Just a few years ago, what athletes had to say about social issues reverberated beyond sports. Under some pressure—not only from events of the day but, it appeared, from the dominant culture—athletes were talking more and more about using their “platform” to fight injustice. Until this month, the last time a game had been postponed for reasons that intersected so directly with politics was in 2020, inside the N.B.A.’s bubble during the coronavirus pandemic, when members of the Milwaukee Bucks led a wildcat strike to protest police violence. That interruption had felt bold and clarifying—an extraordinary disruption of ordinary rituals, which seemed certain to have some effect. But that didn’t turn out to be the case. If anything changed, it was the perceived risk in making, and not making, political statements.
These days, many athletes are slower to talk about politics, and leagues are more circumspect. Social media, it turns out, does not represent the views of the larger public, and it has become increasingly toxic. The platforms are mostly for performance. Even many progressives now seem to feel that professional athletes—who tend to be young, devote themselves single-mindedly to their sports, and as a rule loathe public distractions—don’t have any special authority or obligation to weigh in on world events. Anthony Edwards is a charismatic, hyper-talented basketball player who once posted a blatantly homophobic video on Instagram. He has been accused of pressuring a woman he impregnated to get an abortion. (In a subsequent statement, Edwards said, “I made comments in the heat of a moment that are not me, and are not aligned with what I believe and who I want to be as a man.”) He is not the person to look to for civic leadership or a discussion of federal policies.
In some sense, athletes are freer to say what they really think—though, given the current government and corporate climate, there may be real costs to saying what’s on their minds. There are basketball players who spoke out about the killings in Minneapolis. Victor Wembanyama gave a passionate answer about how horrified he was by the news. Tyrese Haliburton plainly labelled Pretti’s death a murder. Larry Nance, Jr., wore an anti-ICE T-shirt, and the Players Association put out a statement in defense of civil liberties. Breanna Stewart carried an “Abolish ICE” sign during player introductions before an Unrivaled game (and many other women’s basketball players, as usual, waded more directly into political matters than their male counterparts did). But these were exceptions. The N.B.A. was silent, and so were many of its stars. At the end of last week, LeBron James, who once took a lead among athletes in decrying injustice, spoke out for the first time, sort of: he posted a new song by Bruce Springsteen, called “Streets of Minneapolis,” on Instagram. Despite his huge following, and however he feels, whether he denounces the actions of ICE or not probably makes little practical difference on the streets of Minneapolis. James knows, like the rest of us, that Donald Trump made it back to the White House even after James labelled him a clown.
None of this means, of course, that the players and staff weren’t affected by what was happening in their city. On Sunday, Minnesota’s head coach, Chris Finch, talked about how heartbroken the team was, and said he was glad that they hadn’t played on the night of Pretti’s death. The N.B.A. did not present the postponement of the game as an act of protest; the league said it was done “to prioritize the security and safety of the Minnesota community.” Either way, Finch said, “playing basketball just didn’t feel like the right thing to do.” Sports seemed beside the point.
In times of turmoil, what is the point of sports? I know plenty of people who would say there’s none—that professional sports are a bloated form of entertainment, a waste of time. An excuse to eat nachos and gamble. Are they merely an escape? Maybe. People want distractions from bad news. They want rituals. They want an occasion to drink beer and argue with strangers and friends. They want the reassuring rhythms of a long baseball season. They want examples of excellence. Some of them even want to watch the New York Jets. Of course, they don’t necessarily think about these things in terms of wanting. They don’t need sports to have a point. They care because they cared when they were young.
But there were signs during that win against the Dolphins that this year might be different. Maye completed nineteen out of twenty-three passes, for two hundred and thirty yards, throwing for two touchdowns and rushing for another. The game’s real highlight, though, came at the end, when the running back Antonio Gibson returned a kick ninety yards for a score—and Vrabel chased him along the sideline in excitement. When was the last time anyone in New England looked like they were having fun?
Since the loss to the Steelers, the Patriots have won eight straight. They’re atop the A.F.C. East, with a good chance to secure a first-round bye in the playoffs. On Thursday, at home, they avoided an embarrassing loss to one of those New York teams, the Jets—a trap game if ever there was one. What stood out most was what now seems unremarkable: the quarterback playing up to increasingly lofty expectations, serenaded by chants of “M.V.P.!” Maye threw fewer of the spectacular deep throws that he has become known for, but that was a sign of growth: he seemed content to take the yardage that was given to him; nothing was forced. He completed his first eleven pass attempts of the night, and even after cooling off didn’t turn the ball over once. Again and again, he showed how well he can move, dodging pressure and sliding through danger to find open receivers, whether it meant making difficult throws over the middle while on the run or taking the quick out.
But about those deep throws! Nothing has brought life back to Foxborough like the rocketing spirals Maye has been launching downfield. Last season, New England ranked thirty-first in explosive-pass rate, or how often a play gains at least twenty yards. They were thirtieth in that metric the season prior. Now Maye is considered one of the best in the league at long throws, Diggs is having a resurgence, and the team has developed a few of its other receivers into deep-ball threats. There is no doubt that the culture in New England has changed. Vrabel has a tradition of greeting each player on the way to the locker room after games, and the coaches are quick to praise the players. (This was not Belichick’s forte.) The players, for their part, deflect the praise; they speak about one another with delight and awe. The team seems to have found that elusive balance of confidence and calm, accountability and community, which characterizes many excellent teams. There appears to be a willingness to take big risks on the basis of trust.
Where does that trust come from? Sports narratives inevitably have a teleological dimension. Once the ending is known, everything that leads up to it seems to be instruments of that end. In a well-sourced account of the Patriots’ renaissance in the Substack Go Long last month, the football journalist Tyler Dunne noted that, shortly after Vrabel became head coach, he discovered trash in the sauna and dirty washcloths littering the floor of the locker room. He immediately instructed the players to treat their workplace, and the people who cleaned it, with respect. The players understood that the point wasn’t simply civility. It was winning. “If you want to win, you do the small things,” the running back Antonio Gibson said. Dunne’s story was full of details like that. In Dunne’s telling, Josh McDaniels isn’t an asshole; he’s the perfect coach for a hungry and talented young quarterback. Vrabel’s smashmouth style isn’t old-school brutality but necessary toughness. The cultural shift is oriented around the team’s newfound success.
Maybe so. Vrabel is right: respect really does begin at home. Different personalities mesh differently, and what doesn’t work in one situation might be just the thing in another. Maye seems to be thriving under the guidance of McDaniels, whose mastery of the Patriots’ offense has never been in doubt. “It’s fun to be in the headset with him,” Maye said recently, of McDaniels.
It’s also undeniable that the Patriots have had an unusually easy schedule, and perhaps they look great because they’re playing weak opponents. Through eleven games, the teams they have beaten have a combined record of 30–54, and the Patriots have the easiest remaining schedule in the N.F.L. In fact, one measure pegs the Patriots’ schedule as the third-easiest in the N.F.L. since 1978. Clearing the sauna of debris might not have been instrumental, after all. And if a few things had gone in another direction, if a few loose balls thrown by Maye on Thursday night had been intercepted, or if Antonio Brown hadn’t outrun the Dolphins and the Patriots had begun the season 0–3, some stories—such as the one about how Vrabel emerged from a preseason brawl between the Patriots and the Washington Commanders with a bloody face—might sound a little different. Maye has been having a fantastic season. He might really win M.V.P., but he’s been sacked more than any other quarterback (among qualified starters) except one, and over all the Patriots offense has been middling. Take away a few of those thrilling plays, and we might be telling a different story.
But what’s true of negative-feedback loops is also true of positive ones. Encouragement becomes courage. Luck starts to seem like fate. For years, the Patriots couldn’t catch a break. Then came Brady—the hundred-and-ninety-ninth pick in the draft—and the team’s fortunes changed entirely. Losers become winners, until the cycle repeats itself. ♦
A real scowl peaks out behind the practiced one. He is quick to laugh, but also to anger. When he came into the league, there were suggestions that perhaps he should play as point guard, and he still has a point guard’s instinct to include his teammates. But he has had to do so much on his own.
As a rookie, he had nineteen unassisted dunks; five years later, he had more than a hundred. So far this year, he is averaging more than twenty points in the paint while playing just over thirty minutes a game. He’s making nearly eighty per cent of his shots within five feet of the rim. A lot of them, spectacularly, are driving dunks. He is a team unto himself. On Friday night, against the Chicago Bulls, he scored forty-one points, to go with fifteen rebounds, nine assists, two steals, and two blocks. No one has a greater impact on the court right now than Antetokounmpo.
The Bucks have played with math for a long time, trying to leverage Antetokounmpo’s efficiency. But, since winning that title in 2021, the team has not been back to the Eastern Conference Finals, let alone the Finals. The Bucks have been knocked out of the playoffs in the first round three years in a row. Antetokounmpo, once criticized for poor shooting, has shot better than sixty per cent from the field in back-to-back seasons. But the team’s front office has had trouble finding the right people to fit around him, and the coaches have struggled to create space on the floor for him to move.
This past off-season was an odd one for the Bucks. After the quick playoff exit, there were rumors that Antetokounmpo would be the latest N.B.A. star to ask for a trade. As training camp began, the rumors got more specific: he had been eying the New York Knicks as a possible destination, people claimed. He was forthright when asked about it: “I’ve said this many times: I want to be in a situation that I can win,” he told the press. He added, “I’m locked into whatever I have in front of me. Now, if in six, seven months I change my mind, I think that’s human, too.”
The right to change one’s mind is not a grace often afforded to pro athletes—nor to the rest of us, for that matter. The public record is what it is, and commitment is framed as an all-or-nothing proposition. But Antetokounmpo stepped into this season with a display of strength and dominance that is awesome even from him. In the off-season, the Bucks cut the high-priced All-Star Damian Lillard and shifted some of that money to Turner, and they secured a pair of guards: Ryan Rollins, a second-year second-round draft pick, and Cole Anthony, a talented player whose progress with his previous team, the Orlando Magic, had appeared to stall. Rollins has been a terrific defender and the Bucks’ second leading scorer, and Anthony has shown a feel for moving the ball to the right spot. Turner, a six-foot-eleven center who can shoot the three, flies around to create space, and the sharp-shooting A. J. Green complements Antetokounmpo’s paint game by staying outside the three-point arc. Every player has a purpose. But it only works with Antetokounmpo. When he’s on the court, the Bucks have one of the best offenses in the league. When he’s off the court, they stink.
