Fever Coach Makes Telling Statement About Caitlin Clark's Offseason Plans
With the Indiana Fever's 2025 season having come to an end with a tough WNBA Semifinals loss to the Las Vegas Aces on September 30, the team's focus now shifts to this offseason.
This is going to be the most pivotal winter in WNBA history, as the league's landscape is set to undergo a massive shift as a result of the current Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) coming to an end later this month. With a new CBA on the horizon, every WNBA veteran made their contracts expire after the 2025 season so that they could sign a new deal with this CBA in mind, given that it's expected to drastically increase their salaries.
However, the Fever have other things on their mind in addition to free agents. The most notable is how they can ensure that superstar guard Caitlin Clark stays healthy and ready to compete once the 2026 season rolls around, given that 2025 was essentially a lost year for No. 22 because she only played in 13 games due to injury.
Much was made last winter about Clark's decision not to compete in the Unrivaled 3x3 women's basketball league's inaugural season alongside her WNBA peers in Miami, Florida, last offseason, and instead elected to remain in Indianapolis to build strength and sharpen her skillset with the Fever coaching staff.
In hindsight, this decision didn't work out, given that Clark's various soft tissue injuries suggest that she was overworked heading into the season. This is why there's a lot of interest in how Clark and the Fever will handle her recovery and preparation this offseason.
Stephanie White Explains Top Offseason Priorities for Caitlin Clark
The Fever are conducting exit interviews on October 2. When head coach Stephanie White took the podium, she spoke about what the main goals are for Clark this offseason.
"I think first and foremost, she builds up her endurance, her on the court activity. Making sure that she's healthy. And then, continuing to move forward in terms of mechanics, number one, and number two, basketball," White said when asked about Clark's offseason plan, per a video from the Fever's YouTube account.
"She's got to, at some point in this offseason, play five-on-five. It's going to have been a long time since she has. And so how we get that together, we'll have to see," White added of Clark. "But once she's feeling good from a movement standpoint, from a soreness standpoint, and then building back that endurance on the floor without losing some of those mechanical tweaks and mechanical improvements, then we'll start building back up.
"It's a long offseason. And she has had a long, long year, from this point. So it will be baby steps. And I think for us, again, the most important thing is that she's healthy before we really, really ramp up," White concluded.
White mentioning Clark moving forward with her mechanics is interesting, if only because Clark had a subpar shooting season when she was healthy.
But the most intriguing part of this is that White said Clark is going to have to play 5-on-5 at some point. Could that be in some external league? Or will the Fever just set up games for her in their own facility? Perhaps Clark will have an answer when she takes the podium later this morning.
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Grant Young covers Women’s Basketball, the Indiana Fever and the New York Mets for Sports Illustrated’s ‘On SI’ sites. He holds an MFA degree in creative writing from the University of San Francisco (USF), where he also graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Marketing and played on USF’s Division I baseball team for five years. However, he now prefers Angel Reese to Angels in the Outfield.
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