Candice Wiggins had what many would consider a dream career in the WNBA.
She was the No. 3 overall draft pick out of Stanford in 2008. She was named the league’s Sixth Woman of the Year as a rookie. She won a championship with the Minnesota Lynx.
The success, Wiggins says now, hid a darker reality.
“It wasn’t like my dreams came true in the WNBA. It was quite the opposite,” said Wiggins, the former La Jolla Country Day star who is being inducted into the San Diego Hall of Champions’ Bretibard Hall of Fame on Tuesday.
For the first time in an extensive interview, Wiggins described what she said was a “very, very harmful” culture in the WNBA —one in which she contends she was bullied throughout her eight-year career. She also described the discouragement she felt being a part of a “survival league” that she said still struggles for attention and legitimacy after 20 seasons in existence.
Entering Hall, Wiggins finds peace in father’s legacy
Wiggins, who turned 30 on Feb. 14, abruptly announced her retirement last March while considering a contract extension from the New York Liberty —her fourth WNBA team.
“I wanted to play two more seasons of WNBA, but the experience didn’t lend itself to my mental state,” Wiggins said. “It was a depressing state in the WNBA. It’s not watched. Our value is diminished. It can be quite hard. I didn’t like the culture inside the WNBA, and without revealing too much, it was toxic for me. … My spirit was being broken.”
Wiggins, a four-time All-American at Stanford, asserts she was targeted for harassment from the time she was drafted by Minnesota because she is heterosexual and a nationally popular figure, of whom many other players were jealous.
“Me being heterosexual and straight, and being vocal in my identity as a straight woman was huge,” Wiggins said. “I would say 98 percent of the women in the WNBA are gay women. It was a conformist type of place. There was a whole different set of rules they (the other players) could apply.
“There was a lot of jealousy and competition, and we’re all fighting for crumbs,” Wiggins said. “The way I looked, the way I played —those things contributed to the tension.
“People were deliberately trying to hurt me all of the time. I had never been called the B-word so many times in my life than I was in my rookie season. I’d never been thrown to the ground so much. The message was: ‘We want you to know we don’t like you.’ “
There is no published data on the percentage of WNBA players who are gay. In a 10-team league that employs 120 players annually, at least 12 current and former players have come out publicly in various forms of media.
Wiggins said she was disheartened by a culture in the WNBA that encouraged women to look and act like men in the NBA.
“It comes to a point where you get compared so much to the men, you come to mirror the men,’ she said. “So many people think you have to look like a man, play like a man to get respect. I was the opposite. I was proud to be a woman, and it didn’t fit well in that culture.”
Of the league as a whole, Wiggins said, “Nobody cares about the WNBA. Viewership is minimal. Ticket sales are very low. They give away tickets and people don’t come to the game.”
The WNBA, whose teams are subsidized by the NBA, said after the 2016 season that the announced average attendance of 7,655 was its highest in five years. (Attendance peaked at 10,800 in 1998.) The league boasted of an 11-percent increase in viewership on ESPN channels in 2016 —to 224,000 per game. NBA games on ESPN in 2015-16 averaged eight times more —1.6 million viewers.
Wiggins enjoyed a strong start to her WNBA career, averaging 15.7 and 13.1 points per game, respectively, in her first two seasons. But in only the eighth game of her third year, in 2010, she suffered a torn Achilles’ tendon that knocked her out for that season.
Wiggins returned in 2011, and her Minnesota team captured its first WNBA championship, but she was limited to a backup role and averaged only 5.9 points per game.
In her eight seasons, Wiggins averaged 8.6 points per game after averaging 19.2 at Stanford.
The Achilles injury was one of eight for which Wiggins required surgery. She has attributed some of the physical breakdowns to an arduous schedule of playing in Europe in the offseason to supplement her pay in the WNBA.
The current collective bargaining agreement caps the top WNBA salaries at $143,000 per season, while the average player makes about $98,500. Players could earn five to eight times that in Europe.
Wiggins played on pro teams in Spain, Turkey, Israel and Greece, and won the Euro Cup with the Grecian team that she counts among her career highlights.
“It was incredible,” she said of her experience in Europe. “It shaped my entire world view.”
Back home, Wiggins kept on playing in the WNBA, she said, more for the people around her and the fans. She played her final three seasons for three different teams —Tulsa, Los Angeles and New York.
“There were horrible things happening to me every day, and that connection to the outside world kept me going,” she said.
Wiggins said, “I want you to understand this: There are no enemies in my life. Everyone is forgiven. At the end of the day, it made me stronger. If I had not had this experience, I wouldn’t be as tough as I am.
“I try to be really sensitive. I’m not trying to crush anyone’s dreams or aspirations, or the dreams of the WNBA. I want things to be great, but at the same time it’s important for me to be honest in my reflections.”
Wiggins said she is writing an autobiography with the working title, “The WNBA Diaries,” based on her journals as a player.
Wiggins has her sights set on a new athletic career: pro beach volleyball. She is working out with her former club coach who prepared her for volleyball at LJCD and has been mentored by current women beach players.
She aspires to play on the pro beach volleyball tour and possibly the Olympics. She touts the sport’s camaraderie and its “celebration of women and the female body as feminine, but strong and athletic.”
“I don’t know what I can accomplish in volleyball, but this is fun for me,” Wiggins said. “Volleyball has always been an outlet, and it’s something I can pursue on my own terms. It’s really the culture I’m signing up for. This is really who I am.”
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