Episode 30 - Record Crowds and a Messy All-Star Game, Plus the Fight Over Title IX

Thirty episodes in, and this might be the one where we spent the most time on something that has nothing to do with a box score. All-Star Weekend gave us a record crowd, a rookie who could not miss, and a game that got boring about ten minutes in. That is the fun half.

The other half is a report from the Heritage Foundation arguing that Title IX was a failed experiment, and the legislation moving alongside it. We went and read the thing so you do not have to, and then we went looking for the numbers. What we found reframed the whole “protect young girls” argument for us, and not in the direction its authors intended.

We also rebooted 2027 World Cup qualifying, because WAFCON is happening right now and almost nobody can figure out how to watch it.

Around the League: The Headlines

• The WNBA All-Star Game drew 19,783 fans to the United Center, the most attended All-Star Game in league history. That is roughly 4,000 more than the 2026 NBA All-Star Game.
• The WNBA announced a centralized replay center to support officials starting in 2027, using NBA technology. We had flagged the lack of investment in officiating a few weeks back, so this was good to see.
• NWSL viewership is climbing fast. First-half data showed YouTube views up 41.7% to 11.2 million, watch time up 50%, and subscribers up 17.9%. In person, the league hit 1 million attendees faster than any prior season, the Portland Thorns posted their best crowd since 2024 at 21,743, and the league is on pace to average 10,000-plus per game for a fourth straight season.
• Jordyn Huitema of the Chicago Red Stars and Trinity Armstrong of the San Diego Wave will both miss the rest of 2026 with torn ACLs. Armstrong was two games back from tearing her other ACL. Emily Sonnett also went down about seven minutes into Gotham’s match against Portland and was stretchered off holding her left knee.
• The Denver Summit’s permanent 14,500-seat home at Santa Fe Yards will not be ready for the start of 2028 as planned. They are still hoping to play there in the back half of that season. The delay traces back to acquiring the land.
• Gotham FC head coach Juan Carlos Amorós is taking five weeks of paternity leave following the birth of his second child.

“When fathers take paternity leave, particularly men in leadership positions, it helps normalize an important principle. Caring for children is a shared responsibility.” — Juan Carlos Amorós, as discussed on the show

• Brazil announced discounted tickets for the 2027 Women’s World Cup: 50% off selected tickets for students, people 60 and over, low-income young people, and people with disabilities. FIFA still controls the standard price and the quantity available, but a federation stepping in on affordability is a step.
• Napheesa Collier made her season debut just before All-Star weekend, going for 24 points and 10 rebounds in a Lynx win over the Seattle Storm.
• The AUSL championship aired on ABC, the first pro softball game broadcast on a network.
• The LPGA is adding a tournament on Hawaii’s Big Island next season with a $4 million purse and a dual pro and college format.
• Wrexham’s women’s side named Minnesota Aurora’s Sarah [NAME CHECK] as general manager. She was Aurora’s president last season and spent two years as chief of staff at Gotham FC before that.
• Unrivaled is exploring expansion for season three. Miami stays the home base, with as many as nine road stops floated. San Francisco, Denver, and Los Angeles came up.
• The Minnesota Vixen beat the Pittsburgh Passion 42-14 on ESPN2 to win a football championship, the first in Minneapolis since the 1960s.

Title IX Is Under Attack, and the “Protect Girls” Argument Does Not Hold Up

A note before this section: it discusses anti-trans legislation, sexual abuse in youth sports, and suicide among LGBTQ+ young people. If you would rather skip it, the soccer section picks up below.

A few weeks ago the Heritage Foundation put out a report titled “Title IX’s Failed Experiment: Why Accommodating Sex Differences Beats Engineered Equality.” We read it. The short version is that Title IX is bad, it hurts men, and it makes women less docile and harms fertility.

Some context first. Girls’ participation in sports went from roughly 300,000 to about 3.4 million since Title IX was instated, with most of that growth front-loaded in the first two decades. That participation matters well past the field. Recruiters look for it, and the skills it builds (discipline, leadership, conflict resolution, collaboration) are the same ones a workplace runs on. About 94% of women in C-level positions played varsity sports in high school, and over half played in college.

Two quotes from the report that stuck with us:

“Promoting assertive athletics formed a core element of a broader project to remake female character itself, producing a new woman who would be more aggressive, assertive, dominant, and less deferential, less graceful, and less oriented toward motherhood and traditional feminine graces.” — Heritage Foundation report, as discussed on the show

The report also talks about expanding male opportunities and restoring a more humane social order.

“I don’t know where I’ve ever felt that I’ve needed my opportunities expanded as a man.” — Alex

This is not just a think tank paper, though. In January 2025 the House passed HR 28, the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, which would amend Title IX so that only girls born biologically female could participate in girls’ sports at schools receiving federal funding. The bill sets no standard for how that gets determined. Leave that to individual schools and you get sex verification of minors, which is invasive and inappropriate on its face. It also does not stop at trans girls. Any girl who looks too muscular or performs too well becomes a target, and that lands hardest on women of color.

The report’s own opening example proves the point. It cites a 2024 Olympic women’s boxing gold medal match as a Tunisian man defeating a Chinese woman. The Tunisian boxer is a woman. She is not transgender. She has a condition involving elevated testosterone.

Then in June of this year the Supreme Court upheld a federal ban and effectively punted the question back to the states, meaning state-level bans on trans girls and women in sport can stand.

And just this month, Sophie Cunningham of the Indiana Fever repeated a familiar set of talking points in an interview with ESPN’s Hallie Grossman.

“I got a lot of negative feedback about me hating trans. And I’m like, I never once said that. I think I’m here to extend love. But I also think that with love is truth, being honest, and I want to protect young girls in locker rooms, or young girls in sport, who shouldn’t have to go against biological men.” — Sophie Cunningham, as discussed on the show

She has since doubled down. Putting “protect young girls from men” next to trans girls and women is a mischaracterization, and it is built to instill fear. So here is the question we kept coming back to: protect them from who?

The numbers

Alex pulled what data exists on trans athlete participation:

• High school: 8,266,244 total athletes per the NFHS 2024-25 survey. There is no survey or count of trans high school athletes. Estimates range from the low single digits to maybe the low hundreds.
• College: roughly 510,000 athletes. In 2023 testimony, the NCAA president said there were fewer than 10 trans athletes. That is 0.002%, or about one in 51,000. Now the other side of the ledger, from U.S. Center for SafeSport data covering the roughly 11 million athletes in the Olympic and Paralympic movement:
• 9,683 allegations of misconduct by coaches in 2025 alone, about 186 per week across criminal, physical, and sexual categories.
• 31% of female elite or club athletes reported sexual abuse before age 18. Of those, 41% said it came from coaches or team personnel. In a single week, there are more allegations of abuse than there are likely trans athletes in all of high school and college sports combined. And we have watched this play out before, from Larry Nassar to the NWSL abuse scandal, where multiple clubs had coaches and owners abusing athletes and then demanding their silence.

The rhetoric has a measurable cost too. Roughly 36% to 39% of LGBTQ+ youth seriously consider suicide each year and about 10% attempt. Among trans youth specifically, that first number is 46%.

“The result is you’re not protecting kids. You are putting kids in a position where they feel like their only option is to not be here anymore.” — Caitlin

If you or a young person in your life needs someone to talk to, The Trevor Project is free and available 24/7 for LGBTQ+ young people: call 1-866-488-7386, or text START to 678-678. The 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available to anyone by call or text at 988.

Caitlin laid out what protecting kids would actually look like. Nobody gets to inspect a child’s body to verify her sex. Prosecute abusers, and build systems where the people reporting abuse are not silenced or bullied out of speaking. And include the kids who just want to play, even if you are uncomfortable with how they express themselves.

Megan Rapinoe made the connection explicit on The View this week, drawing a straight line from the Heritage report to the broader attacks on the trans community. That progression is what we keep coming back to. It starts with a small population and it does not stay there.

“If you remove these opportunities from women and even from trans girls and women, you are removing an opportunity for them to have high levels of success.” — Caitlin

Make it hard for one group and you have made it hard for the larger group, which is generally the point. It is about control.

WAFCON Is On, and 2027 Qualifying Is a Maze

The Women’s Africa Cup of Nations runs through August 16 in Morocco, the third time the country has hosted. The field expanded to 16 teams from the Confederation of African Football, up from 12 last time. Four World Cup spots are on the line plus two inter-confederation playoff berths.

• Nigeria are the defending champions.
• Cabo Verde are in for the first time, following their men’s World Cup success, along with Malawi.
• Eleven NWSL players are competing for seven different nations. Five of the eleven play for the Washington Spirit.
• Names to track: Temwa Chawinga of Malawi and Barbra Banda of Zambia (the two at the top of the NWSL Golden Boot race), Rosemonde Kouassi of the Spirit playing for Ivory Coast, and Gift Monday of the Spirit with defending champion Nigeria. The frustrating part is access. Between the timing and the lack of a clean broadcast option in the U.S., we could not give a straight answer on where to watch. That is a shame for a tournament with this much NWSL talent in it.

Where qualifying actually stands

Already in:

• AFC: Australia, China PR, Japan, DPR Korea, Korea Republic, Philippines
• CONMEBOL: Argentina, Colombia, Brazil (host)
• OFC: New Zealand
• UEFA: Denmark, France, Germany, Spain That leaves 18 slots, three of which come out of a playoff. CAF fills four through the tournament happening now. Concacaf fills four in late November and early December. UEFA runs a playoff phase in October, and the teams still waiting there are not small: England, the last World Cup runners-up, plus Sweden, Norway, Italy, Switzerland, and the Netherlands.