You could say that about many stars—it’s what makes them stars. The Denver Nuggets are nothing without Nikola Jokić; LeBron James, for decades, was a team unto himself. But Antetokounmpo’s burden seems different. There is a solitariness about him that he can’t or won’t shake. Two of his brothers are now his teammates, and he defends the rest of the Bucks as if they were his brothers, too. After the game against the Pacers, he explained his response to the crowd’s derision as an act of generosity toward Turner, who had been a critical part of the team that had knocked the Bucks out of the playoffs only a few months before. “It was just me trying to show camaraderie, encouragement to my teammate,” Antetokounmpo said. “Which, if you really think about it, four or five months ago he was the one blocking my shot, pushing me on the floor.” He added, “I respect him when I played against him, and now that he’s my teammate it’s a lot of love towards him.” Maybe so. And yet, watching the other Bucks hang off of Antetokounmpo after that buzzer-beater—as he stared into the middle distance, seeming almost oblivious to the teammates clasping at his shoulders, with his fingers on his lips as the boos rained down—I couldn’t help thinking that he still looks like a man apart. ♦
NEW YORK CITY (WABC) — Thousands of runners geared up to kick off the TCS New York City Marathon in the Abbott Dash to the Finish Line 5K.
On Saturday morning, nearly 10,000 runners of all ages participated in the race to Central Park.
Participants started on Manhattan’s east side near the United Nations and raced through Midtown Manhattan to the TCS NYC Marathon finish line in Central Park.
The Abbott Dash is one of 60 adult and youth races produced bylocalnonprofit New York Road Runners.
The race was headlined by the USATF 5K Championships, with 2023 runner-up Ahmed Muhumed and 2023 champion Annie Rodenfels capturing this year’s titles.
ABC 7 New York is your home for the TCS NYC Marathon, and our Countdown to the Starting Line Special with Liz Cho and David Novarro airs on Saturday after Eyewitness News at 11:00 p.m.
Joining Liz and David will be Eyewitness News Meteorologist Brittany Bell with a look at the iconic 5-borough course. Eyewitness News Sports Anchor Ryan Field has reports on which top runners to look for, and Sports Anchor Sam Ryan will have an update on the exciting Wheelchair Division this year.
ABC7/WABC-TV and ESPN2 have been home to the award-winning TCS New York City Marathon broadcast since 2013.
Kevin Durant was drafted, second over all, by the Seattle SuperSonics, a team that ceased to exist seventeen years ago. After his rookie season, the SuperSonics left for Oklahoma City, where they were rebranded as the Thunder. Since then, his influence has shaped not only every franchise he’s been a part of but the entire league. This is easily visible on the court: when he came into the N.B.A., big men were still primarily bruisers. He was long and willowy, with the grace and finesse of a guard; there was some confusion about what position he should play. Now the league is filled with talented big men who can pass and shoot and defend, who can’t be easily stopped or shoehorned. Durant was a protagonist in various narratives that dominated conversations around the league, particularly those concerning team loyalty, individual agency, the way that particular personalities interact, and what motivates players. That such stories—and not narrower discussions of tactics or estimated plus-minus or whatever—did seem to matter so much to so many people was, depending on whom you asked, for better or worse.
Durant, for one, was often exasperated at how he was portrayed. But he could never quite shake his status as a protagonist, and it’s not clear whether he even wanted to. He became M.V.P. while playing for the Thunder before turning a great Golden State Warriors team into a dynasty—and then ending the reign, when he decamped for the Brooklyn Nets. The Nets were a disaster, and his next team, the Phoenix Suns, failed even more dramatically. The way he played was never to blame: he still moves like water, with the same capacity for stillness or torrential force. Off the court, he dabbled in media projects with his entertainment company, Boardroom, and devoted himself to other interests, including, famously, responding to trolls on the internet. He likes the “dopamine hit” of clapping back, he has explained. “That’s like my coffee in the morning.”
Last Tuesday, on the N.B.A.’s opening night, Durant made his début with the Houston Rockets. His teammates are young and on the rise—coming off a fifty-two-win season, with eleven players under thirty years old, including three starters who are twenty-three or younger. Durant is thirty-seven. There has been a lot of talk about how much his teammates would learn from his élite example: how to train, how to eat, how to rest, how to compete. But he’s not there merely to teach. The Rockets have signed Durant to a two-year, ninety-million-dollar extension—a team-friendly deal, yes, but still the kind of money you pay to the player you expect will be the best on your roster. The Rockets are betting that Durant, despite being well past the retirement age of most players, can elevate them into genuine title contenders. He makes certain things feasible, including a lineup full of bigs that the team’s coach, Ime Udoka, has begun using, in an effort to stymie teams with more normal statures. I confess, however, that the narrative possibilities are, to me, even more tantalizing. This is an unpredictable chapter in the life of a complicated and compelling man.
The outsized relevance of the league’s oldest stars is not new. LeBron James is turning forty-one this year. Stephen Curry is thirty-seven, and will be playing for the Warriors alongside Al Horford (thirty-nine), Jimmy Butler (thirty-six), and Draymond Green (thirty-five). And the Warriors are not even the oldest team in the league; that would be the Los Angeles Clippers, God help them. Athletes across numerous sports have been prolonging their careers, with more focus on nutrition, training techniques, and financial incentives. But the trend seems especially noticeable right now in basketball.
This is surprising given some of the ways in which the league is changing. The pace of the game is becoming increasingly punishing. More and more teams are playing full-court defenses and trapping ball handlers. These strategies favor fresh legs and bodies with less wear and tear, younger players who can endure the long regular season and hold up in spring.
And a number of dominant players have arrived in the league after the James-Curry-Durant cohort: Giannis Antetokounmpo, who is now thirty, has been an unstoppable force. Nikola Jokić, also thirty, is widely seen as the best player in the league. The current M.V.P., Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, is twenty-seven, and Luka Dončić, a favorite to become the next M.V.P., is twenty-six. The average age of the champion Thunder is 25.6 this year, nearly eight years younger than that of the Clippers—and the team that the Thunder beat in the Finals, the Indiana Pacers, also played a rotation that consisted almost entirely of players who were thirty and under. The Thunder are the consensus pick to win the championship again this season.
HATBORO, Pennsylvania (WPVI) — This national pickleball organization visited our area to put up some good volleys.
The “U.S. Legends Pickleball League” gathered players from across the country.
All of them were ages 50+ and 60+ to create balanced competitions on the court.
“We have 12 teams today. We have teams all the way…in Boston, all the way down to Florida…The biggest goal for us is we want to make sure everybody enjoys their time when they come out to compete,” said Co-Founder, Michael Cao.
“The goal really is to allow the older players to be able to compete at their age level. I played tennis in high school and college… And then pickleball came along and it allowed anyone 50 and older to be able to compete at this high level,” said Co-Founder, Ron Cortese.
The tournament took place at Dill Dinkers in Hatboro.
Last season, the Kansas City Chiefs made the Super Bowl, just as they had in 2024, and 2023, and 2021, and 2020. (It could have been five straight if they hadn’t blown an eighteen-point lead in the 2022 A.F.C. Championship Game.) They finished the 2024 regular season with a 15–2 record, which suggests that they were very good. They were not actually very good. Also, nobody likes them.
Maybe not nobody. Taylor Swift likes them. Also, it seems that somebody in the N.F.L.’s league office likes them, because the Chiefs are scheduled to play in more high-profile games this season than any other team. They started the season in São Paulo, Brazil, playing the Los Angeles Chargers, on the vanguard of the N.F.L.’s imperial ambitions. They played the Eagles in Week Two, in a rematch of the Super Bowl on Fox. They play in the prime Sunday-night slot three times, and on Monday Night Football twice. They’ll take on the Dallas Cowboys during the Thanksgiving afternoon game, traditionally the biggest game of the year. And for good measure, they’ll play the Broncos on Christmas. And, it seems for good reason: their game against the Eagles drew an audience of nearly thirty-four million, the most ever for a regular-season Sunday game on Fox. But it’s safe to say that not everyone watching them was rooting for them. There had been a time when a lot of people loved the Chiefs. They were the fun, thrilling underdogs that ended the long, joyless dynasty of the New England Patriots. They had a quarterback who could improvise the way Michael Jordan could dunk. But, as the Chiefs tried for an unprecedented Super Bowl three-peat last season, they became the team that people loved to hate.
There were some obvious reasons: Patrick Mahomes’s terrible State Farm commercials; exposure fatigue; the small explosions of rage that occur in some men’s brains whenever Swift’s success is mentioned. There was also, perhaps, general irritation at the idea that such a successful team should be the recipient of so much dumb luck. Twelve of the Chiefs’ wins last season, if you include the playoffs, were by a single score. They won one game with a blocked chip-shot field goal. They won another by the length of a toe. Mahomes, whose unparalleled genius involves the ability to morph into whatever kind of quarterback his team needs to be, morphed into a system Q.B. who threw checkdowns and dramatically crumbled whenever a ref was around. “If winning football games makes you a villain, we’re going to keep going out there and doing it,” Mahomes said. There were rumors that the Chiefs’ tight end Travis Kelce, Swift’s Ken, who also happens to be a future Hall of Famer, would pop the question on the field if his team won the Super Bowl. Instead, Kelce had to settle for proposing after recording a podcast. The Chiefs were blown out by the Philadelphia Eagles—at one point, the score was 34–0—and Kelce was spotted on the sidelines screaming at and bumping the Chiefs’ coach, Andy Reid.
That was dismissed as the passion of a very competitive (and, to judge from Swift’s lyrics, very passionate) man. But it could be seen as the expression of something else: symptomatic behavior of a team on which nobody is having much fun on the field anymore. Certainly not Kelce, who had been caught in more shouting incidents earlier this season. Kelce, in his mid-thirties, has been forced into carrying an unusually heavy offensive burden—not least because he slammed into the team’s 2024 first-round draft pick, the wide receiver Xavier Worthy, on a crossing route during their first game of the season, which left Worthy with a dislocated shoulder. Another top wide receiver, Rashee Rice, started the season with a six-game suspension for violating the league’s personal-conduct policy owing to his role in a multicar crash in Dallas during the 2024 off-season. The team’s running backs have been so ineffective that Mahomes was the team’s leading rusher through the first five games. And the defense, the team’s greatest strength last season, at least until the Super Bowl, has been a sieve against the run.
The team, however, has excelled in committing penalties—the fourth most in the league. The Chiefs drew thirteen flags during Monday night’s game against the Jacksonville Jaguars, including one that put the Jaguars, down by four, on the one-yard line with thirty seconds left. On the next play, Trevor Lawrence, the Jags’ quarterback, stumbled back and fell to the ground. He then frantically tried to get up and nearly lost the ball in the process. Finally, he got to his feet, and hurtled toward the end zone, as Chris Jones, the Chiefs’ All-Pro defensive tackle, sauntered near the goal line, thinking the play was over. Lawrence dove into the end zone. The Jaguars won 31–28, dropping the Chiefs to a 2–3 record.
The losing record means about as much as the Chiefs’ sterling one did last season: not very much. The first loss of the season, to the Chargers, was a one-score loss to an inspired quarterback in Brazil. The second was a one-score loss to the Eagles. The Chiefs had two convincing wins before losing to the Jaguars—and, in that game, the Chiefs dominated the Jaguars by almost every metric except the score, outgaining them by 476–319 yards. Mahomes has been doing Mahomesian things, and has been throwing downfield more often than last season, and into tighter windows. Since 1990, only twelve per cent of teams that started the season 0–2 have made the playoffs, but the Chiefs have a good chance of becoming one of them. They play in a weak division, and should soon see their ceiling rise when Rice returns. The Chiefs come into their game against the Detroit Lions, one of the best teams in the league, as slight favorites. Regardless of how the Chiefs perform this weekend, their season isn’t over.
