teams do not depend on one hero. They trust each other. And together, they win.