I attended my first WNBA game in 2018.
Six years ago, I drove down to the Mohegan Sun Arena in Connecticut from my home in Boston. It was one of those early “camp games” that new fans recently got so up in arms about this summer, and the stands were filled with kids in the upper bowl. In my section in the lower bowl, I squeezed in alongside a group of older lesbians who good-naturedly heckled the refs. I’d never had more fun at a sporting event. I felt like I’d found a version of home.
I have never felt anything but safe, welcomed, and celebrated at a WNBA game — until Wednesday night. The crowd attending Game 2 of the first-round matchup between the Connecticut Sun and the Indiana Fever felt different, and not in a good way.
Even though I’m a veteran sportswriter, I was not credentialed as a press member for this one. Instead, I attended the game as a fan with my partner. After arriving, I quickly noticed the crowd seemed to be rooting for the visiting team, the Fever. Most of the people seated around me were also Fever fans, most of them decked out in Fever guard Caitlin Clark gear.
This didn’t bother me, but it did surprise me. I’d heard (and written) about the “Caitlin Clark effect” all season, but this was my first time seeing it in action. As someone who has spent the better part of a decade trying to tell anyone who will listen how great the WNBA is, I’m thrilled to see more people jumping on board. But very quickly, something started to feel off about the crowd.
“Tonight I felt very uncomfortable,” Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, a Sun fan who has been attending games since 2018, told Andscape. “It was disappointing to see so many people from the area come out to support the opposing team. And on top of it, they had a kind of vitriol for our players that had racial overtones.” Prescod-Weinstein was at the game with their husband. They are both people of color, and Prescod-Weinstein is queer and agender. As a result, “I didn’t feel safe challenging the nasty behavior from the people around me,” Prescod-Weinstein said.
As the game continued, the woman behind me said she’d seen Sun guard DiJonai Carrington shove Clark and became increasingly outraged about it. Then Carrington fell to the ground, and she shouted, “What, did you trip on your eyelashes?”
It was at that point that my partner asked her, “Are you going to be racist for the entire game?” She huffed and puffed a bit but quieted down. Then I noticed a woman standing up and dancing to the music two sections over. Her shirt said, “Ban nails” and she was wearing cartoonishly long fake acrylic nails made out of paper on her hands. It was clear that she was mocking Carrington. There were several “Make America Great Again” hats, including a man wearing a “Trump 2024” hat and holding a sign that said, “Make Basketball Great Again #22.”
Every time the Fever scored, the crowd would erupt, but it didn’t feel like fans were rooting for their team. It felt like a threat. There was an ominous feeling in the building.
But it hasn’t always been this way. “Most games feel like a mini Pride party,” Kate, a Sun season ticket holder who requested we only use her first name, posted a TikTok video about her experience at the game, told Andscape. “Last night felt like a MAGA rally in Connecticut. It felt rabid.”
This was something that fans say was specific to the Fever’s audience. “We went to see a game [earlier this season] when the Sky came to town and though there were a lot of Sky fans, the mood was different,” Prescod-Weinstein said. “A lot of them were Black women. No MAGA hats. This time it was a lot of older white people who seemed to be there to hate on our players rather than to just be fans.”
My partner and I are both queer and trans. The WNBA has always felt like a league for us. In 2023, more than 60% of the players were African American, and over a quarter of them are openly queer. This season, there was at least one trans nonbinary person in the league. The fandom has always felt like it reflected the demographics of the league. This has resulted in an environment that felt safe for both the players on the court and the people in the stands.
The vibe inside Mohegan Sun Arena on Wednesday night was the logical conclusion of the media coverage that the WNBA has received this season, and the league’s failure to respond to it adequately. With the increased audience has come increased attention, largely from journalists and outlets who have never covered the league. When those journalists parachute in, they fail to bring with them an understanding of the culture, context, and history of the sport they are covering. The result is coverage that harms not just the players but the fans.
Coverage of Game 1 between the teams Sunday overwhelmingly focused on one play in which Carrington accidentally poked Clark in the eye, continuing a season-long trend of coverage implying that Clark was targeted by the rest of the league. Despite both players saying it had been accidental, the media ran with the narrative that Carrington — a Black, openly gay player — was aggressively trying to bully Clark, a straight white woman. The Los Angeles Times ran a story with the headline, Caitlin Clark suffers black eye. It was caused by player who mocked and called her out in June, which the newspaper changed after attracting criticism. Sports podcaster Jason Whitlock claimed that Carrington “assaulted” Clark, ESPN sports commentator Shannon Sharpe dedicated an entire segment of First Take to the play, ESPN sent an in-game push notification about the play, and right-wing media had a field day with it.