Napheesa Collier is a smooth, coolheaded forward for the Minnesota Lynx. She is not the most famous player in the W.N.B.A., but she is one of the best. Before injuring her ankle, in early August, she was the front-runner for Most Valuable Player. (She has been the runner-up for the award two years in a row.) And the Lynx was the winningest team in the league during the regular season, and the favorites to win the championship, until Collier was knocked out of the playoffs. During Game Three of the semifinals, against the Phoenix Mercury, she tore ligaments in her ankle after hard contact sent her sprawling. The Lynx lost that game, and then, with Collier in a boot on the bench and her coach suspended for excoriating the referees in her defense, came up short in the decisive Game Four, too. Collier had finished the regular season with historic efficiency, becoming the second W.N.B.A. player to shoot at least fifty per cent from the floor, forty per cent on three-point shots, and over ninety per cent from the free-throw line. Her hallmark is her reliability, not her explosiveness. She does not seem like the kind of person who would burn a league down.
But on Tuesday, at the start of her exit interview, that was exactly what she appeared to be doing. She sat at the podium with papers in her hands, and, in the course of four minutes, read her prepared remarks. She said that the league office paid lip service to players’ health, that it ignored increasingly urgent concerns about referees losing control of games. It seemed not to care about the quality of the product on the floor. And worse: Collier recounted a conversation with Cathy Engelbert, the commissioner, in February, during which Collier asked how the league planned to address the fact that Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese, and Paige Bueckers, some of the most popular players in the league, with huge and rabid followings, were making so little money. (Clark, whose value to women’s basketball is incalculable, earns less than eighty thousand dollars a year.) Engelbert, according to Collier, had responded that Clark should be grateful to the W.N.B.A. for her millions of dollars in off-court earnings, because the league gave her a platform. Collier also claimed that the commissioner went on to say, “Players should be on their knees thanking their lucky stars for the media-rights deal that I got them.” Collier pulled no punches. “We have the best players in the world. We have the best fans in the world. But right now we have the worst leadership in the world,” she said.
Every argument has a rational, emotional, and rhetorical component. Collier excelled on all fronts. She spoke bravely while pointing out the obvious. It’s no secret that the W.N.B.A. has a refereeing problem. Players and coaches have been calling it out for years, though you didn’t have to take anyone’s word for it; you only needed to watch almost any game to see the amount of contact and notice how rarely the referees succeed in ratcheting down the competitive physical intensity. So far, the league’s response has been not to fix the issue but, instead, to levy fines against players and coaches who criticize refs. It wasn’t a shock, either, to hear of the widening rift between the league office and the players. The league and the W.N.B.A. players’ association remain deeply divided on compensation, and the collective-bargaining agreement is set to expire on October 31st.
The smartest turn in Collier’s speech was to invoke the names of Clark, Reese, and Bueckers—three players with disparate and sometimes misaligned fan bases—pitting Engelbert against not only the players but the world. Her comments about Clark got the most attention, as they were surely designed to. Shortly after Collier spoke out, Engelbert said in a statement that she was “disheartened” by Collier’s characterization of their conversation, though she didn’t deny anything specific. Then, in a press conference before the start of the W.N.B.A. Finals on Friday, Engelbert pushed back against Collier’s description of her comments about Clark needing to be “grateful.” “Obviously, I did not make those comments,” Engelbert said.
Except it wasn’t obvious. That, after all, is the way many people in leadership positions in sports—and especially in the N.B.A., which owns a substantial portion of the W.N.B.A.—talk about women’s professional leagues for years, justifying low salaries and poor playing conditions. It sounded plausible because it was plausible. And Clark’s fans, who have often noted the exceptionally high level of physicality directed at Clark and who’ve been aghast at the league office’s reluctance to single out her unique star power, had good reasons to believe that the league was self-sabotaging. After Collier’s comments, Clark was one of the many players who backed her up. “I have great respect for Phee,” Clark said, of Collier, “and I think she made a lot of very valid points.” Clark pointed out that the introduction of name, image, and likeness (N.I.L.) rights in college sports has made it possible for players to cultivate huge followings that they can then carry over into the W.N.B.A.—not the other way around.
Collier said that league leadership, in an effort to avoid accountability, has tried to “suppress everyone’s voices by handing out fines.” She continued, “I’m not concerned about a fine. I’m concerned about the future of our sport.” That’s when it became clear that Collier wasn’t lighting a match. The match had already been lit; smoke was going up. She was sounding the alarm before it was too late, and showing herself to be the kind of person who could lead the way out.
Collier, as it happens, is not just a perennial M.V.P. candidate; she is a vice-president of the players’ association—and a co-founder of Unrivaled, a three-on-three basketball league that competes during the W.N.B.A.’s off-season. (Her husband is the current president.) In 2026, roughly a third of W.N.B.A. players will compete in it. Unrivaled was not meant to challenge the W.N.B.A.’s status as the world’s premier basketball league; it sometimes had the feel of an exhibition, despite being somewhat successful. (The glitziest stretch last season was a one-on-one tournament, which Collier won.) But it does offer more money: this year, Unrivaled paid players an average salary of two hundred and twenty thousand dollars—close to the top salaries in the W.N.B.A. It also offers players equity, along with better amenities, perks, and an aggressive television deal.
At the start of her first-round match in the U.S. Open, this past Tuesday, Coco Gauff—the winner of the U.S. Open two years ago, the reigning champion of the French Open, and the No. 3 player in the world—tossed up the ball as she began her service motion, and then, thinking better of it, let the ball fall. Ordinarily, no one would note this sort of thing. Tournaments don’t keep stats of caught tosses, which are perfectly legal. But this was not an ordinary situation.
Right before the Open started, Gauff’s home Grand Slam, she had fired her coach Matt Daly, and announced that she was now working with Gavin MacMillan, a serve specialist. The timing of the move, and the decision to reconstruct her serve while also playing her biggest tournament of the year, was unusual, if not unprecedented. Most players on this level don’t tinker much at all with their mechanics, let alone invite millions of people to watch them learn something new. Every toss would rise and fall in the spotlight. On Tuesday, after that first throw, she settled herself, launched the ball up again, and struck an eighty-two-mile-an-hour serve—around forty miles an hour slower than her usual first serves, when they’re flowing.
The point was not to flow—not right now. The point was to think, painstakingly, through every movement: to sense precisely which way her knuckles were turning, to feel the tilt of her scapula, to measure the angle of elbow to her body, to insure that her toss was not drifting rightward (which was one of the reasons, MacMillan had explained, that her body was not extending properly, a failing that had contributed to the spate of double faults that have afflicted her game for years). This kind of overthinking can short-circuit the mind-body connection; athletes train themselves for years to avoid it in high-stakes circumstances.
Gauff is not the first top player to tweak or rebuild her service motion in recent years. Jannik Sinner, Carlos Alcaraz, and Iga Świątek have all tweaked their motions in the past couple of years. Aryna Sabalenka hit double faults at such a high rate that she considered retirement; she turned to MacMillan, overhauled her serve, and then won multiple Grand Slams and ascended to No. 1. But such players tend to make these adjustments in the course of many weeks, on private practice courts in Delray or Monaco or Abu Dhabi, far from TV cameras and prying journalists. Gauff is doing it under the microscope of the press and fans at the U.S. Open.
Gauff has been touted for her potential since she was a child, and has now spent most of her life under intense scrutiny. She has always exhibited a preternatural maturity in spite of it, on and off the court. She defeated Venus Williams at Wimbledon when she was only fifteen, won her first title at fifteen, and, last year, was the highest-paid female athlete in the world. She has grown up in an era when everyone has a camera, and the cameras are often on her. Maybe she imagined revamping her serve while everyone was watching would seem like nothing new.
She could justify the surprising decision. She needed to make a “technical change” to her serve, she said, in a pre-tournament press conference, adding, “I don’t want to waste time continuing doing the wrong things.” She was prepared to lose early, she went on—her focus is on the future, not this one tournament. And perhaps she figured she might lose early anyway, given that she’d been struggling since she won the French Open. After losing in the first round at Wimbledon, she had said, “I just feel a little bit disappointed in how I showed up today.”
Gauff has made changes before, and saw quick, dramatic results. A year ago, she was knocked out of the U.S. Open, as the defending champion, while serving nineteen double faults. She was hitting more double faults than any other player on tour. She had hired Daly then, a grip specialist who had modified the way she held her racquet, and she’d gone on to win her first tournament after they began working together, then the Tour Finals, and the French Open in June. But, despite the shift on her service grip and a new shape to her forehand, her improvement stalled. For years, she had succeeded in spite of her serve, relying on her superior read of the game and her racquet skills and using her speed and athleticism. But winning with grit wore on her, and she imagined how much better she might perform if the glaring weakness of her serve were gone. “I know where I want to see my game in the future,” she said. So there she was, a few days before the start of the tournament, hitting serves in the rain while other top players were competing in the glamorous reboot of mixed doubles for a top prize of a million dollars.
She won her first match, over Ajla Tomljanović, in three dramatic, messy sets, hitting safe, slow serves for much of it, seeming to settle into a rhythm as she went. The two players combined for seventeen double faults and more than a hundred unforced errors. But Gauff held firm at the end, as she so often does, and ripped one of her trademark running backhand passing shots to win it. “This is the match that I needed,” she said in a news conference afterward. “I don’t think it can get any more stressful than this.”
MacMillan’s approach is resolutely technical, not psychological. Serving, for him, is a matter of physics: force and mass, levers and acceleration. He explains that there’s something wrong with the angle of the elbow; he does not say there’s something wrong with the head. If the motion is efficient and sound, he explained to the Athletic before the start of the U.S. Open, it won’t break down. “It’s not a mental thing,” Gauff said, in another press conference, echoing that view. “It’s a biomechanical thing that I had wrong, and I’m just trying my best to get it right.” That could be true. It’s probably easier to fix the angle of the elbow, anyway, than to fix feelings of doubt or anxiety. But the stress that Gauff appears to be experiencing is not ordinary pressure. It seems to have become a kind of exquisite torture.
She caught her first toss in her second match, too, against Donna Vekić. This time, though, she didn’t settle in: she had seven double faults in the first set. After Vekić broke her serve at 4–4, Gauff sat in her chair during the changeover and cried. On the next changeover, as Gauff sat in her chair, her hands were visibly shaking. A trainer came out to examine Vekić’s arm, and Gauff stood up, went onto the court, and practiced her serve while she waited for play to resume.
