Dear Congressional Republicans: Your letter to the WNBA isn’t helping anyone

LOS ANGELES — Dear Members of the Republican Study Committee,

I cover the WNBA for the Chicago Sun-Times. This morning, during my daily women’s basketball news sweep, I came across your letter to Commissioner Cathy Engelbert about Caitlin Clark.

You begin by stating the obvious: Clark’s immense popularity has been good for league business.

You also acknowledge, in a twisted and disingenuous way, something many players and league stakeholders agree on: WNBA officiating is inconsistent and too often fails to address rough play.

Then comes the culture-war rallying cry. You assert that the “attacks” against Clark are “racially motivated,” linking to “reports” and “posts” that, somewhat hilariously, don’t work when you try to click them.

By the end, though, you retreat into safer territory. Although the entire letter centers Clark, your actual demands to Engelbert are strikingly general. You ask about the league’s review mechanism for violence, accountability for overly aggressive actions and protections against online harassment.

Don’t worry — I didn’t miss the stereotypes or the not-so-subtle pathologizing of a league full of Black women as uniquely violent and in need of special mechanisms to keep that violence in check.

But I also found the hedge telling. Maybe even you recognized how unserious it sounds for members of Congress to intervene in a professional sports league on behalf of one player.

Especially when that player has never said she believes she’s the target of racially motivated attacks. Especially when Clark has repeatedly noted that she’s one of many players who’ve been on the wrong end of flagrant fouls.

After reading your letter, I took an Uber to the Sparks’ shootaround and spoke with Nneka Ogwumike, the president of the players’ union. She found the letter unfortunate, though not particularly surprising.

Ogwumike said she’s been having plenty of conversations with players about officiating. Increasingly, though, those conversations are also about the vitriol surrounding the league and the people attempting to use it to push their own agendas.

“The stigmas and the stereotypes and the racism and the bigotry that is tied to the players that we have in this league … it’s incredibly disappointing,” she said. “I guess it’s going to be on us as players to try and see what we can do. But we’re out here playing the games.

“With women’s sports, these are problems that we don’t create, that we are now burdened to solve.”

Do you see what’s happening here?

You claim to be protecting women’s sports, but you’re really just handing the league your emotional baggage and asking its players to carry it.

Players just fought their asses off to negotiate a collective-bargaining agreement that values them closer to what they’re worth. Many are still fighting for basic resources their male counterparts have had for years.

Now they’re having to deal with even louder and more demeaning agendas.

So on some level, your radar picked up something real. The league’s popularity is growing faster than its infrastructure. They’re still trying to build the plane while flying it.

But the reason for that isn’t what you seem to think. It’s decades of underinvestment and indifference about women’s sports from pretty much anyone.

Where were your letters then?

Now look — I know you weren’t expecting this letter from me, or probably even a reply from Engelbert. Your letter is an obvious, opportunistic publicity stunt.

I know that because, if you actually cared about the WNBA, you probably wouldn’t attach a statement claiming that “if it were not for Caitlin Clark the WNBA would still be irrelevant and possibly even defunct.”

If you cared about officiating, you could read recent reporting from The Athletic showing that the entire WNBA ecosystem knows it’s a problem — and that resource constraints are part of what makes it so difficult to solve.

If you cared about the players, you wouldn’t repeat narratives that expose many of them to even more online abuse.

And it’s especially hard to take seriously your closing invocation of “strengthening families” and “protecting opportunities for women in sport.”

Because you sure are ruining an opportunity for a lot of us.

I grew up playing basketball in Skokie, Illinois and then Grinnell, Iowa, and the game shaped me. I loved it, relished my successes and learned from my failures.

When my playing career ended, I struggled to find the next version of myself. I’d identified so strongly as a basketball player that I didn’t always know who I was without it.

I found solace in becoming a fan of women’s basketball, both at the college level and in the WNBA. It gave my former teammates and me a way to keep sharing our love of the game — videos, debates and conversations about what sports had given us: opportunities to lead, lessons in resilience.

It also gave us a chance to reckon with what sports had taken from us: the ability to slow down, to forgive ourselves, to stop measuring our worth by performance.

But maybe the best part was simply getting to be fans again. To watch people playing our game and doing things we could only imagine ourselves doing.

Chelsea Gray’s behind-the-back passes. Paige Bueckers’ impossible fluidity. And yes, our Iowa roots gave us special connection to Clark’s logo threes, too.

Following the WNBA and its players created a sense of joy, continuation and belonging.

If there’s one thing you take away from the response to your letter, let it be this:

This league means something to people.

It meant something before Clark arrived. It means something during her rise. It will mean something after she’s gone.

Now picture something precious to you suddenly becoming a prop in someone else’s political fight. Picture people who’ve shown little interest in understanding it deciding it’s useful after all.

After a while, that starts to wear on you.

That’s why I’m writing back.

That, and the Sky canceled their shootaround this morning, leaving me short of my usual material.

Look, bleeding-heart liberals can sniff out a good opportunity, too.