Carrington tweeted some of the threats she’d received, one that included racial slurs and rape and death threats. With the media stoking this kind of fire, is it any wonder that Clark fans showed up to Mohegan Sun ready to target Carrington? And is it any wonder that Carrington has called Fever fans the “nastiest” fans in the WNBA?
“In my 11-year career, I’ve never experienced the racial comments from the Indiana Fever fan base,” Sun forward Alyssa Thomas said after the game. “We don’t want fans that are going to degrade us and call us racial names … It’s uncalled-for, and something needs to be done, whether it’s them checking their fans or this league checking – there’s no time for it anymore.”
WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert came under fire Sept. 9 when she was asked about the toxic fandom and the racist harassment and vitriol many players had been subjected to this season. Engelbert spoke about the need for rivalries in sports and stressed that she encourages players to ignore the trolls on social media. But as Wednesday night’s game at the Mohegan Sun showed, this isn’t just about anonymous hatred on the internet. And it’s not even the first time players have been threatened this season. On June 5, someone approached Chicago Sky players Chennedy Carter and Angel Reese outside a hotel following a game against the Fever. Other players have spoken about the impact of fan behavior on their mental health, including Sky players Isabelle Harrison and Dana Evans.
“This is not about rivalries or iconic personalities fueling a business model,” Terri Jackson, executive director of the Women’s National Basketball Players’ Association, said in a statement following Engelbert’s remarks. “This kind of toxic fandom should never be tolerated or left unchecked. It demands immediate action, and frankly, should have been addressed long ago.”
The WNBA released a statement after Wednesday’s game, saying that it will not tolerate “racist, derogatory, or threatening comments made about players, teams, and anyone affiliated with the league.” But for many, including some players, the statement is too little, too late.
There is another layer to this kind of racism being on display at the Mohegan Sun Arena, too. The Sun are the only team in the league owned by a Native American nation that invested in women’s basketball early, and they play on tribal land. “I want people to be respectful when they come to Mohegan Arena, whatever team they are rooting for,” Prescod-Weinstein said. “Most of us are coming there as guests of the Mohegan people, on their land. Racism in that context has a particular history, and the league has a responsibility there.”
Having been at that game, I can tell you that the most aggressive people in that crowd were not Indiana Fever fans — they were Clark fans. I did not see any other player’s name on a Fever shirt or jersey, and most of the Fever gear I did see explicitly had Clark’s name or number on it. It is no longer enough just to redirect the conversation back to basketball.
Clark was asked about the hate other players have received this season, and affirmed racism has no place in the league.
“Nobody in our league should be facing any sort of racism, hurtful, disrespectful, hateful comments and threats,” she told James Boyd of The Athletic. “Those aren’t fans. Those are trolls.”
Carrington has been critical of Clark this season when she wondered how someone “can not be bothered by their name being used to justify racism, bigotry, misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia & the intersectionalities of them.” She encouraged Clark, who hasn’t been very outspoken about her fans, to use her platform for good, saying “silence is a luxury.” Following the media coverage of Game 1, Washington Mystics guard Brittney Sykes took to X with a similar sentiment.
“Even if you don’t WANT the responsibility …. You STILL have a responsibility! Speak up,” Sykes wrote. “The W has no place for the s— that’s being displayed or said to women in our league … Don’t use players to hide behind true intentions of being mean, nasty, and racist.”
It’s not fair that the media and a segment of her fan base are forcing Clark to be an avatar for white supremacy, but she’s going to have to actively push back. If her Black colleagues are being affected by the racism and misogynoir and she chooses silence, she’s choosing to take advantage of the fact that she can check out of dealing with it while they can’t.
As my partner and I stood in the crowd of an elimination game that was close right up until the last minute, we should have been having a great time. Instead, we debated whether we should leave early, worried that the vibe would sour at any moment. We were concerned that the Fever fans would riot if their team lost, but we were just as concerned that they would riot if they won.
“Caitlin played her very first WNBA game in Connecticut, and I was there,” Kate said. “The vibe was so positive and exciting, and felt focused on the kids who had come from all over to see her play. “Between that first game and last night, something shifted drastically. The fan base has been co-opted by adult parasocial obsession. The change in energy was palpable and felt scary at times, in a way I’ve never felt at a W game.”
I looked around at a crowd I didn’t recognize and became tearful. This is not the league these players have worked so hard to build. The Sun should have been able to focus on the fact that they had just advanced to the second round of the playoffs in pursuit of their franchise’s first championship. Instead, they had to address the racism and vitriol that their players had been subjected to simply for doing their jobs.
If this is what growing the game looks like, I promise you I don’t want it.