The final three spots come from a ten-team inter-confederation playoff, expected in the February and March window. Two teams each from AFC, CONMEBOL, CAF, and Concacaf, plus one each from OFC and UEFA. Top three qualify.

“I don’t know why they make it so complicated.” — Caitlin

NWSL: Still No Separation

We keep waiting for the table to sort itself out and it keeps refusing.

• The top five are within five points of each other. That is two games, or one week of play.
• Sixth through 13th, eight teams, are also within two games of one another. Bay FC sat 11th last week and is 14th now.
• Louisville beat a streaking Angel City. Louisville has also scored more goals this season than Chicago has all year. The Red Stars are still in single digits for goals with a minus-23 differential. We watched the Washington Spirit host the Denver Summit, which was a track meet for the first fifteen minutes before both sides settled. Sofia Cantore’s finish was the highlight, but the real moment was the ball Trinity Rodman played in to set it up. Trinh looked energetic and had chances of her own.

We are seeing the Summit in person in under two weeks at their temporary home in Centennial, which is where they play until Santa Fe Yards is finished.

WNBA All-Star Weekend: Record Crowd, Forgettable Game

The weekend has become a convention. Fan activations everywhere, brand drops, press conferences, and a lot of networking.

• Angel Reese launched her Barbie, Bayou Barbie, with a dream house activation, pink hair for the weekend, and a matching colorway on her Reebok signature shoe. The video of her with young Black fans was the good stuff.
• Nike dropped eight shoes over the weekend, including new colorways of A’ja Wilson’s signature line, Sabrina Ionescu’s, and a vintage Sue Bird.

Shooting Stars

There was no skills competition. Instead we got Shooting Stars: a legend, a current player, and a high school player from four cities, shooting from seven spots with about 1:10 on the clock. One attempt per spot through six, then unlimited from the seventh, which was basically a logo three. Washington won it, with Elena Delle Donne, Shakira Austin, and a high schooler who hit the closing shot. The team took home $85,000.

The three-point contest

The field was Marina Mabrey, Bridget Carleton, Janelle Salaün, Rhyne Howard, Natisha Hiedeman, and Azzi Fudd. We had guessed about half of it right.

The league reported that Caitlin Clark, Sabrina Ionescu, and Kayla McBride declined invitations. Ionescu and McBride disputed that characterization.

“I can’t decline an invite I never received.” — Sabrina Ionescu, as discussed on the show

A text to an agent asking if you might be interested is not an invitation, and the difference matters. One says you would be good at this. The other says we want to use you.

Carleton opened with 29 or 30 in the first round and looked like the basket was enormous. Fudd won the final, and afterward said she got good at catch-and-shoot threes while rehabbing her ACL. You could see it in her rhythm. Ionescu’s record of 37 out of a possible 40 still stands. Prize money moved in the right direction too: $70,000 for the winner, $40,000 for the runner-up, and $25,000 for third. Last year second and third place got nothing.

The game

Team Spoon won, which Alex called, because you do not pick against Cheryl Reeve.

Clark came out firing, hitting threes early and getting the building going. Dominique Malonga dunked, becoming the seventh player to do it in an All-Star Game, and you could tell teammates were setting her up. Marina Mabrey went off, something like five of six from three in the second quarter.

And then it got slow. Players passing up layups, very little defense, a lot of jacked threes. It is an All-Star Game and nobody needs to go 100%, but the get-in price was around $343.

“I don’t need you guys to go a hundred percent, but can we give like 60%?” — Caitlin Clark, as discussed on the show

Some of that is probably the schedule. Some of it is that the weekend doubles as a party. Our pitch for next year: hungover All-Stars versus average Joes off the street, specifically Joes, to demonstrate exactly how that would go.

Jonquel Jones of the New York Liberty won All-Star MVP and gave a lovely postgame press conference, opening up about family and giving real credit to the college coach who took her in when she came up from the Bahamas. She also became the first player to hold regular season MVP, Finals MVP, Commissioner’s Cup MVP, and All-Star MVP.

Both teams played for Chicago-area organizations that keep young girls in sports, with $70,000 going to the winning team’s charity and $30,000 to the other. Kelsey Plum, out with injury, made the case that putting money on the line changes the game. We agree with her.

Vibes, and the Studbudz problem

A’ja Wilson remains the best press conference in sports. Asked about her relationship with commissioner Cathy Engelbert:

“My only relationship with Cathy is when she’s handing me awards.” — A’ja Wilson, as discussed on the show

The sisterhood on display was the best part of the weekend. So were the handwritten notes from girls in those charity organizations to the players, and the videos of players reading them. That is the whole point of this.

The messier part was the Studbudz stream, which ran long enough that people on Threads built out an entire relationship diagram from it. Our read: these players are giving unprecedented access to their lives, and if the men’s side offered the same access you would see the same mess. If the tea of the day is relationship drama rather than something serious, fine. But there is a version of that stream that works better as an edited release after the fact, with some PR support behind it.

It also tells you something about who is watching now. A lot of new fans are arriving from pop culture rather than sports, and the fan base shifts with them.

The League and the Union Finally Talked

The Players Association met with Cathy Engelbert by video conference on Tuesday, with the racist and threatening messages players receive on social media on the agenda. From the joint statement:

“Tuesday’s conversation underscores the importance of addressing issues early through proactive communication and strengthening the League-Union relationship. The League committed to continuing to enhance security resources and will work with the Players’ Union to explore collaborations with organizations that share the values of our League in advance of our shared priorities. Yesterday’s discussion marked the beginning of an ongoing dialogue and we are united in our commitment to building on this work together.” — WNBA and WNBPA joint statement, as discussed on the show

“Addressing issues early through proactive communication” is a strange phrase for something that has been building since 2024. Calling this the beginning of a conversation is not okay. There is also reporting swirling that Engelbert may be on the way out at the end of this year, which makes this feel like too little, too late. Her work building the business side is real and we would not take that from her. This particular problem was foreseeable and should have been handled a long time ago.

WNBA Standings and Who We’re Watching

The top eight have not changed in weeks: Minnesota, Golden State, Las Vegas, Dallas, Indiana, Atlanta, New York, Washington. The Lynx sit two and a half games clear of the Valkyries. The Mystics are seven back of Minnesota but three and a half up on Portland, and that gap is where the real separation is starting.

Washington has been the surprise. Early in the season they had no clear identity. Now they do: rebound, be physical, put bodies on people, and feed Kiki Iriafen and Sonia Citron. Plus the locker room content, which suggests they are having a very good time. They are going to be good for a while, and the same goes for Seattle and to a degree Connecticut.

One rough note: Portland’s Sarah Ashley Barker tore her ACL. She is a real energy piece off the bench and a critical one for their postseason push.

We are taking the girls to the Lynx and Fever on Sunday. Napheesa Collier is back, and we do not think the league has fully processed what that means yet. Her first game back she was not the leading scorer, and that is fine. What she does is lighten the scoring burden on everyone. Natasha Howard does not have to show up big every night. Kayla McBride does not have to put up 30. And when she is not scoring she is pulling defenders with her. She is also a genuine two-way player, and her return pushes the rotation down a spot, which finally gives the Lynx some bench depth.

Whether we see Caitlin Clark is another question. She is one technical foul away from a suspension, and she and Stephanie White are reportedly having strategic conversations about that.

What to Watch

WNBA

• Friday: Dallas Wings at Washington Mystics, 6:30 p.m. ET on ION. Trap game for the Wings.
• Saturday: Las Vegas Aces at Chicago Sky, noon on CBS and Paramount+. Vegas should win, but Chicago has been close so many times. Sydney Taylor is playing lights out for an undrafted rookie. They just cannot close.
• Sunday: Indiana Fever at Minnesota Lynx, on ABC. Top of the West against top of the East. Look for us. NWSL
• Friday: North Carolina Courage vs Orlando Pride, 7 p.m. on Prime. Playoff battle.
• Saturday: Kansas City vs Angel City, 5:30 p.m. on ION.
• Sunday: Washington Spirit vs San Diego Wave, 3 p.m. on CBS Sports. Utah Royals vs Portland Thorns, 6 p.m. on Victory+. Denver Summit vs Boston Legacy, 8 p.m. on ESPN. Golf: AIG Women’s Open, Thursday and Friday on USA, Saturday and Sunday on NBC.

Rugby: Women’s Elite Rugby is off this week. Next Saturday the Denver Onyx play the Bay Breakers in the championship. The TC Gemini could not pull out the win they needed.

Momentum and Setbacks

Setback for Alex: Our congress people, on anything to do with women’s sports and rights. Setback for Caitlin: The attitude of exclusion itself. Curiosity opens up connection and community. Attacks on a group of people do the opposite, and they spread fast.

Momentum for Alex: Azzi Fudd winning the three-point contest. She had a slow start to the season coming off the bench and has grown into it, and she is a delight to watch even when she looks slightly unsure of where she is supposed to be standing. Momentum for Caitlin: Phee is back.

That is thirty episodes. The fun stuff and the hard stuff landed in the same week, which is how it tends to go around here. We spent longer on the Title IX segment than we planned to, and we do not regret it. If you skip everything else, listen to that part and sit with the question we kept asking.

Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or read our newsletter on Substack.

Full Transcript Transcript is computer generated and may contain errors.