There is no hiding the serve, no avoiding it, no stepping around it to hit a different shot. Vekić, hampered by an arm injury, was serving as poorly as Gauff, which only heightened the air of desperation in Arthur Ashe Stadium. Somehow, Gauff held on, 7–6, 6–2—a routine scoreline, but hardly a routine win. On the court afterward, she thanked the crowd for the “joy” the fans gave her, then openly wept—tears of relief and even gratitude, it seemed, but not happiness. The match, she told reporters afterward, was “the worst I’ve ever felt on the court,” though she took pride in the way she’d been able to “get up.”
One person in the stadium that night might have understood the position Gauff was in. It wasn’t her coach, who was shouting words of encouragement. The great gymnast Simone Biles was in the stands, and Gauff spotted her. She took inspiration from the thought of Biles on a balance beam, she said on the court, after the match. If Biles could do what she did on the four inches of that beam, she added, then surely she could get a ball into a big tennis court. But Gauff’s mention of Biles brought to mind, for me, the disorientation that Biles experienced at the Tokyo Olympics, when she twisted and lost her bearings in the air—a disconnect between the body and the mind, a condition that can occur under extreme stress. Gymnastics is a matter of physics, too. But there are humans at the heart of it.
At the start of her third-round match, against Magdalena Fręch, Gauff hit her first toss instead of catching it, and this time her serve went in. At last, she wasn’t broken in her opening-service game. Given how emotional she’d been two nights before, how raw she’d seemed, it was hard to expect much from her—except for her fight, which has never deserted her. But, this time, she seemed calmer. Fręch, a steady but not powerful hitter, gave Gauff time to set her feet on her ground strokes. Gauff’s serve steadied throughout the match, too. She cruised, 6–3, 6–1, and finished with a tidy four double faults. Her average first serve was closer to her usual speed. She didn’t seem rushed. It was a remarkable turnaround in a long, ongoing journey. Humans can do extraordinary things. ♦
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Shaun White, five-time Olympian and three-time Olympic gold medalist in half-pipe snowboarding, is more than familiar with winter sports. He’s lived and breathed it for years. But there was always one thing missing: No one was organizing or governing them.
That’s where White’s latest venture, THE SNOW LEAGUE, has been a game-changer for winter sports athletes. With a mission to bring structure and excitement to skiing and snowboarding, he successfully completed his inaugural event in Aspen.
White’s entrepreneurial mindset came from years as the best snowboarder in the world, observing the benefits and problems with how extreme sports are organized. White’s business acumen was forged on the half-pipe as well as by athlete-entrepreneurs like Jake Burton and Tony Hawk. What they brought to the tools of his trade, White would bring to events.
From his early days of living in a van with his family to make ends meet, White reflected on how that experience shaped his view of success.
“But honestly, I look back and those were some of the most exciting times. I think those experiences gave me a deeper appreciation for where I am now,” says White. “If I’d had the best gear and all the resources from day one, it probably wouldn’t have meant as much to me.”
As he gained skill and then started competing with the best snowboarders in the world, he listened to the more experienced athletes and heard about what made them successful as well as their struggles. Many of them had contracts with brands but were always concerned about not being renewed. He also noticed that the only person not concerned was Jake Burton, who owned his own brand.
Another influence was Tony Hawk, the world-famous skateboarder and owner of Birdhouse Skateboards. White recalled all of the best skateboarders wanting to be associated with Hawk’s brand, considered the best in the world. But Hawk told White not to emulate someone else, and instead build something himself that others would want to emulate.
Many of the best entrepreneurs look for gaps in a market, and White is no exception. He saw that there was no governing body to organize the sport like an NHL, an F1 or a UFC. The snowboarding landscape was made up of random events scattered throughout the season. The events that paid the most might not qualify an athlete for the Olympics, but they needed those for the money that could sustain their careers. Lucrative events often required expensive travel, while other events that didn’t pay much actually could qualify you for the Olympics, or meant more to sponsors than to athletes because of TV viewership.
This fragmented nature meant that the sport’s accolades didn’t coincide with an athlete’s achievements. White experienced this when he had an undefeated season.
“And I got to the end of the season and they’re (reporters) like, ‘Amazing accomplishment, way to go! No one’s ever done that before!’ and I’m so happy with myself, ‘…but how does it feel to not be the world champion?’ I was like, what hoop did I not jump through to get that title?”
White’s answer to these problems is THE SNOW LEAGUE. He created a framework that included a qualifying and ranking system, competitive scheduling and the highest prize purses ever offered in the sport.
White’s credibility made it possible. He had the same frustrations they experienced, and because of that result, the project was met with a positive response from athletes as well as people in the industry.
Since starting THE SNOW LEAGUE, White has achieved some significant milestones like securing NBC as the league’s broadcast partner. Another was signing Eileen Gu as the league’s global ambassador. Gu was the first freestyle skier to win three gold medals in a single Winter Olympics as well as being a multi-gold medal winner in the X Games.
Assembling the right team was the next step. White works closely with two main team members, Ian Warda and Omer Atesman, who are critical to achieving the league’s vision. White describes the insider knowledge Warda brings to the team.
“He’s run the Burton U.S. opens and things like that for years and years and years. So he really knows the ins and outs of how to run a snowboarding competition. He gets the culture,” says White. Atesman, the CEO, came with previously existing investor relationships and leadership experience.
A cultural innovation White brought into the league was equal pay for all athletes. White feels both men and women skiers and snowboarders take the same risks and achieve the same results, and should therefore get the same compensation. The policy also helps deepen the field of female athletes in the league.
The entrepreneurial philosophy
White uses several factors to decide whether an opportunity is worth pursuing. First, he looks at the product itself and decides if he likes it and if it’s authentic to him, seeing if it appeals to the humorous, serious or competitive side of his nature.
He looks at other ventures through the lens of how involved he wants to be in the project. High Cascade Snowboarding Camp in Mt. Hood, Oregon, a park where White attended snowboard camps as a child, inspired him to become an investor in the camp’s parent company.
White also uses the backcountry as other executives use the golf course. He takes potential investors on a skiing or snowboarding trip to show them his world, and they get to experience a departure from the typical 18-hole business negotiation.
Nowadays, White does his best to give back. He recently appeared on the SoFi podcast Richer Lives to talk about building businesses, negotiating contracts and more.
For aspiring snowboarders, White has advice drawn from both a successful snowboarding and business career.
“Wear your helmet. That’s always the first thing I say. And then — learn as much as you can, especially about your finances. Don’t just hand it off to someone else and hope they handle it right,” says White. “Take the time to understand where your money’s going, how it’s working for you. The more you know, the better off you’ll be in the long run.”
White has transitioned his measurement of personal success from medals to intangibles. “Today I measure most of my success within what’s happening in my personal life, with friends, with family. The things that riches don’t really buy you.”
But he also understands that an eye needs to be focused on business success as well. “I feel like as long as there’s just steady growth, are we learning from mistakes? Are we making the same mistakes as before? As long as we’re learning and moving forward and growing, then I’m pretty happy with everything.”
On the horizon
White has plans to increase the number of events in THE SNOW LEAGUE with the addition of freestyle snowboarding. With a successful Aspen event completed and a second scheduled for the end of 2025, there are LEAGUE events scheduled in both China and Switzerland for 2026. After that, White has plans to expand to the southern hemisphere with events in South America, New Zealand and Australia to make THE SNOW LEAGUE a truly global tour.
Shaun White, five-time Olympian and three-time Olympic gold medalist in half-pipe snowboarding, is more than familiar with winter sports. He’s lived and breathed it for years. But there was always one thing missing: No one was organizing or governing them.
That’s where White’s latest venture, THE SNOW LEAGUE, has been a game-changer for winter sports athletes. With a mission to bring structure and excitement to skiing and snowboarding, he successfully completed his inaugural event in Aspen.
White’s entrepreneurial mindset came from years as the best snowboarder in the world, observing the benefits and problems with how extreme sports are organized. White’s business acumen was forged on the half-pipe as well as by athlete-entrepreneurs like Jake Burton and Tony Hawk. What they brought to the tools of his trade, White would bring to events.
Last year, after Carlos Alcaraz beat Miomir Kecmanović in the fourth round of the Australian Open, Jim Courier asked Alcaraz, in an on-court interview, who his favorite players were. “Well, I’m a huge fan of tennis,” Alcaraz began. He reeled off a few names: Daniil Medvedev, Novak Djokovic, Jannik Sinner. Courier pressed him: What about the women? “Well, I watch W.T.A. as well,” Alcaraz said. “Uhhhhh,” he said, and ran his hand through his thick dark hair. He laughed, nervously, as the crowd murmured. “No, I mean, when I can obviously. Uh, when I turn the TV on, if it is W.T.A., A.T.P., whatever, I like to watch it, obviously.”
Afterward, Alcaraz was criticized for his failure to name a single female tennis player, but I didn’t think much of it. With a few notable exceptions, most men’s-tennis stars are not outspoken champions of gender equality, and, besides, I’d have trouble naming my own children if I were pressured to do it in front of fifteen thousand people, not to mention TV cameras. If anything, the expectation that Alcaraz should be watching women’s tennis at all spoke to the relative egalitarianism of the sport he plays. How often is Anthony Edwards asked to account for his W.N.B.A. viewing habits? Then I checked X, and saw that Alcaraz had subsequently confessed that he’d been too nervous to give his real answer, the young English player Emma Raducanu. Why? Because, he said, he was “shy with girls.” Wait, I thought, is that a real quote? It was not, though it was getting passed around as though it were.
I had the same reaction in late June, when I read that Raducanu and Alcaraz would be teaming up in a bid to compete in the “reimagined and elevated” mixed-doubles championship at the U.S. Open this summer. This isn’t real, is it? This time, though, it was, and I should have seen it coming. In February, the United States Tennis Association, which hosts the U.S. Open, had announced that the mixed-doubles tournament would be held on August 19th and 20th, in the midst of what’s known as Fan Week, during the qualifying tournament before the traditional start of the main draw. The participants would be decided by a new formula. Instead of the usual thirty-two teams, there would be sixteen—the top eight with the best combined singles rankings, along with eight wild cards. Given the framing of the tournament’s reinvention, there was little doubt that most, if not all, of those wild cards, which are chosen at the discretion of the tournament, would include the most famous singles players, too. The point, clearly, was to draw as much attention as possible. And no one, short of a comeback from Serena Williams, would draw more attention than the puppyish five-time Slam winner Alcaraz and Raducanu, a telegenic Brit who rocketed to fame when she won the U.S. Open as a qualifier four years ago. But to what end?
The fact that men and women can compete seriously against one another in legitimate competition has always been part of the recreational appeal of tennis—and part of what makes it unique as a spectator sport. The first mixed-doubles Grand Slam title was awarded in 1892, at the tournament now known as the U.S. Open. The winners were an American man, Clarence Hobart, and an Irish woman, Mabel Cahill. Cahill also won the singles and women’s-doubles titles—and, around the same time, published a book called “Her Playthings: Men,” which was panned. For the next century, it was standard for many of the game’s best players—from Suzanne Lenglen to Rod Laver, from Martina Navratilova to Martina Hingis—to play mixed doubles, in addition to singles and doubles. A Grand Slam was a Grand Slam.
