Caitlin Clark said the hardest part of coming back from injury is not the pain. It is getting past the mental hurdle of trusting her body again.
Clark said Wednesday that injuries had made her hypercautious about some movements and that she now understands her body better than she did before. She was speaking before Indiana’s game against the Los Angeles Sparks, one day after the Fever beat the Dallas Wings 87-78 in the season opener of a year that had already forced her to spend ten months dealing with injury recovery.
The back issue surfaced on Saturday, when Clark played her first WNBA game since her season was shut down in July. During that game, she went to the tunnel twice to have her back worked on and adjusted after it “gets out of line pretty quickly,” as she put it after the game. She returned and played eight more minutes against Dallas, a stretch she said gave her confidence because she got through the pain point and kept going.
That mattered because the opener was also a test of workload. Clark said she ran 4.6 miles in the game, calling it a lot of stress on the body because of the speed, contact and physicality. She said she can take confidence from how she responded, but added that it will take time before trusting her body feels natural again.
She made that point again before Wednesday’s game, saying the mental side of injury recovery is still something she is working through. Clark said she knows her body too well now and has become hypercautious about certain things after her injuries. After the opener, she said the experience showed her she can come back into a game, play through discomfort and still feel good.
Clark backed up that confidence against Los Angeles, finishing with a team-high 24 points, 4 rebounds and 9 assists in 31 minutes. She was not on a minutes restriction, and the performance gave Indiana a clearer picture of where its star guard stands physically as the season opens.
Fever coach Stephanie White said the team intends to be strategic with workloads early in the season. White said Indiana was forced to lean on heavy minutes last year because of injuries, and the team wants to handle that better this time. That plan puts Clark’s return in a broader context: Indiana is trying to protect its players while still relying on its biggest talent to carry a major load.
For Clark, the next step is not just staying on the floor. It is trusting that her body will hold up long enough for the season to unfold normally, something the injuries of the past ten months have made harder than the basketball itself.