Caitlin: If you remove these opportunities from women and even from trans girls and women, you are removing an opportunity for them to have high levels of success.

Alex: Hi, I’m Alex.

Caitlin: And this is Raising the Game, a women’s sports podcast covering primetime performers, the business behind the athletes in the leagues, and what the growth of women’s sports means for the next generation of women’s athletes.

Episode 30 Opening: WNBA All-Star Weekend and WAFCON on Deck

Alex: We’re here. Episode 30. We made it.

Caitlin: 30, 30.

Alex: We’re going to keep going. Yeah, we’re going to keep going. I think we’re going to cover a lot tonight. We have the WNBA All-Star weekend. It just happened. So we got a lot to cover there. A little bit messy at times.

Caitlin: Times.

Alex: It was fun. We have the NWSL and some WAFCON stuff going on in the soccer world.

Caitlin: Yes, WAFCON is the Women’s African Football Confederation, I should say, excuse me. And they’re playing, and it’s basically a continental tournament and has World Cup qualifying implications.

Alex: That we need to discuss.

Caitlin: We do.

Alex: Do we want to dig right into favorite thing? Or I suppose we should say, again, make sure to follow us on Spotify, YouTube, subscribe on YouTube, I guess that’s not a follow, but it’s a subscribe, Instagram, Threads. We’re not really active on Threads, but give us a follow there too. RTG underscore pod on Instagram and Threads and YouTube.

Caitlin: Yeah.

Alex: I think that’s all of them. Share us with your friends.

Caitlin: Share us with your friends. Favorite thing?

Favorite Things: All-Star Confusion and a Night of Storytelling

Alex: I think it was during the All-Star game, the girls immediately were like, who are we cheering for? Which side is us? I’m like, well, that’s difficult, because there are multiple people on each team that we like.

Caitlin: They were mostly concerned with where Olivia Miles was playing, because she is their favorite. But then we had to explain that Liv and Court were on one team being coached by big Cheryl. And then Natasha Howard was on the other team.

Alex: Yes. I think we lost them. They didn’t understand All-Star weekend, which is fair.

Caitlin: Man, I think many people may have left being like, I don’t understand.

Alex: Yeah. Well, my dad was like, is this East versus what?

Caitlin: Yeah, explain all the rules, which was good. Open some minds to the W. Mine, my favorite thing from last week, is not sports related, but it is my favorite thing. So I have the pleasure at my place of work, each year we host this really lovely evening where a bunch of my coworkers get up and share really personal, vulnerable stories about their lives. A really amazing moment of connection, and I think kind of understanding across people, and hearing from people that maybe you wouldn’t have heard from otherwise. And it really encourages, this year in particular, this theme of getting curious about other people, understanding that folks are going through things that you have no idea they’re dealing with, and to give grace, to open up, to really step in and see how you can help if you can, even if that just means sitting alongside them, right? That burdens are lighter carried with others. And it was just a really special message, and one that is so important, specifically in this moment in time. I think we talk about a lot of tension in the leagues that we follow and things like that too. Like, let’s take a step back, really hear people out. And that inclusion always matters.

Alex: Yeah, it does. Absolutely.

Caitlin: So that was my favorite thing. I’m already looking forward to my favorite thing for this week, which we’ll talk about in a little bit.

Alex: Yeah.

Caitlin: So let’s get in the headlines.

Headlines: Record All-Star Attendance, NWSL Viewership Growth, and ACL Injuries

Alex: Let’s do it. The WNBA All-Star Game hosts 19,783 fans at United Center, making it the most attended WNBA All-Star Game ever.

Caitlin: So fun fact, this All-Star game for the WNBA drew almost more than 4,000 fans than the 2026 NBA All-Star.

Alex: Yeah, I saw that. That’s amazing.

Caitlin: Pretty cool. They got a show. That’s all I’ll say for now.

Alex: WNBA announces it will have a centralized replay center to support officials beginning in 2027.

Caitlin: We mentioned a few weeks ago that there was some complaint or feedback that there wasn’t enough investment going towards the officiating problem. So this was cool to see. There were a lot of random news announcements around the W that came out this weekend. I mean, there’s a lot of press conferences and panels and whatnot. So love seeing this. The NBA already uses this. It sounds like they’re going to be using their technology. So hopefully that helps.

Alex: I hope it does. The NWSL is significantly expanding its viewership. New data from the first half of the season indicates views across YouTube channels increased 41.7%, reaching 11.2 million viewers.

Caitlin: Yeah, overall watch time climbed 50% and subscribers grew, this is all on YouTube, by 17.9%. So big momentum, shows that people are tuning in, are really interested. I am very curious to see if there’s any change or bump to these numbers post World Cup, right? Because they did so much of a marketing push around the World Cup. For in real life events though, the league reached 1 million attendees faster than any season prior. Portland Thorns just last weekend, which is one of the best attended stadiums, had their best attendance of the season and since 2024 with 21,743 fans, and the league right now is on pace to average 10,000 plus fans per game for the fourth season in a row.

Alex: That’s great. Jordyn Huitema and Trinity Armstrong to miss remainder of 2026 season with torn ACLs.

Caitlin: Yeah, so Huitema of the Chicago Red Stars and Trinity Armstrong of the San Diego Wave, I believe. Really sad to see. I was telling Alex before we started recording, Trinity Armstrong had just come back from tearing her other ACL. She was two games back from that recovery. And then also Emily Sonnett, it hasn’t been reported yet what she suffered from, but she went down like seven minutes into Gotham’s game against Portland, got stretchered off holding her left knee when she went down. We’ve talked here before about the research that needs to go into the kind of endemic ACL tears for women, and it’s heartbreaking that it happens as often as it does.

Alex: The Denver Summit announced last week its new permanent 14,500 seat home in Santa Fe Yards will not open at the start of the 2028 season as originally planned.

Caitlin: So I think for me at least, that headline got my attention. I was like, oh no, they’re not going to open till 2029. And it’s like, no, they are still hoping to play some games there in 2028. It’ll be more towards the latter, you know, back half of the season. The delays apparently have come from actually acquiring the land that they build this on. I didn’t read too much detail into that, but that’s sort of what slowed this process down for the Summit.

Alex: Gotham FC head coach Juan Carlos Amorós takes paternity leave, will step away for five weeks following the birth of his second child.

Caitlin: Yeah. So Amorós said, quote, when fathers take paternity leave, particularly men in leadership positions, it helps normalize an important principle. Caring for children is a shared responsibility. What a novel idea.

Alex: Yeah. Yeah.

Caitlin: We love to see it. We love to see men using their platform, right, to advocate for their families, being a dad, not assuming that that is the burden of the wife or the mom to bear.

Alex: Brazil announces discounted tickets for the 2027 Women’s World Cup for students, people age 60 plus, low-income young people, and people with disabilities.

Caitlin: The timing of this is really interesting coming off of the men’s World Cup. There’s a lot of complaints about the ticket prices. The deal here will be these folks or populations will be eligible for 50% off of specific tickets, right? So selected tickets. FIFA still gets to control the standard ticket price, excuse me, and the quantity of tickets that will be offered. But I think a step in the right direction of a federation stepping in and saying, we want this accessible to our fans.

Alex: Yeah, absolutely. Napheesa Collier makes her season debut just before All-Star weekend, dropping 24 points and picking up 10 rebounds in a Lynx win over the Seattle Storm.

Caitlin: This was second place for my favorite thing. The only reason it didn’t make first is because I didn’t get to watch it, because it was at 2 p.m. on Wednesday. I was following the box score ticker tracker on the Lynx app, being like, how’s she doing? And it did look at first like…

Alex: I think she was like one for seven to start. A little rusty.

Caitlin: Yeah. But then the game kicked in. So super excited that my prediction last week was wrong and that she came back before All-Star weekend. Cannot wait to see her on the court tomorrow night.

Alex: AUSL championship was broadcast for the first time on network TV, making it the first pro softball game to be on ABC network.

Caitlin: Yeah, super cool.

Alex: LPGA set to debut a tournament on Hawaii’s Big Island next tour season, will include a four million dollar purse with a dual pro and college format.

Caitlin: Also huge. I think you just keep seeing the LPGA expand where they’re playing, the purses they’re offering, inclusion of the different tiers and kind of levels of play and stuff like that. It’s awesome.

Alex: Wrexham women’s football club named Minnesota Aurora’s Sarah as general manager.

Caitlin: So she served as the Aurora’s president last season. And then prior to that, she actually was the chief of staff at Gotham FC for two years. So super cool to see her get that opportunity. We will miss her as Aurora fans.

Alex: Unrivaled announces it’s exploring expansion for season three.

Caitlin: Yeah. So they teased kind of, they had some events around All-Star weekend and talked about opening up the season. Miami will continue to be their home base, but potentially having up to nine road stops throughout the season, which to me, I was like, that’s like almost the whole season.

Alex: Yeah. Yeah.

Caitlin: Maybe it was nine games. We’ll see. But looking at places like San Francisco, Denver, Colorado, LA, of course. So we’d love to have you here.

Alex: We would. We would. Something that’s not on here. The Minnesota Vixen bring a football title to Minnesota. I’m so sorry, Vixen. Beating the Pittsburgh Passion, like 42 to 14, I believe it was. They stomped them. It was on ESPN2. It was great.

Caitlin: We were watching over the weekend.

Alex: First football championship in Minneapolis since 1960 something. So go Vixen.

Caitlin: Go Vixen. All right. That’s it for headlines this week. We are going to get into our league updates here, a little bit about WNBA and NWSL.