But, as the sport became more physically taxing and as the rewards for solo success began to vastly exceed those for doubles, fewer and fewer top athletes played doubles seriously, particularly on the men’s tour, where the matches during majors were longer—best-of-five sets instead of best-of-three—and the financial incentives to focus on singles were generally even more skewed. And even fewer played with a partner of a different gender. As the sport became more star-focussed, singles matches took on far greater weight. A Grand Slam wasn’t a Grand Slam after all. It became routine for top players to pull out of doubles matches if they went deep into the singles draw. Doubles grew to be dominated by specialists, especially among men. (There have been some top women, most notably the biggest American star, Coco Gauff, who is a former world No. 1 in doubles, but they almost always focus on singles in the long run.) Talent, people said, was draining out of the doubles discipline; still, the level of the game remained high, and many fans are devoted to it. Doubles fans relish the quicker pace of the game’s points, the ping-ponging net play, the extreme angles and masterful spins that players deploy on their shots; and they understand the tactical nuances and complex chemistries of teamwork. But mixed doubles, specifically, have become an afterthought at Grand Slams. The matches are shoehorned into the tournaments, often on outer courts and at odd times. Last year, the U.S. Open mixed-doubles final, which was won by Sara Errani and Andrea Vavassori, was played on a Thursday, in front of a half-empty crowd. They split a prize of two hundred thousand dollars. The winners of the singles tournaments got $3.6 million.
This year, the mixed-doubles champions will split a million dollars. The runners-up will get four hundred thousand. The matches will be played on show courts and broadcast on ESPN. In terms of buzz, the strategy is already a success. Even people who don’t follow doubles, including me, are talking about it. The tournament will be able to sell tickets, satisfy its television partners, and goose interest as never before. Fans want to see stars, and this approach offers a high concentration of them, in a novel situation. It will probably be quite fun. It’s easy to justify the changes: the tournament could bring in new fans, introduce more people to mixed doubles, encourage more tennis participation, and highlight the complementary qualities of men’s and women’s tennis being played on the same stage. Doubles players, who are already facing reduced opportunities as the tours put more resources into singles, may suffer for it. But there is no rule that an organization has to prop up the least successful and least lucrative part of its enterprise. The new format is good for business.
But what is it? A tennis tournament is an entertainment vehicle, but it’s also an athletic competition, not a popularity contest. Attention can be converted to money, but it’s not the equivalent of value. A popularity contest is an exhibition, and that’s what this looks like. To persuade top players to play, the tournament has insured that matches won’t interfere with their ambitions in the singles tournament—that’s why it’s now a two-day event. The scoring format of matches has been changed to make that shortened time frame possible: sets are first to four games, with a possible third set replaced by a ten-point tiebreak. Throughout the past two months, the tournament has turned the process of determining the field into its own kind of reality show, periodically announcing who’s put their names forward, who’s in, who’s out. Fourteen of the sixteen teams have been chosen so far—with some shuffling owing to injuries—and some of them are delightful. Venus Williams and Reilly Opelka should have a wild card into the Super Bowl, as far as I’m concerned. But only one pairing—the defending champions, Errani and Vavassori—has extensive success together. The world’s top female doubles player, Taylor Townsend, is playing, but her inclusion probably has more to do with her teammate, Ben Shelton, who happens to be an American in the singles Top Ten. The second-ranked woman in doubles, Kateřina Siniaková—who was just overtaken by Townsend for the No. 1 spot—put in a bid to play alongside the No. 1 men’s-doubles player, Marcelo Arévalo, but so far, at least, they’re not included in the contest. “When two world No. 1s in doubles don’t get into the tournament, there’s probably nothing more to say about it,” Siniaková said to a Czech reporter.
Last year, Siniaková, playing alongside Tomáš Macháč, won an Olympic gold medal; they crushed Medvedev and Mirra Andreeva, who are among the fourteen pairs so far confirmed to play at the U.S. Open, as it happens. Siniaková and Arévalo may still have a chance, as injuries and absences continue to shake up the pairings. Navarro, who’d been paired up with Sinner, is among those who have withdrawn, which is probably just as well; the two players had never spoken before their respective management teams submitted their names together. And Sinner is still alive in the Cincinnati Open, which will play its final less than a day before mixed-doubles play is set to start at the U.S. Open. (So, for that matter, is Alcaraz.) It may be that the combined talent of the best singles players is superior to a longtime doubles team. But nevertheless it would be interesting to watch them try. That’s not what’s happening here.
Instead, the U.S. Open is giving us a reality dating series—really. (This is another thing I had to fact-check.) It’s called “Game, Set, Matchmaker,” and, in it, an ice skater turned Pilates instructor will go on dates with seven men around the grounds of the U.S. Open. More mixed doubles! And more of what young people want, which is, apparently, derivatives of the show “Love Island.” That brings us back to Raducanu and Alcaraz, who have been rumored to be dating for years, mostly on the basis, it seems, of knowing each other’s names. The U.S. Open, understandably but cynically, used them to lead the competition’s hype video. Never mind that Alcaraz’s advancement to the final in Cincinnati on Monday will make it difficult—or perhaps impossible—for him to play in New York on Tuesday. Or that neither Alcaraz nor Raducanu has played much doubles at all, let alone together. “I know Emma since a really long time ago,” Alcaraz explained, of their pairing. Raducanu spoke of a “genuine connection.” I would be surprised if their management teams weren’t involved. Raducanu once replied to some kind words from Alcaraz after she had had surgery; that post, too, turned out to be fake. The two were once spotted saying hello, at a distance, in the warmup area of the Madrid Open, and recently did an event together for Evian, which sponsors them both. They were promoting artisanal water. The tabloids, meanwhile, have been shipping them for months. ♦
Depending on which corners of the internet you’ve been hanging around in lately, how much protein you eat is either the single most important factor determining your health and athletic performance, or an overhyped and overconsumed indulgence that’s driving you to an early grave. The truth is obviously somewhere in the middle—but where, exactly?
Last month, the University of Toronto’s Tanenbaum Institute for Science in Sport hosted a conference on high-performance sports science. Along with deep dives into esoteric topics like NBA motion-capture data, artificial intelligence in pro sports, and international rules about intersex and transgender athletes, attendees got a practical primer on the current state of knowledge about protein for athletes from University of Toronto professor Daniel Moore, one of the world’s leading experts on the topic.
Moore’s talk addressed a series of commonly circulated protein myths, misconceptions, and truths. Some of the points were ones that I’ve written about recently—most notably, the question of whether very-high-protein diets damage your kidneys, and the idea that you can only digest a certain amount of protein at a time. Others addressed longstanding debates about the what, when, why, and how much of protein. Here are some of the highlights I took from the talk.
Protein Isn’t Just About Muscle
The fundamental goal of training is to trigger a cycle of recovery and adaptation in your body so that it gets stronger. That recovery process involves refueling, rehydrating, and repairing the cellular damage done by your workout so your body can build back better.
We usually think about protein in the context of repair—and for good reason. On any given day, you’re breaking down 1 to 2 percent of the muscle in your body and rebuilding it. Hard training increases that number. Overall (as muscle physiologist Luc van Loon notes), that means you’re completely rebuilding your body every two to three months. The protein you eat provides the amino acids that serve as the building blocks for repairing existing muscle and adding new muscle.
But protein can also play a role in refueling and rehydrating. Moore points to research showing that downing a recovery drink containing carbohydrate and protein rather than just carbohydrate after a hard workout helps your muscles restock their glycogen—the form in which your muscles store carbohydrate—more rapidly. Similarly, there’s research showing that protein can increase fluid retention when you’re dehydrated, which is one of the reasons that milk is sometimes tipped as a good recovery beverage. There’s even research suggesting that protein helps you acclimatize to heat training more effectively.
It’s worth noting that the enhanced post-workout glycogen storage with protein seems to only matter if you’re taking in less-than-optimal amounts of carbohydrate. More generally, as long as you’re not trying to survive exclusively on sports drinks, you’re likely to get whatever protein you need for rehydration and heat acclimatization and so on from whatever food you eat. But these studies offer a useful reminder that protein isn’t just a set of inert building blocks for muscle: it plays numerous roles in your metabolism that are crucial for both health and athletic performance.
Endurance Athletes Need Protein Too
The cliché of the gym bro with his tub of protein powder is firmly entrenched. Endurance athletes are less interested in—and sometimes actively averse to—packing on muscle. But their protein needs might still be elevated. The repeated pounding of running generates muscle damage that requires extra amino acids to repair. And previous studies have found that endurance athletes can get 5 to 10 percent of the energy they need by burning excess protein rather than incorporating it into their muscles.
Last year, Moore and his team published a study in which endurance athletes completed a series of runs ranging from 5K to 20K over several days, then consumed a batch of amino acids tagged with a special molecular label to track their progress through the body. The method enables scientists to determine how much protein is being incorporated into muscles, and how much excess protein is being burned as fuel. By repeating the running protocol while consuming different levels of protein intake, they can determine how much protein is needed to meet the body’s muscle repair needs before you start simply burning the excess for energy.
On average, they found that the runners needed about 1.6 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight per day to max out muscle-building and repair. The average value means that half the runners were meeting their needs and half weren’t; a safer threshold, where 95 percent of runners will max out their protein requirements, is 1.8 to 1.9 g/kg/day. In contrast, the RDA for protein is just 0.8 g/kg/day, and previous recommendations for endurance athletes were 1.2 to 1.4 g/kg/day.
The takeaway, then, is that yes, endurance athletes need more protein than the average person. But there’s one further wrinkle. Endurance athletes also need more calories overall than the average person. When you’re training hard, there’s a good chance you’ll eat so much that you get all the protein you need without any extra effort. One study of Dutch endurance athletes found that they were getting 1.5 g/kg/day, which is at least in the ballpark of Moore’s numbers. So you don’t need to go crazy on the protein.
Does More Protein Mean More Muscle?
It’s worth comparing those numbers to the latest data on what it takes to optimize strength and muscle growth. The best current evidence is summed up in a 2018 meta-analysis in the British Journal of Sports Medicine that pooled the results of 49 studies looking at protein supplementation and resistance training.
The key result is that consuming more protein led to bigger gains in muscle mass—up to a point. The breakpoint in their analysis was 1.6 g/kg/day, beyond which taking more protein didn’t produce bigger muscles. The data is messy, so I wouldn’t take that number as the absolute final word on the topic, but it’s notable that it’s roughly the same as the estimated need for endurance athletes. Taken as a whole, the evidence at this point doesn’t support the idea that mega-doses of protein—3 g/kg/day, say—are useful.
An interesting footnote: while the relationship between protein intake and muscle mass (up to 1.6 g/kg/day) was clear, the relationship between protein intake and strength was much weaker. There’s obviously a link between muscle mass and strength, but gains in strength also depend on neural adaptations and skill acquisition in the exercise that you’re testing. The positive spin on this is that it’s possible to get much stronger even if you’re not putting on a lot of new muscle.
