Happy Basketball Wednesday, presented by The BIG EAST Conference. I am still on a high from my event with Lisa Bluder and Jan Jensen last Friday night at Prairie Lights Bookstore. It was yet another reminder that the gap between how people perceive women’s basketball through social media, and how the overwhelming majority of those who care about the sport consume it every day, is enormous.
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Basketball Wednesday
I spent four days in Indianapolis around WNBA All-Star weekend, and the supposed acrimony one would take away from the online conversation bore no resemblance to the interactions, preferences and overall fandom on display all weekend. The same is true in Iowa City, where if a partisan group could ever be found, with all of the supposed rage accompanying it, you’d find it in a room filled with Iowa fans there to hear an author of a Caitlin Clark book speak alongside Caitlin’s former coach and the current head coach of the Iowa Hawkeyes.
That’s just not the universe I encountered at Prairie Lights Bookstore. A packed room gathered instead to celebrate both Caitlin Clark’s achievements-to-date as well as the work by people like Bluder and Jensen who helped us reach this moment. No one was there to hate.
I was delighted, too, that I got to spend time with a majority of the Van Horne Hornettes, a 1962 Iowa state high school championship team, who came out to meet me, hear us speak, and were generous enough to share their memories with me afterwards. Their families joined us, too — Evelyn Brehm’s daughter, Melissa, recalled when she first heard about my interest in her mom’s basketball story, she worried she was the victim of a senior scam. (Melissa assures me we’re good now.)
But this was not a zero-sum evening. At the signing after we all spoke, I met plenty of Clark fans, along with those who root for the Valkyries — Kate Martin played a role in that — New York Liberty, Minnesota Lynx and yes, even Chicago Sky fans. It was an evening of “yes, and”. Certainly, partisans have their favorites. But a cruel twist of the online culture and anonymity producing megaphones for the loudest, dumbest voices is that it can convince many who don’t live anywhere but that online world that it is the epicenter of women’s basketball today. And that just isn’t the case.
To be clear: I don’t think the WNBA can or should ignore the amount of abuse its players face online. And it isn’t. When I asked Alyssa Thomas and Kelsey Plum about this, they both mentioned the Social Protection app that players can utilize to proactively police their mentions for abuse.
Even so, it is something players still have to navigate, Thomas told me.
“People are still receiving awful tweets, things in their inbox,” Thomas told me back on July 18 in Indiana. “You know, I understand some of it is part of the game, but some things being said cross the line, and no one should say that to another human being. It’s sad that fans feel that they have the right to say these things to us. Hopefully we can continue to work on this, because nobody deserves any of it.”
That’s part of a “yes, and” approach, too. We can recognize that we’re living in a moment where racism, misogyny and ugly attacks on marginalized groups are more common and open than at any point in my lifetime. We must see the WNBA continue to take steps to protect the players — it is not a reasonable choice to ask players who are building their brands to step away from social media entirely. Sitting back and doing nothing isn’t an option. And yet: this is still not the primary way anyone outside of certain social media sites is experiencing women’s basketball right now.
At last Tuesday’s game between the Indiana Fever and the New York Liberty at Barclays Center, the crowd reserved its loudest boos for Sophie Cunningham. This is still novel enough to evince surprised laughter in the media section, where for the longest time there simply weren’t any villains in the WNBA space. (Cunningham, for the record, loves being booed.) A league in which not everyone is on the same page is inevitable within the framework of a league that grows its fanbase. Growing thoughtfully is necessary, but expectations that the WNBA will not change shape as it grows is not realistic, either.
I say all this not to encourage everyone to throw up their hands and give up on the daily work. Just the opposite. People aren’t asking out of a bad-faith agenda, but simply based on whatever online nonsense they’ve consumed, and legitimately want to know from me when they find out what I do for a living: why do all the players hate Caitlin Clark? Why are all the Caitlin Clark fans racist? Why isn’t the league stopping all the bounty-hunting directed at Caitlin Clark? Why is the WNBA so dedicated to promoting Clark over everyone else? Why is the WNBA so dedicated to promoting anyone except Caitlin Clark?
Most of the time, when I puncture these myths, people accept it. But they’re usually surprised. The person online they heard it from was so sure and so loud about it! Wouldn’t that person on TV need to have some basis in fact to make a claim like this? The video wasn’t definitive, but the person I spoke with saw it replayed hundreds of times with a caption explaining it in very basic — much too basic! — terms. Surely it must be true if that many people retweeted it?!?
I feel for these folks being misled, just as surely as I feel for the longtime WNBA fans who have utilized the league as a safe space, one in short supply elsewhere in this country for the longest time, and now a league that is entering the mainstream at a moment the mainstream has never felt less safe.
So at the risk of failing to provide the hot take here, I’m going to fall back on advice I have given so many people over the recent past. Ignore the noise. Hold space in your mind for understanding that this is absolutely what the online conversation looks like right now, amplified by some folks in the media space who know enough about the WNBA to know they need a take but not enough to have that take be informed, but don’t allow yourself to be captured by it.
Understand as well that in every corner of the women’s basketball universe right now, at sold-out arenas in Brooklyn and rooms filled with love and history in Iowa City bookstores, there is a growing and emerging fan base entirely divorced from these extremes, who are coming to love the sport on its own terms. It is up to the teams and leagues to speak to this reality, not the false one that exists online.
And every single one of us in the media have dual responsibilities — to hold teams and leagues accountable for their work patrolling the online world its players live in by necessity (with occasional frightening spillover into the real world) and at the same time, to amplify what’s primarily happening in these real world spaces. Not because it’s more positive, though it is. But because it’s real. The WNBA and its teams alike should remember this. Social media sites, particularly Twitter, are built to maximize conflict. Treating social media sentiment like reality is sticking a thermometer into a boiling pot and then believing you’ve found the temperature of your entire kitchen.
But while teams, leagues and media all have dual responsibilities here: you, the fans? You don’t have to spend any time at all worrying about the online noise. Go seek out the joyful parts. In women’s basketball, they are more prevalent than ever before, more accessible than they’ve ever been, you’ll be surrounded by folks who also want another fix of the sport they’ve come to love a month or a year or a half-century ago. It’s what the Van Horne Hornettes and Lisa Bluder and Jan Jensen fought to make a reality. And that reality is here.
I wish you’d been there on Friday night, or at the recent sellout crowds I witnessed while covering this incredible sport. Those are the most representative experiences you can have right now in women’s basketball. And also: what joy it brings.
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This week in women’s basketball
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