Episode notes
The WNBA is facing massive backlash for their failure to protect Caitlin Clark from repeated targeting…
Clark has been publicly silent about the targeting, but former WNBA player Candice Wiggins spoke out publicly about the toxic culture of the WNBA in 2017 to The San Diego Union Tribune…
Candice Wiggins had what many would consider a dream career in the WNBA.
She was the No. 3 overall draft pick out of Stanford in 2008. She was named the league’s Sixth Woman of the Year as a rookie. She won a championship with the Minnesota Lynx.
The success, Wiggins says now, hid a darker reality.
“It wasn’t like my dreams came true in the WNBA. It was quite the opposite,” said Wiggins, the former La Jolla Country Day star who is being inducted into the San Diego Hall of Champions’ Breitbard Hall of Fame on Tuesday.
For the first time in an extensive interview, Wiggins described what she said was a “very, very harmful” culture in the WNBA – one in which she contends she was bullied throughout her eight-year career. She also described the discouragement she felt being a part of a “survival league” that she said still struggles for attention and legitimacy after 20 seasons in existence.
Wiggins, who turned 30 on Feb. 14, abruptly announced her retirement last March while considering a contract extension from the New York Liberty – her fourth WNBA team.
“I wanted to play two more seasons of WNBA, but the experience didn’t lend itself to my mental state,” Wiggins said. “It was a depressing state in the WNBA. It’s not watched. Our value is diminished. It can be quite hard. I didn’t like the culture inside the WNBA, and without revealing too much, it was toxic for me. … My spirit was being broken.”
Wiggins, a four-time All-American at Stanford, asserts she was targeted for harassment from the time she was drafted by Minnesota because she is heterosexual and a nationally popular figure, of whom many other players were jealous.
“Me being heterosexual and straight, and being vocal in my identity as a straight woman was huge,” Wiggins said. “I would say 98 percent of the women in the WNBA are gay women. It was a conformist type of place. There was a whole different set of rules they (the other players) could apply.
“There was a lot of jealousy and competition, and we’re all fighting for crumbs,” Wiggins said. “The way I looked, the way I played – those things contributed to the tension.
“People were deliberately trying to hurt me all of the time. I had never been called the B-word so many times in my life than I was in my rookie season. I’d never been thrown to the ground so much. The message was: ‘We want you to know we don’t like you.’ “