The Heritage Foundation Report and the Attack on Title IX

Caitlin: But before we get into that, Alex and I want to talk about something that we think is really important. There’s been some more headlines in the news about this particular issue as it relates to women’s sports lately, and we want to share our thoughts. A couple weeks ago, there was a report released by the right wing think tank, the Heritage Foundation, and the title of this report caught our eye, because the title read, Title IX’s Failed Experiment: Why Accommodating Sex Differences Beats Engineered Equality. And so immediately it was like, okay, I don’t know about that. We, as you probably have guessed if you’ve listened to any of our episodes, are big advocates of Title IX and all the doors that that has opened to women in sports. And it just sort of started to set off some alarm bells. So we went and did some digging.

Caitlin: I think we kind of have mentioned this in the past, but essentially Title IX took girls’ participation in sports from, you know, 300,000 to 3.4 million in about, since it’s been instated. And I think even in that first 20 years, it was like exponential growth, right? And participation in sports is so important. There’s so much data, and we’re going to talk a little bit about what kind of ladders future success and business back to participation in sport through high school at least, and for sure into college. It’s something that I know interviewers and recruiters actually will look for, that kind of experience, both for men and women, right? But you learn a certain set of skills being in an environment like that. Discipline, right? Leadership, conflict resolution, collaboration, like all the things that have to happen in a workplace have to happen on a field in order for you to be successful.

Caitlin: So if we go and look at this report, we’re not going to go too deep into the report, but we wanted to share a few things from it. The TLDR on the report is basically Title IX is bad. It is hurting men and it is making women less docile and harming fertility. That’s kind of the short version. If you really want to go read it yourself, you can. You will read things that, depending on how you feel about women, you probably will be upset by. One of the quotes that I found particularly upsetting, or disturbing to me, was quote, promoting assertive athletics formed a core element of a broader project to remake female character itself, producing a new woman who would be more aggressive, assertive, dominant, and less deferential, less graceful, and less oriented toward motherhood and traditional feminine graces. That one was hard to read. There’s a lot of talk in the report about expanding male opportunities and restoring a more humane social order. These are quotes from the report.

Alex: I don’t know where I’ve ever felt that I’ve needed my opportunities expanded as a man.

HR 28 and the Legislation Eroding Title IX

Caitlin: Yes. So all of that to say, right, this report came out and you kind of start to pull it apart and you start to realize the point of it is, hey, can we repeal or change Title IX, right? And what’s interesting is there actually has been recent legislation that is seeking to slowly erode Title IX, as legislation often is wont to do. So we started to look into that. And of course, that is primarily targeting trans youth, which is also very upsetting. And we’re going to talk about that as well.

Caitlin: So last January in 2025, there was legislation passed in the House. It’s called the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, HR 28. And from section nine of that bill, it would seek to amend Title IX to say that Title IX would require that girls only who are born biologically female are allowed to participate in girls’ sports. So it would ban trans girls and women from competing in girls and women’s sports at any federally funded schools, or any schools that receive federal funding, I should say.

Alex: And how would they enforce this, or do we want to wait to get to it?

Caitlin: No. So I think within the legislation itself, there are no boundaries or stipulations on how you determine this. What inevitably will happen without very clear boundaries on how that is determined is you are leaving it up to these schools or whomever to figure out how to do this themselves. And that is a very slippery slope that is going to lead to, and has been called out, I think rightly so, it’s going to lead to examining young girls to verify their sex. That’s invasive. It’s an invasion of privacy. It is not appropriate.

Alex: Not at all.

Caitlin: And what’s going to happen is girls, whether they are trans or not, are going to be targeted for how they look or how they perform. Right? Because some of the thinking behind this is that a trans girl or trans woman is going to automatically outperform a cis girl or woman because they have higher testosterone and they were born a man. So not only are we discriminating against trans girls and women, but we’re also discriminating against cis girls and women who may have higher testosterone levels, who may look more muscular. This is inevitably and disproportionately going to affect women of color. Black women are going to get targeted for this.

Alex: Well, I think, I mean, hitting off on that, can we go to the first quote from the report? Can I read that? Because that perfectly proves your point, I think. The opening quote here is, in 2024, a Tunisian man defeated a Chinese woman for the Olympic women’s boxing gold medal, which is completely false. The Tunisian boxer who won this match is a woman. She is not transgender. She has a disorder where she has a higher amount of testosterone. And so this is exactly the type of thing that you just called out.

Caitlin: Yeah. So again, targeting of girls and women who are biologically female, as well as excluding those kids or people who don’t feel comfortable in the body that they were born in. The other thing with this piece of legislation from January is that it really opens the door for people, often men, in positions of power, whether they be doctors, trainers, coaches, to, like I said before, potentially violate privacy, right? And we have proof that that happens.

Alex: Yeah, we do.

Caitlin: Larry Nassar ring bells for anybody? If you’re listening, he was found guilty of, I don’t even know how many, counts of sexual abuse of the U.S. Women’s Gymnastics Team and at Michigan State, I think it was. Again, a person who’s supposed to be trusted, somebody who these young girls were supposed to be able to go to when they had something that was bothering them physically that prevented them from competing or practicing, and he abused that power. And there are more than just one Larry Nassar.

Caitlin: So in addition to this proposal that was passed last year, there was also a federal ban upheld by the Supreme Court just in June of this year. So basically, the Supreme Court ruled that they’re going to punt it back to the states. And if states have bans against trans girls and women in sport, then they can do that. Which is, I’m sure, heartbreaking for the trans community and for people who just believe inclusion is important.

Sophie Cunningham’s Comments and “Protect Them From Who?”

Caitlin: And then very recently, pulling us to just last week, last couple of weeks I should say, Sophie Cunningham of the Indiana Fever repeats some talking points that we hear often around trans girls and women being involved in sports, positioning her stance as a women’s sports advocate as a reason to exclude this group of people. In an interview with ESPN’s Hallie Grossman, she said, quote, I got a lot of negative feedback about me hating trans. And I’m like, I never once said that. I think I’m here to extend love. But I also think that with love is truth, being honest, and I want to protect young girls in locker rooms, or young girls in sport, who shouldn’t have to go against biological men.

Caitlin: She has since doubled down on these comments. And we’re going to go into the next part of this, is talking about, protect them from who. But I do want to point out that to me, it’s very disturbing, the placement of, I want to protect young girls from men, in relation to trans girls and women. That is a mischaracterization. It’s also meant to instill fear. And if we want to talk about protecting young girls from men, we should be talking about protecting them from coaches. The people who are in positions of power.

Caitlin: So I know you’re going to, I just want to, as we move forward, they keep kind of, the right wing, the Heritage Foundation, whoever you want to say, keeps kind of pointing to protecting young girls. And our question is, protect them from who?

Alex: Yeah. I think it’s interesting because it’s very easy for the very quick connection of, well, anyone who’s not thinking too critically will say, yeah, I don’t want a man inside the women’s locker room, but they’re not thinking about the whole of it, which we’ll get into in the stats.

The Actual Numbers on Trans Athletes in High School and College Sports

Alex: And so I pulled out the data, the best I could, on the actual amount of trans athletes in high school and college sports. So total athletes, non-trans athletes, just total athletes in high school. This comes from the NFHS 24-25 survey. There were 8,266,244 total athletes. There is no survey or count of high school trans athletes. The estimates they have are anywhere from the low single digits to maybe the low hundreds. So even at the low hundreds, you’re looking at, moving on to college, there’s approximately five hundred and ten thousand college athletes, and according to testimony from the president of the NCAA in 2023, he said there were fewer than ten trans athletes, which is point zero zero two percent, or one in fifty one thousand.

Caitlin: So our point first in this is the number of athletes who we’re talking about protecting the young girls from is very much few and far between. I would also argue that, and we’ll get into this, but these kids get bullied and stigmatized enough. They are not going to go around causing trouble. They just want to participate in a way that makes them feel good about themselves.

Alex: Right? Exactly.

Caitlin: So when we talk about this, I think it gets blown out of proportion, that there are trans athletes everywhere.

Alex: There’s thousands of them just being trans in order to do the thing, to win or to take advantage of women in women’s locker rooms. That’s not the case here.

Caitlin: Let’s talk about who does take advantage of women in women’s locker rooms.

Alex: All right. So this is from SafeSport, which their data is on U.S. Olympic or Paralympic athletes, which is any Team USA swimming club, soccer club.

Caitlin: Yeah, any of those youth clubs, all of the federations, like the foundations or whatever, that funnel in.

Alex: And so there are 11 million plus athletes. Last year, there were 9,683 allegations of misconduct by coaches in 2025 alone, or 186 per week. Now that’s everything, that’s criminal, physical, sexual. It’s a whole bunch of things, but it’s that many.

Caitlin: 186 per week.

Alex: Per week. That’s already in one week, you’re already having more allegations of abuse in some way than there are likely trans athletes in high school and college sports.

Caitlin: And we’ve talked at length about the abuse scandal in the NWSL, right? That was like a whole dark era for that league that they had to navigate through, where multiple clubs with head coaches, owners, things like that, are literally not only abusing the athletes, but then asking for their silence afterwards. That’s also horrible.

Alex: Another stat here from SafeSport: 31% of female elite or club athletes reported sexual abuse before age 18, with 41% of them saying it came from coaches or team personnel.

