When Coquese Washington became the WNBA Players Association’s first president in 1999, the association was in dire straits.
Yearly salaries for players began at around $5,000, and year-round health insurance was unheard of. Both paid maternity leave and retirement benefits were foreign concepts to the WNBA’s Players Association in its early stages.
“We just wanted to make sure that the fight for things would make playing in the WNBA a career and not a side job,” Washington told The Daily Collegian. "The conditions that we were playing under made it impossible for this to be a career or profession.