INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — Indiana Fever All-Stars Aliyah Boston and Kelsey Mitchell supported coach Stephanie White on Thursday, saying they were disappointed by the boos during White's introduction at Tuesday's home game.
The comments came two days after a fiery, 2 1/2-minute monologue by White during which she defended herself after some critics contended she didn't show enough support for guard Sophie Cunningham when she took a hit across the head and neck area last weekend at Chicago. Referees upgraded the foul from a Flagrant 1 to a Flagrant 2, resulting in an ejection of Sky guard DiJonai Carrington.
“I think Steph does a great job with us,” Boston said before practice. “We love her and appreciate her and so to hear (boos), it was really annoying, honestly, and disrespectful. But for us, the main thing is the main thing, and we said we’re going to come out here and get that win.”
They did win — in resounding fashion, 106-92 over the Commissioner's Cup champion New York Liberty.
Following the game, Cunningham and three-time All-Star Caitlin Clark both backed their coach. Cunningham told reporters she had no problem with White's comments after the Sky game that she thought the refs made the right call, but that she didn't think Carrington was intentionally trying to hit Cunningham above the neck.
Carrington also wrote “WHITE PRIVILEGE” and tagged the Fever account on social media after the ejection. She has since explained she never claimed the foul was a result of white privilege.
Before Tuesday's game, White said she had not seen a replay of what happened before her postgame availability Saturday. When she did watch it later, she said called the foul “egregious.”
But the delay put White squarely in the middle of yet another controversy and Indiana Lieutenant Governor Micah Beckwith even used his social media account to call for White's firing.
Clark, Cunningham, Boston and Mitchell disagree.
“I told her to her face, I said, ‘Coach, you know this is for you,’ in terms of a sense of confidence, a sense of awareness that she's not alone,” Mitchell said, referring to Tuesday's pregame conversation. “It's like it really hurt my feelings to see her kind of have emotions in terms of not feeling valued and not feeling wanted in a place where she has to coach. At the end of the day, this is her job and she has to shows up, too, and I think people don't really realize that but it's our job to remind her.”
The boos came as a surprise to some for such an iconic figure in her basketball-rich home state.
She finished her high school career at Seeger, a school located between Indy and Purdue's campus in West Lafayette, as the state's career scoring leader in girls basketball. She led the Boilermakers to the 1998-99 national championship, was one of the original Fever players in 2000 and was an assistant coach on the Fever's 2012 WNBA title team.
The league's 2023 coach of the year returned to Indiana as head coach last season and came within one win of taking a severely injury-riddled Indiana team to the WNBA Finals.
Clark didn't like what happened, but understands because she has also been the target of boos.
“I hated that our fans booed, to be honest, and you can disagree with this and that, I get it,” Clark said Tuesday. “It's professional sports, people are going to boo. But, at the end of the day, that's our head coach and we're going to ride for her and we're always going to have her back and that's never going to tear our locker room apart.”
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