“Hosting this event during WNBA All-Star Weekend was about more than celebration—it was a statement,” Barry said. “Athletes like Caitlin Clark are redefining what strength, focus, and resilience look like.”
Clark opened up about how she prioritizes both her physical and mental health while navigating a high-pressure profession in the public eye. “Obviously I love playing basketball, but it can be stressful having so many eyes on you all the time, and during the season, you’re just going game to game to game,” she said. That’s why she makes sure to enjoy some restorative downtime with her teammates during their travels, even if that’s just going on an evening walk or finding a restaurant to try. Her other favorite way to unwind when she has time: playing golf, which she’s eager to get back to post-injuries. “This is the first time I haven’t felt like a young body that can run around and sprint every day and just continue to do that,” she said. “Being a professional athlete, you really have to take care of both your body and your mind—it’s been a journey learning about that.”
That’s included regularly opening up to a professional about how she’s feeling. “We have a sports psychologist on our staff who I sometimes meet with multiple times a week, to not only talk about basketball but other things in life, and that’s something that’s been important to me over the course of my career,” she says. “I don’t just talk about things that stress me out but also the joys in my life, and that’s always a good reminder and reset for me.” She’s also grown to understand the importance of turning to family, friends, her coach, and her teammates for support. “When you have an athlete or role model you look up to, it’s easy to see them as always happy and living a glamorous life, but it’s not always like that,” she said. “We go through difficult things too, and being able to lean on people and tell them your frustrations or that you’re not OK is really important.” Another mental-health outlet: Clark has a longtime pre-game ritual of journaling. “It makes me really intentional about what I want to accomplish and is a good reset if I’m feeling nervous or anxious about the game, to kind of wipe that away,” she said.
Saturday’s event—which featured healthy snacks, a skills-and-drills session with a professional coach, Pop-A-Shot, and custom “99” T-shirt-making—also included a fireside chat between two other big names in sports whose lives have been impacted by breast cancer: ESPN SportsCenter anchor and breast-cancer survivor Hannah Storm and Juju Watkins, University of Southern California guard, who lost her grandmother to breast cancer in 2019. “It’s so important for women to take the time to put themselves and their health first,” Watkins said. She recalled a time when a girl came to one of her games with a poster with two check boxes on it: beat cancer, and meet Juju. “She saw me as an inspiration in some way, but I was like, ‘You’re literally a superhero standing in front of me.’ This topic is so personal to me because of my story with my grandmother. It’s so important to spread the word and the message that even though you can’t necessarily prevent cancer, you can get ahead of it.” Storm added some of her own perspective as a recent cancer survivor. “If you find your cancer early—which happened to me last year—you can have up to a 99 percent survival rate. That’s why it’s really, really important to do that testing,” she said.
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