Dearica Hamby was ejected for a flagrant foul against the Indiana Fever this week. What happened after the game was worse than anything that happened during it.
The Sparks forward shared a racist message she received in her DMs following the ejection, and it is the kind of note that people in her position get every single time a game involving Caitlin Clark ends with a physical play. Hamby is far from the first WNBA player to be targeted this way. She just decided to make the message public.
Good for her. Sunlight is the only real response.
The context matters. The foul was a hard one, but it was a basketball foul. Officials reviewed it, made their call, and the game moved on. What did not move on was the wave of harassment that hit Hamby’s phone in the hours afterward. Some of it was garden variety trolling. Some of it was, by any honest description, racist abuse.
This is a pattern the WNBA has watched play out for two seasons now. Physical play involving Clark becomes a national story. Opposing players get flooded with hateful messages. The league puts out a statement about safety and dignity. Nothing structural changes. The cycle repeats the next time there is a hard foul.
Hamby is one of the best players in the world at her position. She does not need to justify her presence on a basketball court and she does not need permission to compete hard. That she is spending a portion of her energy on this instead of on scouting the next opponent is the actual cost of what the league is allowing to happen in its comment sections.
The Fever, to their credit, have said the right things when their own players have been targeted. Their front office understands that this problem is bigger than any one player or franchise. What the league office has not done is put real infrastructure around it. Blocking a few accounts on X is not a policy.
The players’ union has been raising this for a year. The response from the league has been measured, which is a polite way of saying insufficient. Real steps would include actual partnerships with platforms to identify and report abuse in real time, mental health resources that go beyond a hotline, and a public commitment that harassment of players will be treated as a business problem, not a PR one.
None of that changes what Hamby had to open on her phone this week. But it might change what the next player has to deal with the next time this happens, which will be soon.
Hamby stood up and named it. The rest of us should have the decency to keep the story alive past 48 hours.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
