SPORTS BASKETBALL
Power, Forward
Darrow Montgomery
Female athletes, like those on the Mystics, have been at the forefront of the ongoing battle for social and racial justice. They are often overlooked compared to their male counterparts.
Ariel Atkins, second from left, at the Mystics championship rally in October 2019 By Kelyn Soong @KelynSoong For four minutes, Ariel Atkins spoke from the heart. Flanked by her teammates and one of their young sons, the normally reticent Atkins explained to ESPN’s Holly Rowe why the Washington Mystics had decided to sit out of their Aug. 26 game against the Atlanta Dream, hitting pause on the WNBA season just days after Jacob Blake, a Black man in Kenosha, Wisconsin, was shot seven times in the back by a White police officer. She talked about being a Black woman, and how she’s used to “people trying to tell us to shut up.” She said she was more than just a basketball player, and told anyone watching that, if they disagreed, they were watching the wrong sport. Atkins simply had enough. She was angry. Sad. Tired. Afterward, Atkins told her coach Mike Thibault that she didn’t realize just how much she had let her emotions build up while competing at the WNBA bubble in Bradenton, Florida.
“For me, it’s tough because I try not to put too many things into my head,” Atkins tells City Paper. “I try not to see a lot of things, but it’s almost impossible to go on the internet today and not see something about social injustice simply because it’s happening too much. I feel like as a community, we’re being desensitized to Black people being killed at the hands of authority ... I’m the type of person that just lets things build up, and you don’t really understand how much it affects you until it kinda hits.” In a league where approximately 80 percent of the players competing in the bubble are Black, the actions by Atkins, a third-year guard, and the Mystics demonstrated just how important the WNBA is when it comes to advocating for social and racial justice. The graphic videos of police brutality can feel personal to many of them. The trauma is visceral. And while female athletes have been at the forefront of this ongoing battle for social reform, they are often not given the credit they deserve for their advocacy. Like the Milwaukee Bucks, the first professional sports team to sit out during the playoffs to protest the shooting of Blake and demand
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justice, the Mystics took a calculated risk in postponing their game. By the end of the night, none of the NBA or WNBA games scheduled that night were played. The WNBA’s Dream, Los Angeles Sparks, Minnesota Lynx, Connecticut Sun, and Phoenix Mercury also sat out of their games, following the Mystics’ lead. But in comparison to their NBA counterparts and male athletes in general, WNBA players have sometimes had to demand the same respect and attention, and don’t receive the same credit for their social activism. “I think women in sports really have to fight for everything that we get,” says Atkins, who is 24. “I’m super thankful to be a part of a league that I personally grew up in, but my [draft] class was the first class to grow up with the WNBA. That’s 24 years later, but I just feel like we’re used to fighting for things, and it takes a special person to speak out on things that they’re not comfortable with … I mean, you have people that are like, ‘Oh, women shouldn’t be playing sports, women should be doing this, doing that.’” It was just four years ago that players on the
Minnesota Lynx wore T-shirts during warmups in support of the Black Lives Matter movement and to honor the memory of two Black men killed by police officers, Philando Castile and Alton Sterling, only to be met with widespread criticism. Four off-duty cops working as arena security walked off the job in protest. This happened more than a month before Colin Kaepernick kneeled during the national anthem in an NFL preseason game. One of those players was four-time WNBA champion and former league MVP Maya Moore, who has skipped the past two WNBA seasons to focus on criminal justice reform advocacy. This season, Mystics guard Natasha Cloud also decided to opt out of the season, announcing that she will instead “continue the fight on the front lines for social reform, because until Black lives matter, all lives can’t matter.” “I know that Maya Moore’s name gets sprinkled in here and there, but I mean, she left the game in her prime,” says Christy Winters Scott, a color analyst for the Mystics and the Big Ten Network. “I mean, can you imagine any NBA player stepping away during their prime or NFL players stepping away during their prime to help others? I don’t think her name gets mentioned enough.” Winters Scott, who starred for the University of Maryland women’s basketball team from 1986 to 1990, remembers a time not too long ago when athletes like herself were taught not to challenge the status quo—at least not publicly. They were told to compartmentalize their feelings and just play. Social media has fueled athletes’ ability to reach a wider audience, but that doesn’t mean speaking out is easy. It requires courage, especially when the trauma is personal. “I think these women feel it on so many levels,” Winters Scott says. “I know, personally, for me as a mom of three Black teenagers, it’s terrifying. And it’s exhausting. And especially, I mean, we’re in a health pandemic on top of a racial pandemic, to be quite honest, and it’s scary.” The Mystics had originally planned to play that night at 7 p.m. against the Dream, and would kneel, lock arms, and raise their fists during the national anthem in protest. They considered holding a media blackout, refusing to answer questions about the team, and instead using their media availability to talk about Blake and police brutality. That afternoon, at Thibault’s suggestion of making “visual statements,” the players, in particular Emma Meesseman and Myisha Hines-Allen, made T-shirts that spelled out Jacob Blake’s name on the front, with each player wearing one letter, and seven red dots on the back to represent the seven times Blake was shot at close range. They would wear those during warmups. But while riding the bus on the way to the arena, the Bucks had decided to sit out of their game—a wildcat strike—and Atkins says the Mystics players “weren’t OK emotionally” over the shooting in Wisconsin. “Trying to lock in for a game is one thing, but it was just a lot,” she explains. When they arrived at the arena, the Mystics