Whey Isn’t the Only Way
The “leucine trigger” hypothesis is the idea that the synthesis of new muscle depends in part on the levels of one specific amino acid, leucine. Milk, and in particular whey protein from milk, happen to be particularly high in leucine and other essential amino acids. Here, from a 2018 study in the journal Amino Acids, are the leucine levels and total essential amino acid levels of various protein sources:
(Photo: adapted from Amino Acids)
You can see that whey is high in leucine and more generally in essential amino acids. But it’s not the only option: corn is surprisingly high in leucine, though its overall level of essential amino acids is lower, and there are lots of other reasonable options. A couple of studies published this year have put this idea to the test: one found that the synthesis of new muscle was the same after consuming corn or milk protein; another found that a blend of pea, brown rice, and canola protein matched the muscle-building performance of whey.
This doesn’t mean that all protein sources are created equal. But it does suggest that, with a little effort and attention, you can get all the muscle-building power you need from many different protein sources.
The Four Rules of Protein
It’s easy to get lost in the minutiae of leucine levels and recommended intakes and optimal timings. Moore finished his talk with four pieces of practical advice for athletes looking to get the most out of their training:
Eat regularly spaced meals and snacks, three to five hours apart.
Aim for ~0.3 g/kg/day of protein each time.
Focus on real food when convenient.
Make sure to meet your overall daily energy and macronutrient needs.
These seem like solid—and attainable—guidelines to me. If you weigh 150 pounds, 0.3 g/kg/day works out to about 20 grams of protein per meal. A tuna sandwich will get you there; two eggs (each of which likely contains 6 or 7 grams of protein) won’t quite do it unless you add some toast and milk.
As I noted at the top, recent findings suggest that (contrary to the prevailing orthodoxy) you can make up for a low-protein or missed meal by getting extra protein at the next one. I don’t think we know enough to be too dogmatic one way or the other, but the big picture seems clear: at the end of the day, if you want to optimize health and maximize athletic performance, you need to ensure that you’ve taken in enough protein to fuel your training and recovery.
It’s hard to find a bigger gut-punch than finding out one of your heroes is not actually a good person. And listen, I’m all about giving celebs the benefit of the doubt when it comes to these kinds of lists. But when it’s multiple people who have had the same type of encounters with a certain celeb, you start to lose faith.
In that light, we’ve compiled fan stories about some of the rudest celebrities in the business.
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Anyone who has found success as an athlete will tell you that sport teaches lessons that go far beyond the playing field. If you’re looking to succeed in the competitive business environment, there may be no better models than champion athletes. What is it that allows these individuals to achieve greatness? What makes someone a winner? There’s not a single answer. Rather, it’s a combination of things. We’re sharing five of them here. If you follow these lessons, you’ll be poised for a championship in the business world.
Champions have a robust belief in themselves and their ability to succeed. Importantly, this does not mean they expect the journey to be easy. Most things worth having require tremendous effort. Champion athletes devote “blood, sweat and tears” in pursuit of excellence, and they’re willing to make the sacrifice because they know it will pay off. Self-doubters abandon the journey when it gets too hard or when they encounter a few obstacles. Champions persevere because they believe in themselves to the core. This stout self-confidence becomes self-fulfilling. When you fully believe you’ll win if you keep on grinding, you’ll out-grind your less confident competitors. Supreme confidence leads to supreme effort, and supreme effort leads to success.
Like a champion athlete, a winning entrepreneur stays committed when things are tough. Tomorrow’s industry leaders are those who will continue to refine their current pitches and marketing strategies as many times as it takes to reach a breakthrough. They will not be deterred by rejection but rather will learn from it, make adjustments, and come back stronger. This willingness to learn and improve, in fact, is another defining feature of champions.
Always look to improve
Champion athletes, while supremely confident, also possess enough humility to know they always have room to learn and grow. When they take a loss, they review the game film to identify the mistakes they’ve made and see where they need to adjust for the next time. Even when they win, they look at what they could have done better. They also seek input from others. When a coach points out a flaw in their technique, they’re receptive to the feedback and incorporate it into their training. They also look to teammates and even to opponents to learn what others are doing well.
As an entrepreneur, if you lose out on a deal or find a competitor holding a larger share of your targeted market, then look at what they are doing to succeed. Be open to learning and humble enough to seek help from others. Champions are usually their own harshest critics, and their high standards drive them to keep improving. So even when you have some successes, continue looking to level up.
Focus on what you can control
Champions do everything they can to control the variables involved in their sport. Knowing that they can’t fully control the outcome, they go all-in on what they can control, including attitude, effort, and preparation. Entrepreneurs ought to do the same by analyzing their markets, rehearsing presentations multiple times, and scouting both their competition and their potential customers. If you’re meeting with a client, study them ahead of time so you can anticipate the questions they may ask and have impressive answers prepared. Be obsessive about your preparation.
A corollary to this lesson is focusing your post-hoc explanations on what you can – or could have – controlled. After a tough loss, champions do not blame the referee. Instead, they look at what they could have done differently so the referee’s calls would not have mattered. As an entrepreneur, be cautious of attributing bad results to luck or of claiming things weren’t fair. When you do so, you lose motivation to make adjustments for next time. Instead, follow a champion’s lead and know there’s always something you could have done better.
Improvise when needed
Even as champions focus on what they can control, they also recognize that they can’t control everything. Rarely does something go exactly as planned, and the best performers adapt and improvise. Something can always go wrong, and rather than panicking when it does, winners stay confident and make the needed adjustments. Thus, even as you work to control what you can embrace the uncertainty of your sport – or your business, as the case may be.
You may have noticed that the lessons described above hold some contradictions. Champions have supreme confidence yet also believe they need to get better. They also focus on what they can control while accepting they can’t control everything. Thus, another key to success is adapting your mindset based on the situation at hand. Champions have the mental flexibility to do so seamlessly. Rather than looking for a recipe to follow every time, they embrace the fluidity required to succeed consistently.
This willingness to adapt – to possess an unfixed mindset – is the main premise of the book Extreme Balance: Paradoxical Principles That Make You a Champion, published by Entrepreneur Press. This volume, which I have co-authored with champion athlete and coach Ben Askren and successful business leader Joe De Sena, describes how various champions balance contradictory principles to succeed in their respective sports. It includes chapters such as “Thinking You’re Good Enough and Thinking You’re Never Good Enough,” and “Preparing for Everything and Expecting the Unexpected.” These sections expand upon the lessons described here – and many others – in greater depth. If you want to be a champion entrepreneur, it’s a great resource to help get you there.
The WNBA has undoubtedly had a historical season with a dedicated yet largely new fan base breaking records in attendance, viewership, and interest. Most recently, the WNBA playoffs have been earning some of the highest viewership numbers ever seen in the league’s post-season games, per The New York Times. The attention has been exciting, but also unveiled some of the racism that continues to stain the game.
At a post-conference interview following Sept. 25’s first-round playoff game, where the Indiana Fever were defeated by Connecticut Sun, Connecticut Sun forward Alyssa Thomas expressed her sentiments about the racism and harassment that she and fellow players experience. She referenced many comments made on social media that exacerbate the issue. “In my 11-year career, I’ve never experienced the racial comments … I’ve never been called the things I’ve been called on social media, and there’s no place for it,” Thomas said, per ESPN. Thomas spoke candidly about the pain of those experiences and how the WNBA needed to do something to protect players; she also called out the Indiana Fever organization to check its fans.
Thomas’s comments prompted the WNBA to release a statement on Instagram stating that racism will not be tolerated – leading many commenters to ask what took the league so long, given the fact that the players have been dealing with and calling attention to the vile rhetoric received throughout the entire season.
Additionally, earlier this month the WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert came under fire when she was called out for not speaking out about the racism the players have experienced. When asked about the fan rhetoric becoming more racist, connecting it to what Angel Reese had been experiencing in the conversations about the Reese-Caitlin Clark rivalry, Engelbert’s response referred to it as “a little of that Bird-Magic moment.” She noted that “the one thing I know about sports, you need rivalry. That’s what makes people watch,” seemingly focusing on how athletic rivalries can benefit the league, as reports the Los Angeles Times. Following backlash, Engelbert issued a follow-up comment stating, “To be clear, there is absolutely no place for hate or racism of any kind in the WNBA or anywhere else.” But for many players, it felt too little too late. New York Liberty forward Breanna Stewart said the commissioner’s words were “disappointing to hear,” according to AP News.
On Sept. 26 Reese, who had an amazing rookie season before it was cut short due to injury, expressed comments in support of Thomas and other players who are also experiencing the racism that she’s dealt with all season. “I’m sorry to all the players that have/continue to experience the same things I have,” Reese wrote on X. It’s well documented that Reese has received the most vile comments on the Internet, including death threats being made against her. “For the past 2 years, the media has benefited from my pain & me being villainized to create a narrative. They allowed this,” Reese shared, reflecting on how racism has been normalized within the league.
For a game that is experiencing historical growth, the events of this past season have been marred by the racist tropes and stereotypes that have been experienced by the players, and observed by the fans, coaches, and media who cover the WNBA. Considering over 70 percent of WNBA players are Black, ESPN reports, it will be important for the league to set a precedent and clear boundaries around what is acceptable fan behavior. The league must emphasize that critiques that go beyond a player’s basketball game, that attack their racial identity, are unacceptable and must be condemned, and there must be consequences for fans who perpetrate them. Racism shouldn’t be excused or tolerated to advance revenue and ticket sales.
The WNBA has been a champion for diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts with a strong show of activism on social issues – but that was largely driven by the Black women who make up the largest demographic within the WNBA. The time is now for the entire league, from the commissioner and owners to the front office, to take a firm stand – to not only protect its players but also to preserve the future of its legacy. They must take actions such as instituting a dress policy in sporting arenas that bans clothing with racist language, ejecting racist fans who hurl racism, and doing more to moderate social media accounts, including banning offending users and cross-referencing their information with ticket-holders, just to name a few.
It’s also important for players who are not experiencing these attacks to speak up and speak out too, as often one’s silence can be mistaken for permissiveness or acceptance.
What Reese, Thomas, and other players have experienced is truly shameful and unacceptable. Racist, sexist, and discriminatory attacks have no place in women’s basketball, and certainly will not grow or advance the game into the future. But, just as with anything in America, until we confront our ugly past we cannot learn from it, change, and positively shape our future. The next generation is watching this unfold, and what’s not said or done will have an immeasurable impact on the evolving fan base and the future success of the game. So while the WNBA’s statement may have come up short and too late for many, let’s hope it’s not the last time the league and those who run it speak up to protect its players. Above all, the players deserve to play in a safe environment that champions women and the sport of basketball.
Ralinda Watts is an author, diversity expert, consultant, practitioner, speaker, and proven thought leader who works at the intersection of race, identity, culture, and justice. She has contributed to numerous publications such as PS, CBS Media, Medium, Yahoo Life, and the Los Angeles Times.
