{"id":418264,"date":"2026-01-20T07:38:20","date_gmt":"2026-01-20T07:38:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/418264\/"},"modified":"2026-01-20T07:38:20","modified_gmt":"2026-01-20T07:38:20","slug":"qa-stephanie-white-on-handling-caitlin-clark-mania-broadcasting-and-the-fever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/418264\/","title":{"rendered":"Q&A: Stephanie White on handling Caitlin Clark mania, broadcasting and the Fever"},"content":{"rendered":"

Stephanie White is in the middle of one of the unique careers in professional sports. An accomplished WNBA<\/a> coach \u2014 her career record is 92-56 \u2014 she was given the on-court keys three months ago<\/a> to the Indiana Fever<\/a>, where she will coach the All-Star quartet of DeWanna Bonner<\/a>, Aliyah Boston<\/a>, Caitlin Clark<\/a> and Kelsey Mitchell<\/a>, as well as three-time WNBA champ Natasha Howard<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Away from the Fever, she is a basketball analyst for ESPN, calling men\u2019s and women\u2019s college basketball and the NBA<\/a>. She recently sat down for an extended conversation with me on the Sports Media Podcast<\/a>, where she addressed the dual roles of broadcasting and coaching the Fever.<\/p>\n

It goes without saying that Caitlin Clark isn\u2019t just an All-Star player. She\u2019s the most famous women\u2019s basketball player in America and one of the most well-known basketball players in the country, regardless of gender. How do you manage, and I don\u2019t mean this pejoratively, the circus that will be around her?<\/p>\n

I think first and foremost, she does an outstanding job of managing it all. Like, she\u2019s incredibly humble. She understands the big picture. So she views it understanding her celebrity, No. 1. But No. 2, she\u2019s a Midwest kid, a Midwest person and she is who she is. She tries to live her life in an authentic way. But she\u2019s very much Taylor Swift 2.0.<\/p>\n

So I think from my perspective, and from our staff and franchise, it\u2019s how do we help her navigate all of this? How do we help her protect her peace? Because it can be a lot. How can we be a resource for her? It\u2019s a different level now with social media and fan engagement. We want to be a resource and help protect her.<\/p>\n

She\u2019s an incredible kid. I call her a kid, but she\u2019s obviously a young woman. An incredible talent. She\u2019s an incredible human being. She works her tail off. There\u2019s a reason she is who she is in terms of a player. She\u2019s handled all of this with such grace and poise that most 23-year-olds wouldn\u2019t be able to.<\/p>\n

all in the work \ud83e\uddec pic.twitter.com\/V0mWzgtXyg<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2014 Indiana Fever (@IndianaFever) February 14, 2025<\/a><\/p>\n

What about from a coaching perspective?<\/p>\n

From a coaching perspective, keep the main thing the main thing. Help her protect her peace and then help her continue to grow on the basketball court. We let our players know sometimes you gotta minimize the noise around you and focus on what our job is. Our job is to put the best team and the best product on the floor that we\u2019re capable of doing.<\/p>\n

I give our front office and management with (COO) Amber (Cox) and (general manager) Kelly (Krauskopf) a ton of credit. They\u2019ve done an outstanding job in free agency. As coaches, we\u2019ll continue to be very transparent in our communication. We will address elephants in the room. Communication is gonna be of the utmost importance.<\/p>\n

You are coaching at the highest levels of your sport, but you\u2019ve also reached a destination job for sports broadcasters as an ESPN on-air person. How do each of the jobs help each other?<\/p>\n

I hope they help the viewer and I hope they help my teams. As coaches, oftentimes we get very tunnel-visioned in a lot of the minutia that goes on every day in our world. As a broadcaster, you get a very macro view. As coaches, we\u2019re often focused so much on what our players can\u2019t do. As a broadcaster, we\u2019re always focused on what players can do. I feel like that helps me be a better coach and hopefully helps me be a better broadcaster.<\/p>\n

How did you get into broadcasting?\u00a0<\/p>\n

I got lucky. I didn\u2019t study broadcast journalism in college. I studied aviation for two years. That\u2019s part of the reason that I went to Purdue. Then I changed to general communications. I was living in Chicago at the time (as an assistant coach for the Chicago Sky<\/a>), and a broadcaster who was calling games for the Sky, Eric Collins, gave me the name of (executives) Tim Sutton and Leon Schweir at the Big Ten Network, which was starting in Chicago. I got to talk to them and had a little audition. They said we\u2019ll give you five or six games and see how you do. Five or six games turned into 50 events that first year. I\u2019ve been doing it ever since.<\/p>\n

The Fever are now considered one of the top four teams, at least based on the oddsmakers<\/a>, to win the WNBA title. Is it realistic to say that this team is a title contender in 2025?<\/p>\n