Bullying, Stigma, and What Protecting Kids Actually Looks Like

Caitlin: So, protect them from who, right, was our question. And I think the last thing that I want to talk about in this section is the bullying and the discrimination and the stigma that people who are part of the trans community experience. If we just kind of take it back and think all LGBTQ plus folks, 36 to 39% of the youth who identify as part of that community, the broader LGBTQ community, seriously considered suicide each year. 36 to 39% of those kids consider ending their lives. Kids. 10% actually attempt. That’s one in 10 kids. So think of your child’s classroom right now and how many kids are in that classroom, and know that of the kids in that classroom who come to identify as one of these groups, they have a one in 10 chance of attempting to kill themselves because of the bullying. Now you want to talk about specifically the trans community, 46%, almost half of that community, considers it because of the bullying. So when we’re talking about language that demonizes a group of people, this is the result of that. The result is you’re not protecting kids. You are putting kids in a position where they feel like their only option is to not be here anymore.

Alex: Yeah. And these are people who just want to feel…

Caitlin: Accepted.

Alex: Normal in their body and accepted for who they are. And a lot of, like we said, kids. These are kids that just want to be accepted.

Caitlin: Right. So if it’s not clear, as a parent, if you want to protect kids, we want to protect kids. One, no, you do not get to inspect my daughter’s body to see if she is a girl or a boy or whatever. That is not okay. That’s a huge privacy violation. I never understand why that seems like an okay thing to do. It seems very odd coming from a group of people who espouse to a bunch of, my rights, my whatever, right? And I just don’t understand how you could be okay with that. Number two, let’s prosecute pedophiles.

Alex: Yeah.

Caitlin: Let’s prosecute abusers. Let’s make a space where people who are making accusations feel safe to come forward, and that they are not going to be silenced or bullied into not speaking up when they have been abused. And that all goes all the way down to kids.

Caitlin: The third one, and this one for me, going back to some of the statistics we just talked about, is just the idea of inclusion. I’ve coached kids who fall in this group. They just want to be included. They deserve the same opportunities as every other kid, to learn all of those skills. And just because you might not feel comfortable with how they choose to express themselves, that is not a reason to exclude them. Think of your kid sitting by themselves at lunchtime, at snack time, and they don’t have this big cloud hanging over them that these trans kids do. It’s devastating.

Alex: Yeah, I was going to say the same thing. Think of your kid. That is also somebody’s kid. That is a person. Think about when you were a kid and felt excluded, and to think that it’s okay to do it because they are different than you.

Caitlin: And then we’ve talked a little bit about this, but sports creates such an opportunity to build community, build leadership skills. We talked about all of the different skills that can apply to work. I mean, it goes without saying, I think we’ve shared the statistic before, but 94% of women in C-level positions played sport at at least a varsity level in high school and over half of them in college. And so if you remove these opportunities from women, and even from trans girls and women, you are removing an opportunity for them to have high levels of success, beyond whether or not they would go that direction. It doesn’t matter. You’re removing the opportunity.

Megan Rapinoe Draws the Line From the Report to the Broader Attacks

Caitlin: So wrapping this up, I want to bring it back to the Heritage Foundation report in the women’s sports community. This time, we’re going to talk about Megan Rapinoe, former U.S. Women’s National Team star, longtime, very outspoken LGBTQ advocate. She was on The View this week, and she talked about how these attacks and the discrimination against the trans community is a direct line to that Title IX report that the Heritage Foundation put out. She’s like, you can draw the line between the two, right? We’re going to come after you because you don’t look a certain way. You don’t look the way I think you should look. Who’s deciding that? Okay, now we’re just going to come after all of you, right? How long before we’re pulling back opportunity for the games that we love to watch, that our girls love to watch, the opportunities that we’ve talked about that our girls will have? Because we are okay with starting small and demonizing a small population. And now we’re going to expand to a larger group.

Alex: Yeah. And I think it’s really interesting because if you demonize the trans community and you have something in place to try to restrict them from playing, it’s not just affecting them. And I don’t know if you said this towards the beginning, but it immediately affects all women. All women who want to play sports, all women growing up that want to play sports. And it’s exactly the type of thing that we see these types of people do, is they make it difficult for one group, which makes it difficult for the larger group, which then does exactly what they want this to do. Women doing sports, women getting into powerful positions. And it is exactly what they want.

Caitlin: It’s about control.

Alex: It’s about control. They want to go after this one group. And by extension, it means they get to control this other group.

Caitlin: Yep. So we wanted to talk about that. Really important to us as parents, and really important to us as fans of women’s sports and frankly, fans of women.

Alex: Yeah. In general, just like women.

Caitlin: Anybody. Right. And it’s heartbreaking, but at the same time, it feels really important to speak up on these kinds of things in particular, because like you just said, it goes fast.

Alex: Yeah, right.

WAFCON in Morocco: Nigeria Defending, NWSL Stars Playing

Caitlin: So all right, we are going to move on to talk about some soccer.

Alex: Soccer time.

Caitlin: Yes. So let’s start off talking about the Women’s African Football Cup of Nations. This is the qualifying tournament for the teams from Africa to get into the World Cup. It’s also just their big tournament to crown the queens of Africa or whatever. So it’s on right now. It runs through August 16th. 16 teams from the Confederation of African Football, or CAF is commonly how we refer to it, up from 12 last time they did this tournament. There are World Cup spots on the line in this tournament, as well as the two intercontinental or inter-confederation playoff spots. We’re going to clear all this up for you today. We felt like we needed a reboot on qualifying.

Caitlin: Nigeria are the defending champions, and then Cabo Verde, after their men’s success in the World Cup, their women’s team is in for the first time, along with Malawi, which is the home of the great Temwa Chawinga.

Alex: Oh, that’s right. That’s right.

Caitlin: Morocco is hosting the tournament for the third time. So that’s kind of cool. And we just have a little list here of kind of who we’re watching. So there are 11 NWSL players playing for seven different nations. Five of the 11 are on the Washington Spirit. We need all of these players from Africa. This is where the talent is, for sure. So I mentioned Temwa Chawinga of Malawi, Barbra Banda of Zambia. So the two Golden Boot, you know, top of the list for Golden Boot in NWSL. A player that I have loved watching so far this season is Rosemonde Kouassi of the Washington Spirit. She’s from Ivory Coast, or Cote d’Ivoire, and then Gift Monday, also on Washington, plays for that Nigerian team that won last year.

Caitlin: So one thing that has been a little bit disappointing is I think it’s been hard for fans to watch this. Both obviously the timing here is difficult, but I also think the access is not very good too. So if you’re looking to watch, I can’t really give you a recommendation.

Alex: Do a Google search, maybe do a YouTube, get one of those sketchy streams somewhere.

2027 Women’s World Cup Qualifying Explained

Caitlin: Okay. So with that, we are in our kind of final stretch leading up to the Women’s World Cup next year in Brazil. And so we wanted to do a little bit of a gut check on, where are we at with qualifiers? What do we have left to do? Who’s in, who’s not in yet that, you know, you’re kind of like, oops, are you going to get in? So let’s go through the qualified teams. You want to take us through this list?

Alex: Yeah, so qualified out of the AFC, Australia.

Caitlin: That’s the Asian Football Confederation.

Alex: Yes. The People’s Republic of China.

Caitlin: Good job.

Alex: Japan, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the Korea Republic, two different things there. Philippines. And then that’s CONMEBOL, Argentina and Colombia.

Caitlin: And Brazil.

Alex: And Brazil, yes. The host.

Caitlin: Yes, the host. They get it.

Alex: OFC has New Zealand. Good for them. UEFA has Denmark, France, Germany, and Spain. Right now we just talked about CAF. And then Concacaf will be…

Caitlin: Which is the U.S., Mexico, Canada. Right. So there are still, I think, let me do my math here quick. Four, four, eight. There’s like 15 additional slots still to fill. 18, actually, because there’s three that come out of the playoff. So we’ll go through the teams that have left to qualify, but it’s important to note that each of these confederations, there are one or two additional teams from them that go play in this inter-confederation playoff, which will happen at the end of the year.

Caitlin: So the AFC, so Asia, right, will have two teams that will go to that. CONMEBOL will have two teams. Oceania, which is New Zealand, is their qualifier right now, will have one. UEFA will have one. CAF will have two and Concacaf will have two. And so what will happen is these ten teams are going to go play in a tournament, right? And essentially the top three teams from that tournament then will be the final qualifiers for the World Cup.

Caitlin: So notable teams that have not yet qualified. So from CAF, right, we have four slots that are going to get filled from this tournament that’s going on right now. So you’re looking at like Nigeria, Zambia, Malawi, Senegal has been playing really well lately, right? Will Morocco get in? Who knows? So they’re going to fill four slots.

Caitlin: Concacaf will happen in the fall. We know that that’s kind of happening end of November, early December. That’s going to be four slots from this group. You know, looking for the U.S., Mexico. Will Canada qualify? Are they allowed? Part of me is like, are they even allowed to qualify? Because they had the whole cheating thing.

Alex: Oh, yeah.

Caitlin: I don’t remember. Costa Rica, Jamaica. Jamaica is the home of Khadija “Bunny” Shaw, who signed that huge deal with Manchester City. So we’ll see what happens there.

Caitlin: And then, UEFA, you guys, is so complicated. So the four teams that have qualified already were the winners of the League A group play. So what they did in UEFA is they take the teams based off of their ranking within UEFA and they break them into three leagues. There’s League A, League B, League C. And it’s literally like top 16 teams go in League A, the next 16 go in League B, the next 16 go in League C. Then they get broken into four pods, right? Four teams. And then you play a round robin of home and away games with each team in your pool, and the winner in League A automatically qualifies. Now what’s going to happen in the fall is, the runners up from League A will go play the winners from League C. Like there’s some…

Alex: I understood some of this.