Protein has always been my safe space in the diet wars. As the pendulum swings back and forth between “carbohydrates are going to kill you” and “fat is going to kill you,” everyone agrees that protein is good for your muscles, satiating, and non-lethal. Everyone except nephrologists, that is.
Back in 1982, a nephrologist—that is, a kidney doctor—named Barry Brenner, co-author of one of the definitive textbooks on nephrology, published a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine suggesting that eating too much protein over a long period of time might overwork the kidneys and eventually lead to chronic kidney disease and even kidney failure. This idea has been hotly debated ever since, with opinions loosely settling into two distinct camps: nephrologists think too much protein is a problem, and sports nutrition researchers think it isn’t.
As someone who pays a lot of attention to the sports nutrition literature and very little attention to the latest nephrology news, I haven’t worried much about Brenner’s hypothesis. But a recent review paper by three nephrologists in Sports Medicine—in my world, in other words—caught my attention.
Alberto de Lorenzo of HM Sanchinarro University Hospital in Madrid, along with two colleagues, argues that chronic kidney disease might be “the real finish line” for athletes and bodybuilders on a high-protein diet. Given all the articles I’ve written about the joys of protein, I figured it was worth digging into.
Why Kidney Specialists Worry About Too Much Protein
Most of the protein you eat is broken down into amino acids which are then used to build or repair muscle. If there’s any extra protein, it will be burned to produce energy. One of the byproducts of burning protein is a waste product called urea. The job of filtering out waste products like urea from your bloodstream is handled by your kidneys, which send the unwanted waste to be excreted in your urine. The more protein you eat, the more urea you’ll produce—and, consequently, the harder your kidneys will have to work.
It’s reasonably well established that eating more protein will lead to an increase in kidney filtration rate, presumably to handle the higher waste load. This is accompanied by dilation of the blood vessels leading to the kidney and an increase in the pressure on the filtering units. Similarly, eating less protein reduces the filtration rate. For this reason, people who already have chronic kidney disease but aren’t on dialysis are often advised to keep their protein intake relatively low.
What some nephrologists fear is that, even in people with healthy kidneys, this increased blood flow and pressure will eventually damage the delicate filtering structures in the kidney—which in turn will force the remaining kidney structures to work even harder, triggering a kidney death spiral.
The evidence for this sequence of events is clear for people (and animals) who already have kidney problems. But it’s basically non-existent for people with normal kidney function. That means it becomes a question of weighing different kinds of indirect evidence.
Why Sports Nutritionists Don’t Worry About Protein
The International Society of Sports Nutrition, in its official position stand on protein and exercise, is unequivocal: “no controlled scientific evidence exists indicating that increased intakes of protein pose any health risks in healthy, exercising individuals.” Moreover, the position stand cites a series of studies led by Jose Antonio, the cofounder of the ISSN, in which athletes consumed as much as 4.4 grams of protein per kilogram of body mass each day, more than five times the recommended daily allowance of 0.8 g/kg/day, without any ill effects.
De Lorenzo and his colleagues aren’t impressed by these studies, or by the larger body of studies in healthy non-athletes. The sample sizes were small, and their durations ranged from six weeks to a year, which might not be long enough to observe a decline in kidney function. The tests used to estimate kidney filtration rate are designed for use with kidney disease patients, and are less accurate in people with healthy kidneys, particularly if they have high muscle mass. There were no true low-protein-diet control groups. The authors have ties with sports nutrition companies that sell protein supplements, and none of them were nephrologists.
These critiques are all worth considering, but you have to weigh them against the strength of whatever other evidence is available—which, in this case, is not much. I dug up a few of the individual studies and meta–analyses to look at more closely, and my general impression was that it was basically a Rorschach test. Depending on which outcomes you look at and what threshold you use to define a clinically significant change, you can convince yourself that high protein intake has a strong effect on kidney function or has no effect on kidney function.
How Much Protein is “Too Much”?
Half a century after Brenner’s original warning, I still don’t see any compelling evidence that healthy people need to worry about eating too much protein. I can’t rule it out, though. So it’s worth considering some numbers. The protein RDA is 0.8 g/kg/day, which for a 150-pound person works out to about 55 grams of protein per day. That’s a couple of 5-ounce cans of tuna.
De Lorenzo’s paper defines a “high-protein diet” as more than 1.5 g/kg/day. The ISSN suggests that “the majority of exercising individuals” should aim for 1.4 to 2.0 g/kg/day, though it notes some “preliminary evidence” that higher doses even above 3 g/kg/day might help build muscle. A major meta-analysis in 2018 concluded that muscle- and strength-building gains max out at around 1.6 g/kd/day on average.
The average daily protein intake among Americans, as of 2015-2016, was 97 grams for men and 69 grams for women. Depending on weight, that’s in the range of 1.0 to 1.5 g/kg/day. In broad strokes, then, I suspect that the average person could probably still benefit from upping their protein intake.
In particular, focusing on getting more protein throughout the day rather than cramming in a huge load at dinner might (though not necessarily) help build more muscle. But I’d pause before pushing too far into the extremes, like 3 or 4 g/kg/day—not because there’s strong evidence that it’s dangerous, but because it’s conceivable that there might be downsides and not clear that there are significant upsides.
As it happens, that balancing act is evident in another new study that was published last month looking at protein intake and mortality in older adults who already have chronic kidney disease—in other words, the group that we know will be hurt by too much protein. The results were the opposite of what you’d expect: the more protein subjects ate, the less likely they were to die during the study. Higher protein intake is associated with all sorts of interconnected benefits in older people: more muscle, stronger bones, less frailty, lower rates of heart disease, and so on. In this cohort, these benefits outweighed whatever theoretical harm protein might inflict on the kidneys. For muscle-challenged endurance athletes like me, that’s a message to keep in mind.
WTOP catches up with some of the seasoned athletes who enjoyed scenic views at Sunday’s Parks Half Marathon in North Bethesda.
Runners cross the finish line at the Parks Half Marathon in North Bethesda on Sunday.
(WTOP/Heather Gustafson)
WTOP/Heather Gustafson
Medals for runners that finish the Parks Half Marathon in North Bethesda on Sunday.
(WTOP/Heather Gustafson)
WTOP/Heather Gustafson
Runners cross the finish line at the Parks Half Marathon in North Bethesda on Sunday.
(WTOP/Heather Gustafson)
WTOP/Heather Gustafson
Runners grab some water during the Parks Half Marathon in North Bethesda on Sunday.
(WTOP/Heather Gustafson)
WTOP/Heather Gustafson
Runners cross the finish line at the Parks Half Marathon in North Bethesda on Sunday.
(WTOP/Heather Gustafson)
WTOP/Heather Gustafson
Runners grab some water during the Parks Half Marathon in North Bethesda on Sunday.
(WTOP/Heather Gustafson)
WTOP/Heather Gustafson
The Parks Half Marathon started in North Bethesda Sunday morning in Maryland just before dawn.
At approximately 6:50 a.m., runners hit the pavement near the Redland metro stop. The course wound through parts of Rock Creek Park, offering rolling hills and scenic views, finishing near Tuckerman Lane.
“I just got a new personal record,” said Jordon Acton after finishing the race for the second time.
“I think I was maybe five seconds faster than the last time I ran it.”
Kristen Hume said she was feeling “amazing” after finishing the run, but worried that her face was red. Even though she was feeling warm, she said the weather was perfect for running.
“Very hilly, definitely, lots of ups and downs, but really awesome,” said Hume. “The crowd was amazing.”
Chris Bergenson and his running partner Mike Anderson said they made a new personal record.
“It’s mostly downhill. But, you know, even though it’s a little bit of uphill, the downhill makes it all worth it,” said Bergenson
As they crossed the finish line, they were greeted by volunteers handing out water and medals.
“It’s a great honor to give these medals out, they work so hard,” said volunteer Alethia Backus.
The first male finished was 26 year-old Dylan Gearinger from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, at a net time of 1:08:03. The first female finisher was 23 year-old Chaltu Marame from D.C. with a net time of 1:20:32.
The transition from being a star collegiate athlete to a rookie on a professional team can be rocky, regardless of your sport or your gender.
But in the small and hyper-competitive WNBA (just twelve teams with twelve players each) – that transition can be especially challenging. Often, teams only have capacity to sign one or two rookies per season, if any, leaving those new players swimming in a sea of veterans and without direct peers to confide in.
Plus, there are the many cuts, trades, waives and signings that come with being such a small league. Not to mention, the grueling, compact schedule, and the potential pressure that comes with all the new eyes on the W.
But if you’ve watched enough games, you’ve likely noticed that while the on-the-court play is highly physical, something different – and special – is happening on the sidelines, and in the huddles.
“Our league is a sisterhood,” says Ariel Atkins, a guard for the Washington Mystics since 2018. “It’s a small league, and it creates this system where we really want everyone to succeed.”
The hugs, high-fives and pep talks between veterans and rookies that we witness as fans are just the tip of the iceberg that is the tradition of mentorship in the W – a tradition that doesn’t just help rookies thrive in professional life, but bolsters the league as it grows.
Why Mentorship is So Essential in the WNBA
You’ve probably heard about how important mentorship is for women in fields dominated by men (lack of mentorship opportunities is one reason women have been found to leave such fields, for instance, and though mentorship is linked to many success metrics, fewer women than men report having mentors). And while there’s no denying that the women of the WNBA have been dominating for many years, by the numbers, the league still lags behind the NBA. (See: the huge salary gap, the more-than-double number of NBA teams, and the fact that WNBA teams weren’t even allowed to fly charter until recently.)
Until that changes (we’re getting there), one role of mentorship is to help players fill in the gaps of the sometimes under-resourced league, and to navigate the unique challenges of being a woman in sport. Atkins points out that having so many Black and LGBTQ+ players in the league also makes those mentorship relationships all the more essential, especially as those players often find themselves in positions of advocacy and activism off-the-court. “At the end of the day, as much as it is about mentorship, it’s about supporting the person to the left and to the right of you,” says Atkins.
And while coaches can act as mentors, too, Atkins says that teammate mentors serve the essential purpose of being a resource and a confidant who isn’t also evaluating you. “Your mentor is somebody who is also in the trenches with you,” she says. “They’re running with you, they’re taking hits with you. They’re feeling the same emotions you’re feeling with wins and losses, because at the end of the day, you’re on the court together with the same jersey. It just hits different because you can look to your left or your right and see this person battling with you.”
These rookie-veteran relationships are also key to on-court chemistry, says Atkins, giving rookies the sense of comfort and confidence that allows them to play their best and building the trust between players that leads to basketball magic. “My biggest thing with our rookies and younger players is for them to know that we trust them,” she says. “Because I’ve seen them put the work in.”
Brionna Jones, a forward for the Connecticut Sun since 2017, agrees: “When you have good vets on a team who can help the rookies along, the faster the teams can build that chemistry and build that connection on the court,” she says. “That’s what makes teams more successful.”