I think on paper, certainly. Our goal was to bring in players that can complement our big three. I didn\u2019t know that we would be able to build the depth that we were able to build in Year 1.<\/p>\n

I think each player that we brought in complements what we have in a tremendous way. They understand what it takes to put a championship-caliber team together. It\u2019s our job as coaches to build chemistry quickly. We\u2019ve got to find out which groups can play best together. We\u2019ve got to find out how to make our team and each individual player as efficient as possible throughout four quarters and throughout 44 games.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve got four more games than we had a year ago in the same time frame and no Olympic break. We\u2019ve got to be able to get a rotation. Two years in Connecticut, we couldn\u2019t find a rotation. Our starters had to play heavy, heavy minutes. I think at times in fourth quarters and throughout the end of the season, you could tell that a little bit because our efficiency dipped.<\/p>\n

Here, we\u2019ve got a lot of great offensive weapons that we\u2019ve got to put in positions to be successful. But we\u2019ve got to get better on the defensive end of the floor.<\/p>\n

So do I think we can be title contenders? Absolutely. Do I think it\u2019s going to all come together right away in May? No, it\u2019s going to take time. There\u2019s always that element of luck to stay healthy and be peaking at the right time. I\u2019m incredibly excited about the players we brought that fit our locker room. They are good culture players who understand sacrificing for one another for the betterment of the team. They have championship-caliber pedigree.<\/p>\n

\"go-deeper\"\/<\/p>\n

GO DEEPER<\/p>\n

Why DeWanna Bonner chose Caitlin Clark, Indiana Fever: ‘I want to win another championship’<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

One of the things that often happens with great players is they make a jump from their rookie season to Year 2. In the WNBA, that often means getting stronger. What\u2019s realistic in terms for Caitlin from Year 1 to Year 2?<\/p>\n

She is stronger, first and foremost. She\u2019s got a lot of self-awareness. She figured out right away that I need to get stronger, I can\u2019t get knocked around as much. She\u2019s done a great job of getting in the weight room and focusing on her strength, in terms of low center of gravity, time under tension, all of those things. I think the next step is efficiency. Not so many turnovers, higher field goal percentages.<\/p>\n

I remember sitting in a press conference midway through last season and getting asked about Caitlin Clark and Indiana. I was like, guys, just relax, they\u2019re gonna figure it out. They\u2019ve gotta learn how to play together. She\u2019s thrown into this league right away and she\u2019s gonna figure it out. And she did.<\/p>\n

She\u2019s gonna see all kinds of coverages, all kinds of matchups. It\u2019s working on how to become a little bit more efficient, whether that\u2019s angles of attack, not avoiding contact, how we get by people, different cadences in dribbling, different cadences in footwork and different finishes around the rim. \u2026 For us as coaches, it\u2019s moving her off the ball a little bit more so she\u2019s not getting worn out in-game. We\u2019re challenging her on the defensive end of the floor, as well \u2014 being a better defender. As an opponent, you want to attack a good offensive player by making them play on the defensive end, putting them through the wringer. We will be creative as a staff in how we utilize her and how we utilize her talents.<\/p>\n

How do you want the Fever to play this year?<\/p>\n

I think our players play fast naturally. When you look at what Indiana did a year ago, they were tops in the league in pace and tops in the league in offense. We want to continue to build on that. We want to make sure that we have more options to share the ball, make it more difficult to guard our big three.<\/p>\n

I think Aliyah Boston probably had more space last year than she\u2019s had in her career, and I think she\u2019ll have even more this year. Kelsey Mitchell, the same. Caitlin led the league in assists, set a ton of assist records as well as some scoring records, but now she\u2019s got more options. We wanna be more versatile. Everybody\u2019s ready for our first and second action, so we gotta be patient enough to get to the third and fourth action.<\/p>\n

Where we can improve is our ability to score off of cuts with this roster. We can use a lot of off-ball screening action with the lineup that we have. I think we can force mismatches and look to attack mismatches a little bit more. We\u2019ve got a high-IQ team.<\/p>\n

The biggest challenge for this group is we\u2019ve gotta go from 11th or 12th in the defensive end of the floor to the middle of the pack. Because there are gonna be days where our shots aren\u2019t falling. There are going to be days where we\u2019re not great offensively. There are really good defensive teams and players in our league that are gonna make us uncomfortable. So we have to get to the middle of the pack on the defensive end of the floor. But I\u2019m excited about that. I\u2019m excited about the challenges that we have with our group. We got a lot of length and size and the ability to stretch the floor and shoot the ball \u2014 and we\u2019re gonna use it.<\/p>\n

(Photo of Stephanie White: Ron Hoskins \/ NBAE via Getty Images)<\/p>\n