We don't yet know whether Team USA's trip to Berlin for the Women's World Cup will end in glory. One of the most dominant teams in the history of international sports currently sits two wins away from winning a fifth straight gold medal and its 12th overall with a semifinal against Spain and a likely final against a dogged France team on the horizon this weekend. Any way you spin it, anything less than a gold would be a failure for the Americans.
But no matter how the podium plays out, this trip has already been a success in one crucial way. It has shown the on-court potential of the Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese connection and proved that off-court harmony between the two is, in fact, possible. As we gear up for the Sept. 17 return of the WNBA season -- and a potential playoff clash between Clark's Indiana Fever and Reese's Atlanta Dream -- that is a lesson worth savoring.
Reese and Clark have been in each other's orbit since they were teens, playing against each other in AAU and later in the Big Ten during their freshman and sophomore years when Reese was still at Maryland before she transferred to LSU. Individually, they are both magnetic forces of nature on and off the court, and together they've ignited a firestorm of excitement, devotion, investment and controversy that has both taken women's basketball to new heights and made it central to the culture wars in exhausting, reductive and damaging ways. The mania around the pair took over the mainstream news cycle for the first time after the 2023 NCAA National Championship Game when Reese and LSU defeated the Clark-led Iowa team 102-85 in front of a then-record 9.9 million viewers.
Reese was seen taunting Clark at the end of the game with the "you can't see me" gesture, and the moment blew up into a national conversation about sportsmanship and class that was, to put it mildly, tinged with racism. They met in the Elite Eight the next year, and Clark's Hawkeyes got revenge in front of 12.3 million viewers. Weeks later at the 2024 WNBA Draft, more than three million people tuned in to see Clark get drafted No. 1 overall by the Fever and Reese go No. 7 to the Chicago Sky.
Over the past three years, games between the two have continued to set ratings records and stir up controversy. Rivalries are great for the sport, and the tapestry of women's sports is rich enough to support heroes, villains, petty hatred, blind loyalty and everything in between. But the conversation about the rivalry between Reese and Clark has become so detached from reality that it feels like it's happening in an alternate universe to actual WNBA games.
It has become less about the two athletes as individuals and more about race, gender, class, privilege, identity, gatekeeping and politics. It has clouded the phenomenal things both players have accomplished on the court in their first three years and taken nuance away from their remarkable journeys to their 2026 forms. It has fueled an ugliness that has cast a dark shadow over the league's explosion in popularity, an ugliness that is present even when the two stars aren't playing.
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