Last week, the WNBA announced the final vote tallies for this season’s All-Star Game. As expected, Caitlin Clark topped the fans’ ballot for the second year in a row. In the players’ voting, however, she ranked only ninth—among guards. Some observers argued that Clark’s relatively low standing among her peers is a fair ranking for a player who has missed 10 of her team’s 19 games. But others, such as USA Today columnist Christine Brennan, saw it differently. A sportswriter whose career spans more than four decades, Brennan has emerged as one of the most outspoken voices on the Clark beat. In columns and in media appearances, she has taken aim at women’s basketball leaders and stakeholders for mishandling a watershed moment in the sport. As Brennan saw it, the All-Star vote was yet another example of that. The disparate results between the fans and players, she wrote on social media, reveals “an obvious and crucial disconnect that WNBA leadership would be wise to address.” This line of criticism has been a recurring theme of Brennan’s coverage of Clark, now in her second season with the Indiana Fever after a celebrated four-year career at the University of Iowa. It also animates Brennan’s new book, On Her Game: Caitlin Clark and the Revolution in Women’s Sports, which is out Tuesday. In an interview last week, Brennan said the WNBA was “so utterly unprepared” for the frenzy surrounding Clark. “It’s astounding to me,” she said. Clark is a unicorn, but in Brennan’s view, the league and broader women’s basketball establishment often treat her like just another filly. While some have attributed the WNBA’s spike in television viewership to both Clark and her rival, Angel Reese, Brennan isn’t having that. Clark’s ascendance, she says, is “unlike any” she’s seen in her 44-year career. For Brennan, Clark is singularly responsible for the league’s newfound popularity. In On Her Game, Brennan recounts a phone call last year with a top league official the day after Clark announced that she was going pro. “Do you know how big this is?” she asked. The official concurred, though not as enthusiastically as Brennan expected: “Yeah, this is the biggest thing to happen to the [WNBA] since Maya Moore came into the league.” Moore entered the WNBA in 2011 with a glittering résumé from the University of Connecticut, and retired as one of the most decorated players in league history. But at Iowa, Clark became the most famous women’s player ever, packing arenas and drawing record-setting TV audiences. And her arrival in the WNBA has brought a surge of attention to a league that had long been starved of both public interest and respect. The official’s answer mystified Brennan, who calls the interaction “as telling an anecdote as any in the book.” She wonders if the league simply refused to believe that Clark’s enormous popularity would translate in the pros. In the book, Brennan argues that the WNBA should have briefed its players on the coming Clark phenomenon. She quotes the sociologist and civil rights activist Harry Edwards, who says it was “predictable” that some players in the league, particularly Black players, might experience “disappointment and anger” over the hype and fanfare that greeted Clark’s arrival. Clark has not been warmly embraced by all corners of the league, as evidenced by some of the tough fouls and taunts she’s drawn from other players. Edwards suggests that the league should have held a “series of seminars” during last year’s preseason, led by experts and specialists, designed to help the players grasp some of the changes that were coming—and to remind them that they laid the foundation for Clark. That, Edwards says, might have prevented “this wall of negativity” toward her. Brennan devotes large portions of On Her Game to addressing some of that negativity. She calls out the women’s hoops legend Diana Taurasi, who said last year that Clark would receive a reality check in the WNBA by going up against “grown women that have been playing professional basketball for a long time.” Brennan acknowledges in the book that many sports fans might argue that Taurasi’s skepticism is part of a long tradition of veteran players speaking dismissively of the next generation, “that this is exactly the way the old guard treats rookies in men’s sports, so why not in women’s too?” But Brennan doesn’t buy that. “Women’s sports still have so much catching up to do, decades and decades of catching up,” she writes. “So, along comes a woman who can help accelerate that timeline, draw those fans, raise those salaries—and Taurasi gives her the cold shoulder?” Taurasi, through a representative, declined to comment. During an appearance with Clark on ESPN in the spring, she appeared to walk back her original comments: ”Reality is coming to me