Caitlin: So they have to do these extra layers. I won’t go into all of it. I was trying to understand it earlier today.

Alex: I feel like UEFA pulled something over on FIFA and they’re like, listen, we’ve got this great idea.

Caitlin: Look at all this. So there’s this playoff phase in October. Notable teams that have yet to qualify that will be looking to qualify in this playoff: England, last World Cup runners up, right? Sweden, perennial powerhouse, always give the U.S. national team fits. Norway, they used to be a pretty strong powerhouse, and ask anybody from the 99ers team about Norway. Italy isn’t in yet. Switzerland, I think I saw on the list. The Netherlands I don’t think have qualified yet. So that is going to be high drama and worth a watch. They do play a home and away in the playoff, so you play two games, the top ranked team gets the home game on the second leg. I don’t know why they make it so complicated.

Alex: I’m really interested in this 10 team playoff. That’s going to be…

Caitlin: That’s also going to be cool. So if you think about it, we have all of this fun stuff in the lead up. So you have CAF right now. We’re going to get into the fall. We’re going to have this UEFA playoff. You’re going to have Concacaf going on. And then you’re going to turn the corner and get into, I think it’s February, March timeframe, and they have this inter-confederation playoff. So plenty of international football on the women’s side to watch.

Alex: The U.S. doesn’t make it, I’ll be biting my nails all February or whatever that is, because I can’t deal with a playoff.

Caitlin: I would be very shocked if they lost to El Salvador in November. But never say never. I did call out a few weeks ago that, you know…

Alex: That’s why we play the games.

Caitlin: That’s why we play the games. Okay, I don’t think they’re losing that.

Alex: No, I don’t think so.

Caitlin: I was more meaning I don’t know if we should expect them to win the whole World Cup, but also they hadn’t qualified, so, fair point. Okay. So that is a little bit of an update on international. We’ll keep sprinkling in some talk about the World Cup, and we want to make sure that we’re appropriately hyping the best sporting event in all of the world.

Alex: Absolutely.

NWSL Standings: Still No Separation in the Table

Caitlin: Let’s wrap up this section, talk a little bit about NWSL.

Alex: Yeah, I’m just looking over the standings again. It’s like there’s not a lot of separation happening still. It is still wild that one through seven is 10 points apart.

Caitlin: Yeah, I got to be honest. I was looking at it and I was like, we’re starting to see separation. And then I looked at it closer and I was like, no, we’re not. Not really. So here’s what I saw. You’ve got your top five, right, are all within five points of one another. So that’s within two games. So that’s a week’s worth of play.

Alex: I literally was going to say, well, look at San Diego all the way down at four. Four points out of first.

Caitlin: Right. And Portland and San Diego have kind of dipped lately, but they’re still right there, right? And then if you look at six through 13, that’s eight teams, right? They are within two games of each other too. That’s a week of play, right? Depending on how things fall. And I think we saw from this week to last week, there are teams that, I think Bay is a good example. Like last week, I think they were in 11th and now they’re in 14th. Like what happened to you?

Caitlin: Louisville got a win over the week against the surging or streaking Angel City FC. I don’t know what happened. Somehow, I was commenting to Alex before we got on air, somehow Louisville has more goals than Chicago has scored all year. Chicago, you guys, is still in single digits for goals.

Alex: I don’t understand. 31 against you or something like that.

Caitlin: Yes. Their goal differential is minus 23. That is not how you win.

Alex: But I bet what is their record, just slightly better?

Caitlin: Yeah, it’s just slightly better. So anyways, we watched the Washington Spirit play the Denver Summit last night. That was fun. It was like a track meet for the first 15.

Alex: Yeah.

Caitlin: And then the teams kind of finally decided to settle in. Sofia Cantore’s rip. But can we talk about Trinity Rodman’s assist, the ball she played into her? Oh, my. It was beautiful. And Trinh had a lot of chances too. She still seems to be quite energetic.

Alex: Yeah, for sure.

Caitlin: So always more to watch. We are going to get to go.

Alex: Yeah, we are, Denver Summit.

Caitlin: In just under two weeks.

Alex: Yeah. They’re out in Centennial.

Caitlin: Centennial Park, which is where they’ll play until their stadium, as we mentioned before, is done. So it’s pretty cool.

WNBA All-Star Weekend: Fan Activations, Angel Reese’s Barbie, and Eight Nike Drops

Alex: We’re moving on to WNBA.

Caitlin: Let’s do it. Let’s talk All-Star.

Alex: Let’s talk about this All-Star weekend.

Caitlin: I want to open just with a little bit of marketing things, fan activations. There was a ton of fan activation over the week.

Alex: I need to know about the second one when you get there, because I did not hear about that.

Caitlin: Oh, you missed it. Okay. Well, we already mentioned record attendance. So many people. I’m sure there were a ton of people who came into Chicago that didn’t go, let alone the 19, almost 20,000 that were there. Angel Reese launched her Barbie. They made her a Barbie and she’s known as Bayou Barbie. That’s the whole thing. She had a little Barbie dream house area that people could come up and meet her. She did Barbie pink for her hair at the All-Star weekend.

Alex: This is basically just a convention for the WNBA.

Caitlin: Yeah. 100%. It’s networking. I think her signature shoe with Reebok also got kind of a Barbie colorway. And I just saw this really sweet video of her engaging with all of these young Black girls, right, and these fans who are so excited to see somebody representing them, who looks like them. And the WNBA obviously has had a ton of Black superstars, but that connection with the Barbie and the toy piece is a little bit extra. And Angel really, say what you will about Angel Reese, but she really feels strongly, or seems to really feel strongly, about the impact that she is having on the next generation, right? And who’s looking up to her, and she thinks highly of that honor that she has. So I love that.

Caitlin: And then Nike, this is just another tidbit, there’s tons of other stuff we just couldn’t get to at all. Nike dropped eight new shoes at All-Star weekend. So you want to talk about a behemoth who is like, I’m going to go do a release on this weekend because that’s how big this weekend is.

Alex: Yeah, absolutely.

Caitlin: It’s great to see. So I think A’ja got a couple new colorways of her A’One. Sab has her shoes. There were a few others. I think there were some Kobes. There was a Sue Bird vintage shoe. So that was cool to see.

Shooting Stars Replaces the Skills Competition

Caitlin: All right. Remember we talked about how we didn’t know who was going to be in the skills competition or the three-point contest last week? Well, turns out there was no skills competition. It was called Shooting Stars. Do you want to talk about that?

Alex: Yeah, I thought it was pretty interesting. What was it? They had a legend, a current player from each team, and then a high school player.

Caitlin: Past, present and future.

Alex: Yes.

Caitlin: From four different cities.

Alex: And they were shooting from, I don’t remember, was it seven total spots on the floor? Layup, then like a mid-range, all over, just basically extending out until almost mid court.

Caitlin: I think they had about a minute and 10 on the clock. And at the first six spots, each player got one chance to shoot, right? And you get points based on makes. And then once you get to the end, you could shoot as many times as you wanted from the seventh spot, which was like a logo three basically. And so you wanted to get there quick, but obviously then you want to make the shots too.

Alex: Yeah, that was fun. Washington won that one. And they took…

Caitlin: Elena Delle Donne, Shakira Austin, and what was her name? I didn’t even get the name. I saw it on the TV. But that young gal, she won it for them, didn’t she?

Alex: Did she hit the… She made the big shot. The big three at the end, yeah. So they took home 85K, and I believe that was going to a charity, was that not?

Caitlin: I don’t know if all of the winnings were going. I know the game itself, the winnings were going to a charity. But I think that the participants might have gotten some kind of prize money.

The Three-Point Contest: Azzi Fudd Wins, and the Invite Confusion

Caitlin: Okay, so three-point contest. We had put some analysis out there of who we thought might participate. We were like half right.

Alex: Yeah, we got some of them.

Caitlin: Take 50-50. I don’t even know if we were trying to be right, but they were included. So it ended up being Marina Mabrey, Bridget Carleton, Janelle Salaün, Rhyne Howard, Natisha Hiedeman, and Azzi Fudd, right? And I think of this group, I think Azzi Fudd was one of the exclusions, but we said it would make sense to include someone like her, or a Caitlin Clark I think was left off that list, because of the marketability, right?

Caitlin: Also interesting, speaking of Clark and others, there were reports issued by the WNBA that Clark, Ionescu and Kayla McBride declined invites to participate.

Alex: And Ionescu and McBride were both kind of like, well, we got a little bit of a text or something to our agent, but it wasn’t really an invite.

Caitlin: I think Sabrina’s quote was literally like, I can’t decline an invite I never received. And so I think again, it points to a lack of clarity around communication from the league and the players.

Alex: I think I said last week, I think it was probably like a text to the agent, like, are you interested? Not, hey, you’re invited.

Caitlin: Yes. Which feels different.

Alex: That feels different.

Caitlin: That frankly feels a little bit like, oh, you just want to use me. Versus, you are somebody that would be good at this.

Alex: Yeah.

