Photo Courtesy of @caitlinclark22 on Instagram
By Alexander Bernhardt Bloom | alex@queensledger.com
The Stanley Cup, this year, was won in Sunrise, Florida. This week, Major League Baseball’s best faced off in Arlington, Texas. Perhaps there is an organized campaign at work among our nation’s professional athletics leagues to send their most accomplished into the depths of the smoldering South this summer.
This week, the All Star representatives of the WNBA will get the worst of it, weather-wise, when they convene in Phoenix, Arizona, but to be fair, they’re not there to perform outdoor activities.
Friday is when said activities will get underway with the famed Skills and 3-Point Challenges, the league’s best and those there to cheer them taking up residence in the Footprint Center, usually home to the middling Phoenix Mercury. In the meantime and over the whole course of the two-day gathering, a related event across the street called WNBA Live will occupy the Phoenix Conference Center, and provide a venue for celebrity handshaking, ticketed proxy event-viewing, and the distribution of corporate partner-emblazoned swag and merchandise. On Saturday night all heads will turn toward the main event with the All Star exhibition game in the Phoenix arena.
The main event will look a little different this year because of the augmented structure adopted by the league to accommodate the 2024 Summer Olympics. In years past, the WNBA has suspended the All Star Game entirely as it prepares to send players – the USA Women’s National Team are all league members – to compete abroad. In 2021, sensing the opportunity, no doubt, for increased visibility in the spectacle, league leaders decided to stage the midsummer game, but billed it not as a show-down, but a send-off for the players who would compete in the games in Tokyo that year. This year they’ll repeat the successful format.
Of the twenty-four All Stars making their way to Phoenix to receive the honor this week, twelve of them are Olympians who will subsequently be making their way to Paris to compete in the summer games. (The other twelve are selected through a complicated schema that includes fan voting and input from other players, managers, and members of the media). If the claim is that the Phoenix event was arranged in their honor they’ve certainly earned it: the national team will seek their eighth consecutive title and possess a historical record to inspire would-be competitors to run for the exits at 70-3.
The domestic celebration should provide for a good show in its own right nevertheless. The WNBA is enjoying a crest-resembling moment in what has been a tsunami wave of rising fan following in recent years. Analysts have measured numbers three times the size of what they were for television viewers this season compared with the last, and ticket sales and player sponsorships have soared. The talking heads that be have said much about why.
Many of the sets of eyes present in Phoenix or tuned in from afar will be trained with special attention on Caitlin Clark, midwestern poster child, collegiate sports All American, WNBA rookie and highly-anticipated Rookie of the Year, and first-time WNBA All Star selection.
Clark has been credited with raising the visibility of the sport in general, and for carrying the banner as it enters a new era. At 22, the backcourt-lurking guard has had little time in the public eye but has widened them nonetheless in great numbers. She dribbles with dexterity and attacks in the paint with slithering stealth. She shoots with an outrageously quick release and astounding accuracy, and does so fearlessly, often from distances more frequently chosen in jest in schoolyard pick-up games – reach!
Coaches have explained the pass on Clark’s selection for Team USA as a matter of experience, and so she’ll join the home team on Saturday night, but we should expect to see her in the ranks of All Stars here and abroad for many years to come.
Sweating it out in one of America’s hottest municipalities this weekend, the WNBA’s best and the fans there to see them will, by any measure, have much reason to rejoice. Half of their stars will depart for the glamorous municipality in France thereafter, but they’ll always have Phoenix.
