What women’s basketball must be now — Dawn Plitzuweit talks Minnesota

Basketball Wednesday

Presented by The BIG EAST Conference

So many aspects of women’s basketball filled so many of us with pride, but perhaps nothing more than the central place it came to occupy in the American popular culture here in 2024. Women’s basketball was no longer a side dish in the lives of omnivore sports fans, but often the main course — sometimes to our irritation — and it was an end to that marginalization that likely made the decision a majority in our country made last night even harder to fathom.

For years now, we’ve seen WNBA champions and NCAA women’s champions alike come to the White House and be treated like royalty. One of my favorite moments came in the June following the Lynx’s 2015 championship, when Barack Obama and Cheryl Reeve’s son exchanged pleasantries.

The Lynx won again in 2017. There was no ceremony in 2018 with the president. The Las Vegas Aces celebrated with Joe Biden this past summer. I clearly cannot predict the future, or I wouldn’t have awakened quite so distraught this morning, but it is similarly impossible to imagine, for instance, the New York Liberty exchanging playful phrases with the next president during a trip to the D.C. next season.

This matters less because of the event or lack thereof itself, and what it means, just as women’s sports always carries with it that inherent, more significant context. “Stick to sports” has always been a mantra meant to reward the entrenched power, but it is particularly painful when applied to women’s sports. This is a country that, last night’s results reminded us yet again, clearly contains a group big enough to consist of a governing majority salivating at the prospect of subjugating women, either in pursuit of greater power or, really, for its own sake. Adam Serwer was right.

I cannot begin to tell you precisely what the future holds. But I do know that women’s sports, and the public profile of those players, teams and leagues, are far larger than they were back in 2016. The WNBA has fully embraced its role in progressive life, not originally because it was the right thing to do, but primarily because it would not have been sustainable for the league to exist while attempting to suppress the efforts of its players to repair the world. Trust me, I was there when the league last tried — it did not go well.

To try to do so now would be even worse for the WNBA. The country is not a monolith, and just as surely as a bare majority chose the cruelty of Donald Trump’s policies and worldview, tens of millions of us not only embraced the phrase “we’re not going back”, we’ll continue to live the values stemming from that slogan. And just as surely, however awful the attacks on WNBA players stemming from bad faith actors were this season, it will seem virtually bucolic compared to how those attacks will look, sound and feel when they are fanned or even instigated by the President of the United States. And his history makes that conflict all but a guaranteed eventuality.

That is to say: women’s basketball is going to operate as a central foil to the coming administration. There is no way to avoid this. Any effort to do so will be self-destructive to the WNBA. And yes, there will be a cost, a psychic and possibly an economic one, for this role. But it is simply a new reality we’ll all need to face now, as proscribed as the new level of legal immunity the next president will enjoy thanks to last June’s Supreme Court ruling.

I cannot and will not tell you how to feel or what to do. I am in mourning for all of us — and however wide you cast the net for who will be hurt by what’s ahead, my guess is it isn’t wide enough, and no, it doesn’t give me any solace at all how many of the very people who voted to put him into office will be among those victims. I can only tell you what I will do, which is to accept, clear-eyed, what has happened, figure out ways to protect my own people, and show up for everyone I can who needs help.

Oh, and one other thing. I’m going to make sure to squeeze the joy from every experience I can. I’m going to reiterate to myself how lucky I am every time I get to go watch JuJu Watkins or Paige Bueckers play, Dawn Staley or Geno Auriemma coach, the New York Liberty pursue a repeat title or the Indiana Fever grow around Caitlin Clark and Aliyah Boston. I will sink deeply into the storylines, the arcs, the successes and the efforts of all who play it, because that is my job, yes, but also because that is one of the greatest pleasures of my life. Unrivaled’s arrival the very week of the inauguration now looms as more than just fortuitous. For so many of us, it will be self-care.

That is the role women’s basketball can and must play in our lives during the years ahead: a respite, a recharging of the soul, a place to smile and celebrate greatness. We will need this from women’s basketball more than ever now, to energize us for the fight ahead. And the sport, as we know from over a century of setbacks in the larger realm of American life, injustices large and small, codified and lawless, presented with ample public warning or sprung upon us, is more than up to that task.

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Five at The IX: Dawn Plitzuweit, Minnesota

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