Caitlin: I still like, Sab obviously has done her thing in the three-point shooting contest. We have yet to see Caitlin Clark participate in one, which seems a little bit strange given her three-point shooting proficiency. Frankly, this year, I would have understood all three of these sitting this out, even if they had gotten invited and they officially declined, right? Ionescu is just kind of coming back from injury. Clark’s been nursing the back injury thing, although then I’d say, why are you playing in the game? And then McBride has been playing a ton of minutes for the Lynx. And so I’m sure, I actually was thinking to myself, I was like, I’m sure Cheryl shut that down. She was like, no, you can’t do that. You need to go lay down somewhere.

Caitlin: So anyway, it was fun. We had some great performances though. So Bridget Carleton in the first round, I think hit 29 or 30. She just, it looked like the basket looked huge to her, right? You could tell that Natisha Hiedeman probably had been out a little too late the night before, with that live stream.

Alex: There’s a video of her seeing Cheryl somewhere and she’s like, I’m not even hungover, I’m just tired because I’m not sleeping. It’s like, you’re just, you’re hungover.

Caitlin: But then it got down, so they do all six shoot and the top two advance to the final round. And so it was Azzi Fudd against Bridget Carleton, and Carleton went first, I think she went first, and Fudd went second. Fudd went off, and I saw a quote from her afterwards that when she had torn her ACL, she got really good at just jump shot three pointers.

Alex: Wow.

Caitlin: And you could tell her rhythm was so smooth when she was doing that. It was so fun to watch. So love to see it. She ties Ionescu’s performance from last year. Ionescu still has the record of 37 out of 40 total points. She also did the whole comp with Steph the one year, which was pretty cool.

Caitlin: So for this, the winner takes 70K, which is up, I think it was up like five or 10,000 from last year. But the cool thing in my mind, second and third place last year, you got nothing. This year, runner up 40K.

Alex: There you go.

Caitlin: Third place, 25K.

Alex: That’ll help.

The All-Star Game Itself: A Record Crowd and Not Much Defense

Caitlin: All right. Let’s talk about the game.

Alex: Team Spoon won, I was right. I’m never going to doubt Cheryl.

Caitlin: Never pick against Cheryl.

Alex: That’s probably pretty fair. Yeah, Clark did come out super hot. She was throwing arms out, stealing balls.

Caitlin: Yeah, she was like, I’m out here to play. No one else got that memo.

Alex: Yeah, everyone else like, I ain’t playing.

Caitlin: I think my overall summary of it was there were a few really cool highlights, like Clark coming out and hitting a couple threes and things right off the bat, that kind of got the crowd in. But then it started to get a little weird. We did get a Dominique Malonga dunk. She becomes the seventh in history to do one in an All-Star game, which is cool. You could tell they were trying to set her up. You had Marina Mabrey go off. She’s another one where if she can get going, I think she was like five of six from three in the second quarter of that game or something. So those were fun to watch.

Caitlin: But overall, we were like, I don’t know, 10 minutes, two minutes in, I was like, this is dumb. This is boring. Like people are literally passing up layups. And I get it’s an All-Star game, but I was expecting at least a little bit more creative passing, or a little bit more defense. Defense can be fun to watch.

Alex: Yeah.

Caitlin: And fun steals and things like that. And I thought we’d see more like, let’s get Dom to dunk five times.

Alex: Yeah.

Caitlin: Maybe that’s too many. But it’s just a lot of jacking threes and I don’t know.

Alex: Yeah, it wasn’t.

Caitlin: Now, to be fair, players look like they’re having fun. And I think there’s a debate to be had about who’s All-Star weekend for. If I’m a fan watching, or I’m there and I paid money to be there, I don’t know if just watching the players have fun is what I came to see.

Alex: What did you say it was, like $300 to get in the door or something like that?

Caitlin: The get-in cost was like $343 or something.

Alex: I want to pay $343 to watch no defense and jacking threes.

Caitlin: And I think too, there are very few times that you’re going to get to see all of those players play, right? And they’re mid season, they’ve got to rest, but you don’t need to go a hundred percent. I think Caitlin Clark said this at halftime. She’s walking off with Holly Rowe, right? And she’s like, I don’t need you guys to go a hundred percent, but can we give like 60%? Like, yeah, I agree with you. Let’s try a little harder.

Caitlin: So, but again, it also is a networking weekend for the players. And I put networking in quotes because they’re partying a lot.

Alex: Yeah, networking.

Caitlin: And so I wonder how much of it also is like they are just literally so hungover.

Alex: I think next year what we need is we need a hungover All-Star team versus average Joes off the street, and specifically Joes, to show how hungover women can still whoop their asses.

Caitlin: Oh, let’s pitch it.

Alex: Let’s do it.

Caitlin: Let’s pitch it.

Jonquel Jones Wins All-Star MVP and Completes the Set

Caitlin: Okay. One person I do want to call out, Jonquel Jones of the New York Liberty. She was named All-Star MVP. She had just a lovely, so she apparently has a lot of family stuff going on, was pretty distracted. I didn’t get the whole story of it, but just had a lovely postgame press conference kind of opening up about that, really giving respect to her college coach, the woman who kind of took her in when she came up, I think from the Bahamas. And Jonquel also made history as the first player ever to be regular season MVP, Finals MVP, Commissioner’s Cup MVP, and All-Star MVP.

Alex: Yes.

Caitlin: So big ups to JJ doing her thing. Seems like a lovely human, couldn’t go to a better person.

Caitlin: So wrapping up on the game, Alex mentioned money to charity. So both teams were playing for two different organizations in the Chicago area that help keep young girls involved in sports, because it’s important. And so the winning team got 70K to go to their charity that they were sponsoring, and the losing team got 30K. So still meaningful dollars for these kinds of organizations, for both teams. But I think it was Kelsey Plum who, and she didn’t play because of her injury, but she said, you know, we’ve got to put money on the line if you want…

Alex: Yeah, for sure. Absolutely.

Caitlin: And I think I agree with KP. So we could put money on the line or we could play against the average Joes.

Alex: It might play less percent and still win.

All-Star Vibes: A’ja Wilson’s Press Conferences and the Studbudz Stream

Caitlin: All right. Wrapping up All-Star. Overall vibes. There were some…

Alex: Oh, boy. We weren’t on Threads.

Caitlin: There were some funny things. There was a lot going on, but a couple of my favorites. A’ja Wilson. A’ja Wilson is hilarious. I love her in a press conference. She’s just so real. A’ja was asked, what’s your relationship with commissioner Cathy Engelbert? She said, quote, my only relationship with Cathy is when she’s handing me awards.

Alex: What was the other one? She was there with Olivia Miles and she was like, what year were you born? She’s like 2003. And I don’t remember. She was like, oh…

Caitlin: Yeah. That’s on camera. Go look that one up too.

Caitlin: I love seeing the sisterhood of this group. They genuinely, all that we can see obviously, seem to really enjoy seeing one another, getting to let loose, getting to have fun. It seems like they feel safe, you know, the groups that hang out with one another and whatnot. And that is a really important part of sport and participating in it.

Caitlin: I also love the inspiration that these women are providing for that next generation. So we talked about Angel Reese and her Barbie. These charity organizations that the teams played for, each girl in these organizations wrote a handwritten note to a player, and I saw a video of the players reading these notes, and these girls are just talking about how, you know, it’s so cool to see somebody who plays the same position as me or looks like me, or, I want to be you when I grow up. And that really was a reminder of what this is all really about, is how are you setting that example for that next generation of girls, to want to pursue these kinds of opportunities. These women are fighting to open those doors. We’ve talked about the impact that the CBA that they just negotiated is going to have on the players who are in college right now, the players who came out this year, right? So I think that’s really cool. Maybe it’s a little messy.

Alex: It definitely is a little messy. The Studbudz stream apparently was watched by some people the entire time on Threads, and it got down to, this person was dating this person, they cheated on this person, but now these people are together. There was this whole relationship diagram that was being brought about by the Studbudz stream. This is social media stuff here.

Caitlin: Yeah, I think the moral, or the way to think about that, is these players are giving unprecedented access to their lives for a time being. And frankly, I think the women’s side, we see it a lot more than the men’s side. I would never want to judge them too harshly. I think if you saw a similar level of accessibility on the men’s side, you would probably see some mess too. Right? And so if the tea of the day is going to be relationship drama, and it’s not like domestic abuse charges…

Alex: Yeah. I just think it’s interesting because I think it highlights what we’ve talked about in the past, of, there’s a lot of new fans.

Caitlin: Yeah.

Alex: There’s a lot of new fans where this is what they’re coming from, is maybe not necessarily a sports background, but more like a pop culture background. Love Island background. So things change a little bit with the fan base.

Caitlin: That’s a good point. So we could debate whether or not the players should be allowing that level of access. I think you mentioned it almost feels like the Studbudz stream would have been better as just a one-off, like, let that be a special thing that happened last year.

Alex: Like still maybe do it, but maybe it’s an edited video that gets released later or something.

Caitlin: Helping, or PR people who are helping you out with that.

Alex: And I love Tia, loves Love Core, but…

Caitlin: Yes. Yeah, good time.

The Players Association Meets With Cathy Engelbert

Alex: Oh, the yawns are coming. We have one more thing. There was last week…

Caitlin: Oh, yes.

Alex: Players Association meeting with Cathy Engelbert.

Caitlin: How did it go?

Alex: Well, it was a video conference. I thought it was going to be in person, but it was on Tuesday. There were still games happening. They’re going to talk about a lot of things, but specifically, like we talked about, the racist and threatening messages that players are getting on social media. The quote we have from a joint statement from them was, Tuesday’s conversation underscores the importance of addressing issues early through proactive communication and strengthening the League-Union relationship. The League committed to continuing to enhance security resources and will work with the Players’ Union to explore collaborations with organizations that share the values of our League in advance of our shared priorities. Yesterday’s discussion marked the beginning of an ongoing dialogue and we are united in our commitment to building on this work together.

