Without Caitlin Clark, Cheryl Reeve is in a no-win situation at the Olympics. She bears some of the blame.
Reeve, a La Salle alum, is one of the most influential figures in women’s basketball. But since Clark won’t be on the Olympic team, Reeve’s crowning achievement will be greeted with indifference.
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Indiana Fever guard Caitlin Clark, left, and Minnesota Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve, who is also coaching the U.S. Olympic team.
The surest bet at the 2024 Summer Olympics is a bet against Cheryl Reeve. She won’t win. She can’t win. Put your money down now. These circumstances aren’t completely her fault, though she probably could have done more to change them, to help herself avoid this odds-on outcome. And even in the best-case scenario for her and the U.S. women’s basketball team, she will be at the mercy of those circumstances.
These Games should be the crowning moment of what has already been a glorious life in the sport for Reeve. From her childhood in South Jersey to a terrific collegiate career at La Salle, from four WNBA championships as the head coach of the Minnesota Lynx to two Olympic gold medals as an assistant, she can’t match the first-name recognition of Dawn or Geno, but her resumé testifies that she’s every bit their equal. Now she’s in charge of a team that hasn’t lost an international game since 2006, that is 70-3 all-time in Olympic competition, and that in Paris should cruise to its eighth straight gold medal.
Without Caitlin Clark.
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Cheryl Reeve coaching Team USA in an exhibition game against Tennessee on Nov. 5, 2023.
That’s Reeve’s problem. If the Americans win the tournament with ease, well, everyone knew they were going to win the tournament with ease, so why couldn’t Clark have joined them for the ride? If they struggle some and still get the gold medal, couldn’t Clark have helped? And if … God forbid … they lose … the schadenfreude from the pro-Clark partisans will be a hailstorm, on social media and everywhere else. The decision by USA Basketball’s national women’s committee to keep Clark off the roster has created this no-win situation for a coach who, for her part, doesn’t appear all that broken up about the absence of the world’s most popular basketball player.
Throughout the WNBA regular season, Reeve has reacted to every Clark-related question as if she were an Oscar-nominated actress feigning happiness and enthusiasm over the revelation that someone else had won the award. Since April, when she was available to reporters at the U.S. Olympic media summit in Manhattan, Reeve has insisted that she had minimal say-so over who ended up on the team.
Sorry, but that assertion stretches the bounds of credibility. Reeve is as respected and as accomplished as any coach in the sport, and she’s also the Lynx’s president of basketball operations. She practically built that franchise. If she wanted Clark on the roster, she could have made sure that Clark would be on the roster, and if she didn’t, Reeve would do better to articulate her defensible position than to sidestep the question altogether.
Reeve’s father was in the Air Force, and she has been coaching at the sport’s highest levels for more than 30 years, has been there as women’s basketball’s power people have fought for a bigger piece of the public’s attention and respect. It would be understandable if she believed that a rookie — any rookie, even Clark — should pay her dues and shouldn’t leapfrog a more experienced, accomplished player. Besides, it’s not as if a deserving player hasn’t been left off the U.S. roster before. Candace Parker, with two previous gold medals in her pocket, didn’t make the Olympic team in 2016, and Nneka Ogwumike wasn’t on the 2020-21 team in Tokyo, despite the fact that she already had won a WNBA championship and been the league’s MVP.
Neither of them was the headliner Clark is, though, which means that, in this case, defensible is still wrong. No, Clark’s presence wouldn’t necessarily increase the chances that the U.S. will roll through the tournament. She’d be coming off the bench, playing relatively little. But it would increase the audience for and interest in a team that has been so dominant for so long that its excellence has become expected. And boring.
“It feels like the momentum of the WNBA season could go far in that,” Reeve said recently. “Again, it’s having more eyes in general. ‘I’m a WNBA fan and watching all these games. You’re breaking for what? Oh, the Olympics. These players are going over? I’m watching. I’m going to be more invested in that as well.’ It seems inevitable that should happen for us.”
It certainly would have seemed inevitable had USA Basketball not passed up the opportunity to add Clark. Now, Reeve and the program have little to gain, everything to lose, and no real credit coming their way in Paris. Clark would have drawn casual fans and followers to the U.S. team’s games and the entire sport, just on the possibility that she might take the floor for a few minutes.
“I just know it’s a struggle every time [the committee is] making a decision,” Reeve said. “This time it’s Caitlin. Last time it was Nneka. Before that, it was Candace. The committee works so hard. I told them, ‘No matter what you do, whether it’s a Caitlin issue or not, you’ve left someone off who someone really thinks you should have brought.’ That’s a great problem for the U.S. That’s a great problem for us.”
It’s just not a great problem for the woman in charge. On Aug. 11, at Bercy Arena on the banks of the Seine, Cheryl Reeve will likely become the head coach of a gold-medal Olympic basketball team, and her achievement will be greeted with more indifference than it might have been. She and her sport said no to its brightest star. They’ll have to live with the silence.
