Why Unrivaled Shouldn’t Add Caitlin Clark To Its Roster [Op-Ed]

As rumors circulate that Indiana Fever guard Caitlin Clark might be in negotiations to join the third season of the 3-on-3 women’s basketball league, Unrivaled, I feel deflated. 

Clark has been rumored to join the league before. This time there’s more at stake. It’s been a long WNBA season, and much of the air has been taken out of the usual excitement about the league by the Fever, Clark, and her rabid fanbase, who have centered their white racial grievances and anti-trans sentiment, creating a toxic and sometimes perilous environment for players, reporters, and fans alike.

As the WNBA regular season winds down, the usual playoff jitters and excitement are ramping up. Most of my favorite WNBA teams are in the playoffs this year, and a few of my favorite players are strong contenders for Most Valuable Player and Defensive Player of the Year honors.

This year the league celebrated its thirtieth anniversary, ushered in by a well-deserved pay raise for players and one of the strongest rookie classes in recent memory. This season has also brought with it some exhausting unpleasantries. 

At times it has felt like we have been watching uncut scenes from the documentary series “Shiny Happy People,” but a special WNBA edition. Indiana Fever guard Kelsey Mitchell, who has compelled many a Black WNBA fan to repeat the popular refrain “not all skin folk are kin folk,” all but confirmed that refrain appropriate. 

This season, Mitchell shared she was obtaining a graduate degree from Liberty University, the same conservative Christian institution President Trump’s embattled aide, Natalie Harp, who one media outlet called “The High Priestess of the Cult of Trump,” graduated from. 

Indiana Fever’s Sophie Cunningham tried to de-escalate further debates she introduced about whether trans athletes should be in the WNBA by saying the focus should be on basketball. Outside the arena, anti-trans protesters did just the opposite, showing up to numerous games espousing rhetoric that had some fans reconsidering their attendance.

As all of this has reached fever pitch, and yes, that pun is intended, we have had Unrivaled to look forward to. Since the league’s launch two seasons ago, so many of us have felt like we were experiencing an ideal women’s basketball sanctuary, where elite basketball is executed by many of our favorite players, coexisting with an inclusive environment intentionally isolated from structural racial grievances that continue to escalate within the WNBA. 

Unrivaled has provided Black players a vital reprieve from the constant anxiety that a routine hard foul against a heavily protected, overtly emotional opponent might ignite a torrent of death threats and targeted racial harassment from a rabid fanbase that the WNBA’s front office and Clark herself have so far refused to reel in.

It’s also not lost on any of us that Unrivaled plays the majority of its games in Florida, a state that has earned a national reputation for rolling back rights for women as well as Black and LGBTQ people. Florida enforces a six-week abortion ban, prohibits gender affirming care for minors, restricts discussion of gender and sexual orientation, and has permanently banned DEI programs and funding across its public colleges and universities. 

In its first two seasons, Unrivaled has emerged as a sports outlier. 

In August, the league closed a new round of funding that pushed its valuation up to $650 million, with players retaining roughly 30% of the company and every roster spot commanding a six-figure salary. The league also offers an extensive list of perks, including on-site childcare and robust family benefits like on-site nannies and professional chefs. It also has intentionally elevated Black women into head coaching positions during a cycle where the WNBA didn’t have even one Black woman at the helm of a team this season.

Signing Clark risks forfeiting the foundational culture that capital simply cannot buy back; the sense among Black and queer players and fans that this was one space they could show up to without having to watch their backs or compromise their peace. That institutional trust took two seasons for Unrivaled to earn, and one roster decision could permanently dissolve it. 

That risk and the accompanying vulnerability would land at a critical juncture for the young enterprise ahead of what could be Unrivaled’s most pivotal season since its first year launch. 

Television viewership for the league dropped last season, a dip attributed to Unrivaled competing head-to-head on TV schedules with the Winter Olympics and college football playoffs. Athletes Unlimited announced this year that it’s stepping away from its offseason basketball league, effectively removing Unrivaled’s most direct competitor while creating a rare and immediate opportunity for the league to absorb a loyal audience and talent pool that Athletes Unlimited spent half a decade developing. 

Unrivaled announced that the new season will include a long bus tour across the country to cities outside of its home base of Florida, with stops already locked in in major metropolitan markets like New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. 

Signing Clark all but guarantees her volatile following will collide with metropolitan markets and fans meeting Unrivaled for the first time. The hostile behavioral patterns and exclusionary rhetoric that continue to shadow Clark throughout the WNBA season and career will inevitably manifest at these new venues. Consequently, a promotional tour built to cultivate a broader consumer base risks alienating those very communities by introducing disruptions that Unrivaled successfully excluded from its games and digital spaces.

For Unrivaled executives, the financial allure of adding Clark to their league would be a shortsighted calculation that would compromise long-term sustainability for an immediate bump in metrics. In this way, Unrivaled would be wise to learn from the missteps the WNBA made by over-indexing on a transitory demographic of spectators who are deeply invested in the symbolism they’ve attached to a specific player instead of in cultivating fans who will become long-term fans of women’s basketball.  

By compromising its core values for rapid expansion, Unrivaled threatens to alienate its most dedicated consumer base, Black and queer fans whose cultural capital, money, and consistent engagement continue to sustain women’s basketball through shifting trends. 

From the beginning, Unrivaled positioned itself as a forward-looking entity, using the tagline, “The Future is Unrivaled,” as part of its down payment on securing future Unrivaled stars among the nation’s top collegiate players. True progress and the future of basketball can’t be built upon Caitlin Clark, an overrated player who acts as a lightning rod for every toxic, identity-driven grievance masquerading as sports fandom.  

Maybe Unrivaled believes it has enough guardrails in place – fair officiating and coaches who can rein Clark in, but that’s a steep risk to take for a league that’s still finding its footing. No amount of tight refereeing or courtside security can contain the hostile circus that follows her, and if Unrivaled executives think they can reality-proof this league just because they hired a few Black women as coaches, they are deeply mistaken. 

Besides, since the WNBA and Unrivaled schedules don’t overlap, anyone desperate to grab a front-row seat to watch a heavily protected player flop and complain to the officials while a vitriolic crowd bullies and spouts racial and homophobic epithets at her opponents can simply stay home and stream old Indiana Fever replays on WNBA’s League Pass. After all, that option is a whole lot cheaper than a courtside seat at Unrivaled.

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