Controversy always seems to hover around Caitlin Clark, even though she has nothing to do with it herself. And this time it involves the continuation of a dispute between sportswriter Christine Brennan and Minnesota Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve.
The response to Brennan’s book On Her Game about Clark and her rise to superstardom has been polarizing in women’s basketball circles ever since it was announced. Brennan faced backlash from the WNBA Players Association over some of her questions towards players while also having a public dispute with Sarah Spain over her coverage. And for her part, Brennan has also been critical of the WNBA for not doing more to protect Clark on the court.
But perhaps the loudest critic has been Reeve thanks to her role as the Team USA Olympic women’s basketball coach. Earlier this summer, Reeve called out Brennan over her reporting around the decision to leave Caitlin Clark off the Olympic roster. She even went as far as to call it “fiction” and say that she had to be Brennan’s villain to help tell the story.
In an appearance on a livestream with Robin Lundberg, Brennan fired back, saying that Reeve has lied about their interactions and the characterization of her reporting.
“I’m thinking, USA Basketball is making a decision. I’ve covered Olympic team selection decisions since ’84. I’ve never heard or seen anything like this. So the goofiness, the ridiculousness was already apparent,” Brennan said of the decision to leave Clark off the team because of a potential fear of backlash if she didn’t play a lot of minutes at the Olympics.
Brennan then went to talk about Reeve’s tweets about Clark getting too much media attention from the WNBA preseason last year and how she vehemently opposed targeting a young athlete.
“I wanted to give them an opportunity to soften or explain themselves. Cheryl Reeve, please talk to me. I texted her, I called her PR people, I got in touch, e-mailed the PR people. Went through USA Basketball several times in May when that story first broke for USA Today and then all the way through including, I forget exactly when, but certainly December, maybe January, to give her an open opportunity to talk to me. I would have run the quotes at length. She didn’t want to do that. Ok, that’s fine.”
“But she said at one point in that appearance she had that I didn’t do the due diligence. Oh, I so did the due diligence. And she knows that because she has the messages including text messages when I had her cell number. So the lying, Robin, it makes me sad to say this because I liked Cheryl Reeve. The lies are there. And anyone can find them and see them,” she added.
Now that both sides have come out and basically accused the other side of not telling the truth, it does not look like that we may ever get to the root of what actually happened between Cheryl Reeve, Christine Brennan, and the decision to leave Caitlin Clark off the Olympic basketball team. Let’s just hope and pray that she is on the 2028 Olympic roster so we can all one day be able to move forward.