Let’s start with the good: The WNBA is more popular than ever. During the offseason, the league and the WNBA Players Association reached a landmark collective-bargaining agreement resulting in a 400 percent increase, on average, in player salaries. The average franchise valuation has soared 59 percent in the past year; the Golden State Valkyries were appraised at a league-high $850 million. Between now and 2030, the WNBA will add three new teams, in Cleveland, Detroit, and Philadelphia. And the WNBA saw a 44 percent jump in ratings for this year’s All-Star Game—which, for the first time ever, hosted more in-person fans than the NBA’s.
Yet this success has come amid unprecedented controversy. In early July, a group of 11 Republican lawmakers sent a letter to Cathy Engelbert, the WNBA’s commissioner, demanding that she be held accountable for not adequately addressing “repeated acts of unnecessary physical hostility and violence” on the court against the Indiana Fever guard Caitlin Clark, who has emerged as one of the league’s most popular players. The letter also suggested that these acts may be “racially motivated” against Clark, who is white, and called for the Department of Justice to investigate. And right before the All-Star Game, Clark’s teammate Sophie Cunningham told ESPN, “I want to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men,” which immediately became a massive talking point around and outside the league. Shortly thereafter, multiple rallies sprung up in support of Cunningham; Celeste Keaton, a co-owner of the Seattle Storm, was suspended after verbally confronting a pair of teenage fans during a game who were holding signs supporting Cunningham.
The discussions surrounding Cunningham and Clark have different origins; nonetheless, because they play together, their respective dramas have snowballed into one messy dispute that now envelops the league. Engelbert has certainly guided the league into its most financially stable era, but this is a complicated crossroads requiring delicate steering. Even if the WNBA isn’t in immediate danger of losing popularity, culture wars can be exhausting over time. And because its explosive success is the very thing attracting many of its critics, a narrative course correction may not be so simple. But the league needs to protect its players, and be careful not to kowtow too much to its critics.
Managing the WNBA responsibly is especially challenging in this political and media environment. As Media Matters for America recently noted, Fox News has dedicated at least 206 segments to the WNBA since late June, most of which revolved around racial issues or the inclusion of trans athletes in the league. It’s difficult to refocus attention when a major news network isn’t letting up.
Much of what’s happening now began when Clark entered the league, in 2024. In a short time, her tenure has helped the WNBA transform financially and receive more mainstream attention. But Clark’s stratospheric popularity has been complicated to manage. By keeping her views private, she’s become a blank slate for anyone’s cause. Though she has never publicly acknowledged her own political leanings, prominent conservatives have wielded Clark against her own league to advance MAGA’s racial grievances.
And whenever a perception emerges that Clark is being treated unfairly by her peers, the backlash is outsize. In June, the Phoenix Mercury forward Alyssa Thomas was suspended after hitting Clark in the throat during a game, one of the incidents prompting the letter from the Republican lawmakers. It was a bad play, but aggressive physical contact is an inevitable part of sports. Yet it was treated as an outlier: Thomas, who is Black, told reporters that after her play with Clark went viral, she received death threats and was called racial slurs.
The heated environment can be seen as part of a larger outcry. The league is about 70 percent Black, and anywhere from 25 to 35 percent queer; historically, its players have embraced progressive issues. In 2016, the Minnesota Lynx wore T-shirts calling for justice and accountability following the police-related deaths of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling. A few years later, Senator Kelly Loeffler of Georgia, a Republican, wrote a letter to Engelbert criticizing the league’s support of the Black Lives Matter movement. In response, players backed Raphael Warnock, who eventually won the seat from Loeffler in the 2020 election.
This history has made the WNBA low-hanging fruit for MAGA figures, whether politicians or commentators, who use it to score cheap points with their base. Critics lacking a serious investment in women’s basketball can conveniently swoop in to recite their spiel, and pay no attention to the sport itself. When the league was less popular, its players may have been freer to express their opinions without blowback. Perhaps that’s no longer possible. During All-Star weekend, I spoke with the Lynx’s rookie sensation, Olivia Miles, who talked about the difficulty of using the league as a platform for other issues, given the current attention. “Learning how to navigate that through sports is not an easy thing to do, because everyone is watching us at all times,” she said. “There’s so many things that are said and done and criticized.”
The freedom to voice one’s politics goes both ways, and in Cunningham, conservative critics have a figure whose beliefs explicitly align with theirs on one particular topic. In the ESPN profile, she characterized her politics as “very much in the middle.” But her actions have drawn polarized attention. In Minneapolis, Cunningham took pictures with the former college swimmer Riley Gaines, who for years has advocated to keep transgender women out of women’s sports, and whose activism has been far more explicitly partisan. (Gaines has said the Biden administration “pushed radical gender ideology every chance it got,” and campaigned for President Trump.) “I think it’s people just practicing their rights of freedom of speech and doing what other fans have been doing since the WNBA has started,” Cunningham told reporters of the rallies held in her support. “And so props to them, props to everyone who is able to be competent and be bold and courageous enough to speak their truths.”
