The WNBA is fiercely aggressive, however the Atlanta Dream Cheyenne Parker-Tice Imagine {that a} victory for one participant could be a victory for your complete girls’s basketball crew — and that one participant is altering the sport proper now.
“It is a pivotal second for girls’s sports activities,” stated the 6-foot-4 ahead, who’s in her ninth season within the league. us weekly Solely whereas selling her crew with Honeypot. “Caitlin Clark She got here in and had this impression…she made historical past in girls’s sports activities and he or she introduced all these new followers along with her. Now could be like the start of a brand new period.
Clark is already making waves within the WNBA after being drafted as a first-round decide by the Indiana Fever in April after a record-breaking school profession at Iowa. The 22-year-old defender turned First rookie in history to score a triple-double Final month, she broke down with a fever Team assist record Solely performed 20 video games in a single season.
As well as, Clark has helped introduce extra viewers and followers to the world of ladies’s basketball. Her crew’s NCAA championship recreation towards South Carolina marked the primary time in historical past that the ladies’s closing drew a bigger tv viewers than the boys’s closing.
“The impression she’s had is unbelievable,” stated Parker-Tyus, 31. us. “We needed to change venues for this woman so all her followers may match into the health club. It has been superb to see the expansion and acceptance.
Cheyenne Parker-Tice and daughter
Courtesy of Atlanta DreamThe Goals’ recreation towards the Fanatics on August 26 was moved to State Farm Enviornment, dwelling of the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks, to accommodate the massive crowd Clark attracted.
However Parker-Tice stated that is only the start.
“For gamers like her, it is only a matter of time earlier than they arrive round. Now we’ve got sufficient room for extra of them,” she stated. “So long as folks see her greatness and actually imagine in her, there’s room for extra Caitlin Clarks.”
Whereas 2024 is a 12 months of exponential progress for girls’s basketball and ladies’s sports activities, Parker-Tice believes change has been a very long time coming. When she was drafted by the Chicago Sky in 2015, she stated folks on the road in downtown Chicago did not even know what the Sky was, not to mention who the gamers have been. Practically a decade later, she sees many optimistic adjustments.
“I am all the time dedicated to serving to construct the model of ladies’s basketball,” she informed us usfamous that billboards, media protection and the brand new WNBA media rights settlement will all assist put the league within the highlight. “I’m going to present a shout out to different feminine gamers and put up about them as a result of I simply need to assist.”
Along with selling her sport, Parker-Tice can also be an advocate for girls’s well being. In a first-of-its-kind collaboration with the assistance of Dream’s unique physique care accomplice The Honey Pot – the WNBA All-Star helps to interrupt the stigma related to vaginal well being, which turned an enormous deal for her after she turned pregnant extra essential.
“Going by means of childbirth fully modified my perspective and gave me an appreciation for the delivery course of and understanding my physique,” Parker-Tice informed me us. “It is a quite common factor that occurs to girls. So it is rather essential to have a wholesome vagina.
As a part of its mission to assist the well being and well-being of vaginal sufferers, The Honey Pot ensures Dream gamers have entry to any female care merchandise they could want in their very own locker rooms, along with impactful initiatives in the neighborhood.
“Once we began working collectively, the primary time we walked into the locker room, we could not imagine our eyes,” Parker-Theis stated. “It is nearly thrilling as a result of as girls, we purchase these items however we do not all the time know it is coming. So for our crew to have the ability to have that entry is a very, actually cool factor. Thrilling stuff.
