The league's labor situation came to a head faster than Reese expected, a rival league's aggressive recruitment push forcing the issue into the open by mid-April — three top scorers from Eastern conference teams announcing, within the same week, that they'd signed with the new competing venture for contracts nearly double what the original league could currently offer.
The players' informal talks became something more urgent almost overnight. Reese found herself, alongside Priya and four other team captains, in a series of increasingly tense video calls with league leadership, pushing for concrete commitments — a real collective bargaining framework, salary floors, the specific structural protections that would keep players from bleeding away to a rival league before this one had a genuin