Alex: And I’m also kind of like…

Caitlin: This has been going on for a couple of years now.

Alex: I’ll see it when I believe it. Oh, and also you’re just now addressing issues early through proactive communication?

Caitlin: That’s what I’m, I’m glad they talked.

Alex: Just to, I mean, going to a little bit more just today, there were some rumors swirling about Cathy Engelbert might be potentially on the way out at the end of this year. And so this may be one of those too little too late type of things. At least they’re doing something about it, but it should have happened quicker probably.

Caitlin: Yeah. Again, I think we talked about this in our episode last week. I just don’t know that she’s the right leader, or we’re asking for something from that role that isn’t in her skill set necessarily for the moment that the league is in, right? She was pivotal in what has happened with the business building that happened since she was hired. I would never take that credit, of developing that strategy and being able to execute on it, away from her. At the same time, there were probably some foreseeable things related to this issue now that frankly should have been addressed sooner. I mean, to say that now is the beginning of a conversation when this has literally, in a big way, I think since 2024, that’s not okay.

Alex: Yeah, for sure.

Caitlin: That’s a bummer.

WNBA Standings: The Top Eight Hold, Washington Finds an Identity

Alex: Okay. Games start up Tuesday night. So our tomorrow. If you’re listening to this, it would have been last night.

Caitlin: Oh, last night.

Alex: Yeah. You want to take us through maybe the top?

Caitlin: Our top eight have not changed for a few weeks now. They shift around a little bit in there, but they really haven’t moved. And frankly, there’s starting to be some separation between number eight and the rest of the group. So we’ll talk a little bit about that. So going in order right now, you’ve got the Minnesota Lynx at up top. They’re two and a half games ahead of Golden State Valkyries. Then follows the Las Vegas Aces, the Dallas Wings, the Indiana Fever, who went on a little bit of a surge there before All-Star break, the Atlanta Dream, the New York Liberty and the Washington Mystics.

Alex: You were like, wait, I was watching you.

Caitlin: The Washington Mystics. And the Mystics right now are seven games back of the Lynx. So, I mean, in basketball, that’s not a big spread, right? But they’re three and a half games ahead of Portland, which is the next closest team to them. And then that spread just starts to get, it’s still kind of tight in that middle group, right? We’ve been talking about Portland, Toronto and the Sparks. But to me, this next couple of weeks for those three teams, if they want a chance of unseating the Mystics, they need some things to fall in their favor.

Alex: I’ve been really impressed with Washington.

Caitlin: Yeah, oh yeah. I mean, we’ve talked about this a couple of times, but a lot of really young talent. They also seemed, at the beginning of the season, they didn’t really have what I thought was a clear identity.

Alex: Yeah.

Caitlin: They do now. It’s called rebounding. It’s called being physical, getting bodies on players on defense. And then it’s basically, can we feed Kiki Iriafen and Sonia Citron?

Alex: Right. And don’t forget locker room antics. Have you seen some of the stuff they do in there yet? They look like they’re having a great time.

Caitlin: Right. And they’re one of those teams, we’re watching and we’re like, they’re going to be really good.

Alex: Next year.

Caitlin: Next year, the year after, for a while, right? Same thing with Seattle, same thing I think with Connecticut Sun to a degree, who are all kind of sitting at the bottom right now.

Caitlin: One bummer thing I do want to note. I saw over the weekend that Portland announced that Sarah Ashley Barker, who is kind of like an energizer off the bench for them, often can come in and hit a bunch of threes, she underwent an MRI on her knee and has torn her ACL. And I actually think that that is pretty critical for, I think she is a critical piece for them pursuing the postseason.

Alex: Yeah, sure.

Caitlin: We’ll wrap this section up by saying we are going to a game with our girls over the weekend. The Minnesota Lynx are hosting the Indiana Fever. This is literally the only game we could make it. We got to make it work with the kids. So we are very excited for that. I cannot wait to see Napheesa Collier back on the court.

Alex: It’s going to be great.

Caitlin: I don’t even think that we have given due appreciation to the fact that Phee is back. Does the league even understand?

Alex: It doesn’t feel real yet almost, right?

Caitlin: Right, because it was one game and we couldn’t watch it.

Alex: This will be the second game in two years we’ll have gone where the Fever are in town. Will we see Caitlin Clark play or not?

Caitlin: It is very possible that she is suspended because of technical fouls. She’s one tech away from the suspension. We’ll see what happens. Her and Stephanie White are having strategic conversations about it. Reportedly.

What to Watch: WNBA, NWSL, Golf, and Rugby

Alex: All right, well, let’s move it on here. Let’s look at what to watch. WNBA Friday, we’ve got the Dallas Wings versus the Washington Mystics, 6:30 p.m. on ION.

Caitlin: That’s a trap game. I just want to say it, for the Wings.

Alex: Saturday, Las Vegas Aces versus Chicago Sky, noon on CBS and Paramount+. I honestly, I think Las Vegas wins, but Chicago has been so close so many times.

Caitlin: Chicago is often up in the fourth quarter. I love Sydney Taylor. She’s playing lights out for an undrafted rookie over there, but they can never close the game.

Alex: Yeah.

Caitlin: Maybe they’ll do it this time. We would appreciate it, Chicago.

Alex: And then, of course, Sunday, Indiana Fever versus Minnesota Lynx on ABC. Look for us.

Caitlin: That might be top of the West, top of the East.

Alex: Oh, yeah.

Caitlin: Right now, we’re on top of the East, if they can maintain that going into Sunday.

Alex: All right. NWSL, Friday night, just one game. North Carolina Courage versus Orlando Pride, 7 p.m. on Prime.

Caitlin: That’s a playoff battle right there. Kind of that grouping.

Alex: Saturday, Kansas City versus Angel City, 5:30 p.m. on ION. And we try to pick one game usually per day. This was too good. Sunday, Washington Spirit versus San Diego Wave, 3 p.m. on CBS Sports, Utah Royals versus Portland Thorns, 6 p.m. on Victory+, and Denver Summit versus Boston Legacy, 8 p.m. on ESPN. Watch them all.

Caitlin: So we’re going to get home from the Lynx game and just turn it on.

Alex: Yeah, just pass out. We’ll pass out. The kids will still play. They’ll pass out in the car.

Alex: LPGA, we have the AIG Women’s Open, Thursday and Friday on USA, Saturday and Sunday on NBC. Women’s Elite Rugby is off this week. Next Saturday, the eighth, I believe the Denver Onyx play the Bay Breakers in the championship. The TC Gemini just could not pull out a win the other night and give themselves a chance.

Caitlin: So close.

Momentum and Setbacks

Alex: Momentum and setbacks.

Caitlin: Oh, no, I wasn’t ready for this.

Alex: I was.

Caitlin: Okay, you go first.

Alex: I mean, setbacks. Anything the Heritage Foundation puts out around women’s sports. And our legislatures. Oh, yeah, I could just say that the Heritage Foundation, they’re a real setback to progress in this nation.

Caitlin: Yeah. I think just in doing more of the research that we did on that segment in particular, I think I would piggyback and expand my setback to being, this attitude of exclusion is such a sad thing. I think of the event I described in my favorite things, and where leaning in with curiosity, really getting to know people, just opens up opportunity to connect and create community. And when things like this happen, when attacks on a group of people happen, like you said, it doesn’t take long for that to expand and to create this otherizing that is really, really harmful. And I hate that.

Caitlin: Momentum?

Alex: I like seeing Azzi win the three-point contest. I mean, she’s been having a great season now. She had kind of a slow start because she wasn’t starting, but then she’s kind of grown into it. And I think it was fun watching her. I also find it really fun to watch her in general. No offense, Azzi, but sometimes you look like you don’t know what’s going on. And I love it because I think it’s because that’s how I would be, like, where do I look right now?

Caitlin: Yeah, I love it. When they were like trying to corral her, she was like, I’m not sure. It’s kind of cute.

Caitlin: My, I think I was just thinking, I was like, I think I just gave my momentum away, but Phee’s back.

Alex: Yeah, some of the Lynx.

Caitlin: Let’s hope, I mean, right, I think there’s been some questions as we’ve awaited her return of, how is she going to come back, right? How will she look individually? And then how does that dynamic on the team shift, right? I think we saw in her first game back, I think Liv produced a little bit more points, but that’s okay. Inevitably, what she should provide is a lightening of the scoring burden for everybody, right? So you don’t need Natasha Howard to show up big every night, which is what it felt like for the first half. You don’t need Kayla McBride to be putting up 30 points.

Alex: Right. And if she’s not scoring, she’s at least pulling defense away.

Caitlin: Yeah.

Alex: Her gravity is huge.

Caitlin: She also proves, I mean, we forget, she is a two way player. She plays great defense. And now you’ve got Nafeesa coming off the bench, creating some depth for them, which they desperately…

Alex: Yeah. Really needed it.

Caitlin: So anyways, in Cheryl we trust, and go Lynx.

Alex: Those Lynx. All right, Instagram, Threads, YouTube, RTG underscore pod, RTGpod.com, Substack at Raising the Game Podcast, and you can email us, raisingthegamepod@gmail.com.

Caitlin: Yeah, share, like, subscribe, comment. We love it all.

Alex: Yeah.

Caitlin: Appreciate y’all being here today.

Alex: Bye.