Mrs. Angry Flower Clifton 🌸

BREAKING: Dolores Huerta, the labor and civil rights leader, has died. She was 96. nytimes.com/2026/10/28/us/do…

The WNBA cannot simultaneously pursue the economics, visibility, cultural relevance, and fan investment of major professional leagues without accepting that increased attention also produces increased scrutiny, expectation, criticism, and emotional demand. Kelsey Mitchell is one of my favorite players, and I don’t doubt what she’s describing. There is an important line here: harassment, threats, racism, misogyny, and abuse should never be normalized as something athletes are required to tolerate. But criticism, scrutiny, enormous expectations, passionate fans, boos, relentless media attention, and people having strong opinions about your performance are different. Those are part of big-time professional sports. It’s worth challenging the idea embedded in “showing up every day to compete for fans that may or may not like you is hard.” Of course it is hard. That is precisely why developing the capacity to do it is part of becoming an elite professional athlete. I work with male athletes who play in some of the most intense sports markets in the country (New York, Los Angeles, Boston). These are environments where millions of people care deeply about what happens, poor performances are dissected, fans can be unforgiving, and the emotional temperature surrounding a team can become enormous. One of the most important developmental shifts I help athletes make is learning to change their relationship with that environment. The athlete’s relationship to pressure changes their physiological and psychological experience of pressure. When the internal story becomes these people are against me, this environment is hostile, I shouldn’t have to deal with this, the system is continually defending itself. When it becomes this is what meaningful competition feels like, people care, and I have developed the capacity to cope and thrive in it, the same environment can become energizing. I’ve watched athletes make that shift. They stop experiencing passionate fans as something they need protection from and begin feeding off the atmosphere. Many eventually come to love playing in those cities, and fans can feel that shift too. They can feel when an athlete wants to be there and appreciates the passion surrounding the team. That kind of transformation requires intentional development. This is where there is an important conversation to have about the continued growth of the WNBA. Players have fought for greater investment, compensation, visibility, resources, and respect as professional athletes. The growth happening around women’s basketball is extraordinary, but greater visibility also creates greater exposure. More fans means more opinions. More money creates greater expectations. Bigger television audiences create more scrutiny. Cultural relevance brings noise, and athletes do not get to control all of it. The developmental question becomes: Can you expand your capacity to remain yourself inside of it? Professional sports still has enormous gaps in developing that capacity, and women’s sports may have some unique ones. Men’s professional sports have had decades longer to build infrastructure around athletes and substantially more money flowing through those systems, and they still haven’t mastered it. As women’s sports rapidly professionalize, the internal development infrastructure surrounding the athletes has to professionalize with it. We cannot ask athletes to perform inside increasingly demanding environments without helping them develop the psychological, emotional, and somatic capacity those environments require. At the same time, the answer cannot always be asking the environment to become less demanding. The most elite competitors I work with eventually understand something important: pressure is a privilege, but only once you’ve developed enough capacity to experience it that way. Hardcore fans aren’t the enemy of professional sports. Indifference is. — P.S. I train pro athletes, teams, and executives. I write about the intersection of somatics and performance. Ring the 🔔 to join the community.

I refuse to watch anymore @WNBA until next season when @CaitlinClark22 returns. I’ve never seen such an open corrupt game of refereeing in my life. @wnba SUCKS

The Lynx have had an amazing season. Olivia Myles is truly the best rookie. But GOLLY I hope the Liberty close out this series tonight and eliminates them!!!! Let’s go #Liberty #GoNYGoNYGo

"The View" host Sunny Hostin stands up for accused Cornell gang rape defendants. 🎥: ABC

She doesn’t want flowers, she wants books