Cloud to skip season to fight for social reform
The WNBA season is set to resume this summer during the COVID-19 pandemic. But Natasha Cloud won’t be part of it.
Cloud announced via Instagram Monday evening that she will skip the season to focus on “something bigger than myself.”
“This has been one of the toughest decisions of my career,” Cloud wrote. “But, I will be foregoing the 2020 WNBA season. There’s a lot of factors that led to this decision, but the biggest being that I am more than an athlete. I have a responsibility to myself, to my community, and to my future children to fight for something that is much bigger than myself and the game of basketball. I will instead, continue the fight on the front lines for social reform, because until black lives matter, all lives can’t matter.”
Cloud last year led the Washington Mystics to their first WNBA title. The Cardinal O’Hara All-Delco and Saint Joseph’s grad averaged a career-best 9.0 points and
5.6 assists during the regular season, upping those averages to 13.1 ppg and 6.2 apg in the playoffs. She averaged
14.4 points in the WNBA final, scoring 18 points in the Game 5 win over Connecticut to clinch the title.
The point guard is the franchise’s all-time assists leader, having played 150 regular-season games over the last five seasons.
She’s drawn just as many accolades for her work off the court, especially in the Washington D.C. community. She led a team media blackout during last season to draw attention to recent shootings near an elementary school in Northwest D.C. She won the WNBA’s Dawn Staley Community Service Award last year and has been on the front lines of protests in Philadelphia and Washington since the May 25 killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. Cloud penned an essay for the Players Tribune just after Floyd’s death, likening white silence on matters of race to “a knee on my neck.” Cloud was the 2019 Daily Times Sports Figure of the Year.
Cloud’s teammate LaToya Sanders also announced that she would skip the season, citing the decision as “what’s best for my health and family.”
The WNBA has precedent for socially conscious decisions like Cloud’s. Former UConn star and twotime Olympic gold medalist Maya Moore has put her career on hold for two seasons while working for criminal justice reform. Atlanta Dream guard Renee Montgomery announced last week that she will skip the shortened season to focus on social justice issues.