What Mentorship in the W Looks Like
When former Villanova star Maddy Siegrist joined the Dallas Wings last year, veteran teammate Natasha Howard helped teach her the “stay ready” mentality that Siegrist says is crucial to thriving in the W. “Things can change in a second, so that mentality is huge,” she says. “You could go from not getting in a game to starting in the next game, which I think is pretty unique to this league.”
Howard also cooked Siegrist dinner when she first joined the team. “That meant so much to me,” says Siegrist. “You’re going from college where you’re a young adult and now you’re a real grown-up. I leaned on my vets a lot for that.”
What any given player needs from a mentor, on or off the court, is highly individual. For instance, Monique Curry taught Atkins a trick to help with her serial fouling, and Tierra Ruffin-Pratt helped her understand that her journey through the league wouldn’t be the same as anyone else’s. Siegrist’s mentors, like Howard and Kalani Brown, taught her to take care of her body – “something I definitely didn’t do as much as I should have in college” – and that more isn’t always more.
For Jones, it was mentors like Alyssa Thomas, Jasmine Thomas and Shekinna Stricklen who encouraged her not to lose her identity as a player as she tried to fit into the system her coaches had designed. “They were always the first ones to cheer me on,” she says.
Mentorship in the W isn’t just limited to teammates, says Atkins. “Something cool about our league is that it’s uber-competitive and insanely physical,” she says. “But at the end of the day, you see people dapping each other up after games. If you have a question about something, about business, medical, anything like that, everybody is super helpful. Young players need to have that comfortability to actually go to people and ask questions.”
A Growing, Changing League
By 2026, the W is expected to have expanded to 14 teams, with the goal of adding two more in the next several years. Those veterans will be key in anchoring their teams and teammates in a time of change, especially as the league will have room for more roster spots, and therefore more rookies. “It’s definitely going to help as we transition, having those people in place to help all the new players coming in get where they need to be,” Jones says.
As for what the growing number of eyes on the league means for the players themselves, and for what they need out of their mentors? “I don’t think it changes anything,” says Atkins. “I just think we need to continue to be who we are.”
Lauren Wingenroth is a freelance journalist covering all things sports, fitness, and the performing arts. In addition to PS, her stories can be found in The New York Times, GQ, Outside magazine, Women’s Running, Well+Good, Dance Magazine, and more.
New Olympic sports are making their debut at the Paris Games, with Team USA climber Sam Watson setting a new world record in speed climbing and initiating a unique “Selfie Olympics.”Watson said, “I was wondering if I could get a person from all of these different delegations to take a selfie with me.”His idea led him to his own, “Selfie Olympics.” Watson admitted, “I don’t think I’ll get to all 203 because there are some delegations that have already left.”There are 204 nations represented in Paris and Watson is quite proud of one pic he secured.Watson explained, “A member from Tuvalu, which is a tiny island nation. I looked at where they were entered and they were only surfing and sailing. Surfing is Tahiti and sailing is Marseille, so there’s almost no one in Paris.”Watson understands the athletes he’s taking selfies with have different cultural and political views. Watson said, “All of these countries are still human, they’re still Olympians, they’re still competitors, and we still share that, so it is really special to get all this.”Watson, just 18 years old, set a new world record in a qualifying round earlier this week.He’ll compete in the speed climbing medal event on Thursday. The climbing events at the Paris Olympics will conclude on Saturday. When asked about the difference between speed climbing and traditional climbing, climbing coaches likened it to the difference between the 100-meter sprint and the marathon in track and field.
PARIS, IDF —
New Olympic sports are making their debut at the Paris Games, with Team USA climber Sam Watson setting a new world record in speed climbing and initiating a unique “Selfie Olympics.”
Watson said, “I was wondering if I could get a person from all of these different delegations to take a selfie with me.”
His idea led him to his own, “Selfie Olympics.”
Watson admitted, “I don’t think I’ll get to all 203 because there are some delegations that have already left.”
There are 204 nations represented in Paris and Watson is quite proud of one pic he secured.
Watson explained, “A member from Tuvalu, which is a tiny island nation. I looked at where they were entered and they were only surfing and sailing. Surfing is Tahiti and sailing is Marseille, so there’s almost no one in Paris.”
Watson understands the athletes he’s taking selfies with have different cultural and political views.
Watson said, “All of these countries are still human, they’re still Olympians, they’re still competitors, and we still share that, so it is really special to get all this.”
Watson, just 18 years old, set a new world record in a qualifying round earlier this week.
He’ll compete in the speed climbing medal event on Thursday. The climbing events at the Paris Olympics will conclude on Saturday.
When asked about the difference between speed climbing and traditional climbing, climbing coaches likened it to the difference between the 100-meter sprint and the marathon in track and field.
A’ja Wilson is on fire right now. To summarize the Las Vegas Aces center’s year: She’s averaging a stunning 27.2 points per game, per the WNBA. She was awarded Best WNBA Player and Best Athlete, Women’s Sports at the ESPY Awards. She’s currently playing on Team USA in Paris, and (along with Breanna Stewart) shot back-to-back 20-point games during the Olympics – something that hasn’t been done by a Team USA women’s basketball player since Teresa Edwards in 1988. She’s also the only player – across the men’s and women’s teams – to have multiple double-doubles during the 2024 Games, according to Bleacher Report. As for her work off the court: This year, Wilson released a (New York Times bestselling) book, “Dear Black Girls: How to Be True to You“. She announced her A’One shoe deal with Nike. She continues to empower children and families with dyslexia through the A’ja Wilson Foundation. Phew.
You’ll notice the range of her accolades. Wilson isn’t just making a big impact on the sport of women’s basketball; she’s also a role model for the next generation. As Tom Brady wrote in her Time “Most Influential People of 2024” profile, “A’ja Wilson is not just an incredible athlete, she is also an inspiration to all who witness her talent and drive. Her journey is a testament to the power of passion and fearlessness in achieving greatness.”
Before heading to Paris to compete in her second Olympic Games, Wilson sat down with PS as part of her participation in a new Gatorade campaign. The campaign remixes the famous Gatorade marketing ad from the ’90s – you know the one, where the biggest athletes of the time were shot sweating Gatorade bullets – and includes the iconic tagline “Is It In You?” The updated ads feature none other than Michael Jordan narrating, an impactful acknowledgement of just how larger-than-life the WNBA talent is.
“I remember growing up and watching these commercials,” Wilson tells PS. “To now [be] a part of it is truly special. When you have someone like Michael Jordan headlining, it’s pretty awesome to say that your name is in that list. You know that name is going to be full of greatness.”
Here, Wilson shares with PS how she stays focused when she’s facing challenges on or off the court, and what message she hopes she’s sharing with her younger fans.
Photo Credit: Gatorade
PS: Coming off of back-to-back championships, sold out games, and all this incredible hype and energy for the WNBA right now, do things feel differently for you and your teammates this season?
A’ja Wilson: No, I feel like we’ve always got this target on our back. It gets bigger, and bigger, and bigger every single year. So, it’s not really too different, but I would honestly say our mindset has been different for greater purposes. And that’s what I love the most. It’s like, we’re not satisfied. With the resume we have and what we’ve done over the two years, we could definitely take a step back and feel entitled and think that every team is gonna roll down and let us win. But that’s not the case. We’re coming in with the mindset of: no, we want it. We want it again. We’re being greedy. We need to go after it and take no plays off. So I’m definitely excited about what’s to come for the Aces.
PS: Could you talk us through any goals you have set for this season?
AW: Just to be better. I always said the main goal for myself is just to be better than I was last year. Either that’s just better and better shape or a better teammate or a better leader or adding different things to my game. I want people to see a different A’ja than they did last year. That’s how we continue to grow – not just for myself, but as a team as well.
PS: I know you mentioned mindset – how do you stay focused and maintain composure?
AW: I do the flip of everything. I get a little loose. I talk to my teammates. We dance a little bit, we may sing a little bit. It’s already a lot of pressure on us going into games. So I relieve that by not thinking about it too much and understanding that it is a game, it is entertainment at the end of the day. And I’m blessed to be able to play it. So I go out there and have fun. I really just shake my shoulders off a little bit, and go out there and just take what the defense gives me and what the game gives me.
I [also] really try to train myself to be in the moment and understand that not every day’s gonna be sunshine and rainbows. They’re gonna be thunderstorms as well. But those thunderstorms do go away and when they do, that’s the time to shine the brightest. That’s where you get that rainbow and you can really flourish into who you are.
So, that’s my approach when I’m on court, off court, in life, anywhere. I don’t want to ever take for granted where I am in life and where I come from.
PS: How do you respond to challenges or any setbacks you might have experienced in your journey?
AW: I do them again. [Laughs] I feel like I’m a little kid that has to test the stove a little bit, to be like, “Is it really that hot?” It’s really that hot. I have to go touch it again, because I’m like, “It wasn’t that hot.” I really don’t like no for an answer. But when I do get that no, I try to understand that maybe that’s not the door that I want to go through, but there are multiple other doors that I can get through. So when it comes to challenges, I attack them head on and know that if it’s meant for me, it’s going to be for me.
PS: Tell us about how you and your team stay inspired and keep the energy high.
AW: We get lit, we get lit. [Laughing.] We’re turning up some music, or constantly cheering each other on.
You don’t know what things people may be going through. And you don’t want to add on to that. We add on to ourselves sometimes. And so for us, we take that off and allow people to be themselves and love them in that – and that’s how I really gain a lot of trust from my teammates and my coaches as well. But we just have fun with what we do. Some people may look at it and be like, “Oh my God, they’re crazy,” or, “It’s fake,” or “It’s for the camera.” But it’s genuine.
PS: I know you had a book come out. What would you say, to maybe someone from the younger generation, who might be struggling to find their voice?
AW: Your voice doesn’t always have to be loud. I feel like a lot of people think you have to have that loud voice, and you have to be commanding everyone in the room. But no, you can be yourself. Your voice can be as faint but it can still be heard because you’re being you. And the people that you love and are true to you will totally understand that. You don’t have to be the loudest or most outspoken. You can be yourself and still make a difference, and make a change, and be kind in that space.
People are so quick to just wanting to be the loudest and the proudest. But in some aspects, you can be yourself and if that’s quiet and at peace, then so be it. That’s my biggest thing with young people is understanding that one, it takes time to find your voice; and two, it doesn’t always have to be the loudest in the room. You can still be your voice at your pace.
PS: Do you have any words of advice for young fans of the WNBA or girls who are playing in high school or other female athletes?
AW: I’ve always said it in my book: give yourself some grace. I feel that’s the biggest thing. It’s just like, be kind to yourself. Yes, be kind to others, but be kind to yourself, because that’s where it really matters.
You never know who’s day you may change. Just know that and have fun in that, make it a good day.
It’s not always gonna be pretty. It’s not always gonna be great, fun, and happy. [So] understand that you can get through those days. Just give yourself some grace.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Jade Esmeralda, MS, CSCS, is a Staff Writer, Health & Fitness. A life-long martial artist and dancer, Jade has a strong passion for strength & conditioning, sports science, and human performance. She graduated with a Master of Science degree in Exercise Science and Strength and Conditioning from George Washington University.