Now coaches and players are being peppered with questions about where they stand—even though the league has never had a trans-woman player. (Layshia Clarendon, who was the first WNBA player to undergo top surgery, identified as nonbinary and trans. They retired in 2024.) Clark, too, has been criticized for not backing Cunningham’s stance. Some, like the Minnesota Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve, are choosing to do their own form of counterprotesting. Reeve wore a T-shirt during a recent game against the Fever that read Trans Kids Belong; ahead of the game, she defended trans rights to the media. “I’ve chosen to listen to transgender families, and what I know is exclusion is not the answer,” she said.
This is a snapshot of the current WNBA experience—unprecedented growth and great basketball at risk of being swallowed up by the same culture wars plaguing the broader political landscape. Nearly every day brings some new development conflating the conflicts. Last week, the former NBA players Royce White and Enes Kanter Freedom announced their intentions to identify as transgender in order to play in the WNBA. (It’s highly unlikely they’ll be allowed in the league.) During a game, Cunningham received a hard foul; the other player, the Chicago Sky’s DiJonai Carrington, was ejected and subsequently posted “WHITE PRIVILEGE” to social media. The implication, presumably, was that Carrington, who is Black, was more heavily penalized because of the perception that Cunningham, and by extension her image and outspokenness, needs to be protected.
With the overall success of the league at stake, being dragged into the political fray may be a steep price to pay for visibility. Still, the players don’t seem ready to shut up and dribble. “I think it’s really important that we don’t lose something that’s a foundational truth in our league, to the growth,” Jonquel Jones, who plays center for the New York Liberty, told me during All-Star weekend. “There’s enough space where we can grow as a league but still continue to have our integrity and continue to operate in a certain type of way. I feel like we’re losing that a little bit.”
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Competitive friction is one thing—but all of the WNBA’s players, regardless of who they are and what they believe, are now being publicly harassed. Before the All-Star Game, members of the players’ union executive and justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion committees met with league officials to express their concerns about the escalation in abuse. Yet the players are, in many ways, subject to political dynamics outside their control. “We’ve experienced a lot of great changes, but the perspective I have, it really weighs heavily on—and I want to say this in a way that isn’t taken the wrong way—this isn’t a problem that was created by the players,” WNBA Players Association President Nneka Ogwumike told me. “So looking to us to always fix it is not the only way.”
The question now is how the league can cool the rhetoric used around it. Clark, for example, has criticized the racism and misogyny that her fame has brought upon the WNBA, but that has done little to slow it down. When she was asked about the pregame demonstrations supporting Cunningham after a recent game against Minnesota, she opted for a generic, noncommittal answer. “I think it’s for leagues and the governing bodies to work with their athletes to find solutions, but our focus is on basketball,” she said. Perhaps she shouldn’t have to be more forceful—but soon enough, she may not have a choice.
Meanwhile, Cunningham has taken a different approach. Detractors call her “MAGA Barbie,” a nickname she’s disavowed, although, at the very least, she’s played just enough footsie with MAGA to enrich her own personal brand. Nevertheless, she seems to recognize that things have gotten out of control: “I’m going to let people just do the speaking for themselves, but for me, I want to get back to basketball,” she said in early August.
But how exactly can the league pivot back to basketball, especially during a time when outrage is so easily stoked? Last Wednesday, a task force of WNBA-team presidents and general managers met to discuss trans-athlete inclusion, as well as the abuse that many of their players have received. In a statement released after the meeting, the league denounced the outside criticism as “bad-faith efforts” that were meant to “demean or marginalize others.” The meeting didn’t result in any new eligibility guidelines regarding trans players, and it showed that the league is on the defensive—which won’t cut it.
The WNBA doesn’t get the luxury of being conveniently neutral the way other leagues do, not when its Black and queer players remain easy targets. Yet while all of this has been going on, excellent basketball is still happening. The league hasn’t imploded. Clark and Cunningham are able to play without causing riots. Nobody’s taken the bait regarding White and Freedom’s trollish provocations.
Perhaps the best thing the WNBA can do is stay firm in its own identity, even if a few brushfires get started in the process. A more visible commissioner with consistent messaging certainly could help. But all of this stems from the players feeling the freedom to express themselves—and, in turn, feeling confident in their capacity to navigate any criticism. In a way, the fuss around Clark and Cunningham shows that giving in to the social-media comments section isn’t the answer. The league needs to be who it is, and take whatever comes with it.
The post The WNBA Needs to Get It Together appeared first on The Atlantic.