now,” Taurasi said. The decision to give Clark the cold shoulder at last summer’s Olympics also gets relitigated in On Her Game, with Brennan saving much of her criticism for Cheryl Reeve, the coach of the US women’s team. In posts on social media last year before the US team was selected, Reeve appeared to take issue with the WNBA’s Clark-centrism, appending one of her missives with the hashtag “#TheWIsMoreThanOnePlayer.” “I’ve covered the Olympics since 1984. I’ve never seen a coach act that way,” Brennan told me. “I have never seen a coach say anything about an athlete in the selection pool, ever. It’s just so interesting to me how all of that was accepted. Forget that it’s Caitlin Clark. How about just any person?” she continued. “But then you throw in that this is a person who is going to make Cheryl Reeve more money, and is going to make all these players more money. Why are they acting this way? What is the reason? Is it wanting to keep the small things small?” Brennan was a part of the Lifetime channel’s coverage of the WNBA back in 1990s, and she recalls male colleagues saying “denigrating, awful stuff” about the fledgling league at the time. “For someone like me, as a journalist, I don’t see myself as an advocate for women’s sports,” she said. “I see myself as an advocate for the coverage of women’s sports.” Brennan’s coverage was never really a lightning rod for criticism before she decided to write about Clark, which proved to be a contentious assignment. Last fall, Brennan was among a group of reporters gathered around Connecticut Sun guard DiJonai Carrington, whose team faced off against Clark and the Fever in the first round of last year’s WNBA playoffs. In game one of their series, Carrington hit Clark in the eye, leaving her with a visible bruise. Brennan, in the scrum of reporters, asked Carrington if she had swatted Clark intentionally. Carrington said she hadn’t, and in fact, wasn’t even aware that she hit Clark. Brennan then followed up, asking if Carrington was laughing about the incident with a teammate later in the game. “No, I just told you I didn’t even know I hit her,” Carrington replied, “so I can’t laugh about something I didn’t know happened.” The episode became a Rorschach for both the media and WNBA fans. Carrington had, by that time, already been subject to grotesque online harassment, which only intensified after the incident with Clark in the playoffs. Brennan was the subject of a pointed statement from the WNBA Players Association that ripped her as “unprofessional” and said she did not deserve her credentials. To the Players Association, Brennan’s line of questioning fed into a racially charged narrative that was festering on social media. Clark, herself, later said that she backed the Players Association’s stance and that she found Brennan’s questions inappropriate. But others, including Brennan’s editor at USA Today, defended the questions as standard journalism. Brennan delves into the ordeal in the book, even highlighting some of the criticism: The former women’s soccer great Megan Rapinoe, for one, said the questions came off as “racist.” “What I say in the book, and what I’ll happily say to anyone, is that I’ve asked much tougher questions of male athletes and female athletes for years,” Brennan said. “Is the Players Association saying that women can’t handle basic questions?” (A representative for the Players Association declined to comment.) Here, Brennan sees another case of the league being caught flat-footed as it entered the Clark era. In the book, Brennan quotes an unnamed WNBA official who lamented that the league’s players weren’t accustomed to “real media exposure.” “Frankly, our players just don’t get it,” the official said. “Sadly, the WNBA players were not prepared or not assisted in understanding that, within this new world of theirs of more national scrutiny, that there will be questions asked that maybe they’ve not had before,” Brennan said. A certain amount of tension was unavoidable for a league wading into unprecedented waters—no seminar was going to change that. And the incumbent WNBA players probably shouldn’t have been expected to genuflect before Clark simply because she’s brought a crowd. They are competitors, after all. But Brennan has a point when she says the league and its players will have to adapt to a less insular sporting environment. That will, on occasion, mean uncomfortable questions and even criticism. Brennan has gotten plenty of that herself while working on the book. “If this stuff bothered me, I would’ve been hiding under a bed in 1982 and I would’ve never come out,” she said. “It’s fine, because you can imagine what life has been like as a woman in a man’s world, in a man’s locker room, and the verbal taunts and things that I’ve received.”