Caitlin Clark’s “Welcome to the WNBA” moment is not what you’d expect

Caitlin Clark, appearing on the New Heights Podcast with Jason and Travis Kelce, revealed her “Welcome to the WNBA” moment.

The Indiana Fever star shared that she ruptured her eardrum in a game against the New York Liberty after running into a hard pick.

“Somebody set a screen on me, and I hit my ear just perfect on the girl where my ear dropped and ruptured,” Clark said. “I knew it right away because I had done it before. It hurt so bad.

The moment that Clark is referring to took place on June 2nd against the New York Liberty. Previously, in an interview on 60 Minutes, she shared that the injury occurred when she ran into Jonquel Jones, the Liberty superstar who later ended up winning Finals MVP.

“It was a really good screen for JJ,” Clark said then. “She’s a tremendous player, but I think that just speaks to the physicality of the league that she got me in the right spot.”

On New Heights, Clark also revealed that it wasn’t her first time suffering that injury. She previously ruptured her eardrum in a “very Midwestern way” — getting launched off a tube in the middle of a lake.

“It’s not really much you can do — it takes months to heal, and after the season, the doctor had to go back in and look to see if it closed,” Clark shared. “Lucky enough, it closed, so I was fine.”

Clark shared that in her case, she was able to avoid surgery, but that the injury impacted her for a few weeks.

“You have to be careful about getting water in there, you can’t go in lakes or pools. It’s weird,” she said. “Sometimes it’ll bleeds when it pops, but mine didn’t, thankfully. It’s just really annoying — your hearing is really off for a few weeks.”

Clark initially declined to share details about what took place, per Matthew Byrne.

“I don’t wanna explain it — it’d probably be pretty gross,” she said on June 7th. “But no, I feel fine. I can’t hear great out of one of my ears.”

The ensuing game was one of Clark’s worst as a pro — she scored just 3 points on 1-10 shooting.

Sue Blauch, the Associate Vice President of WNBA Referee Performance and Development, told SB Nation that legislating screening is one of the league’s biggest points of internal discussion.

“Because we’re offensively driven, and we have so many screens in our games, we’re constantly making sure that we’re balancing the defenders being able to defend, as well as the offensive players being able to do what they want to do without being illegally impeded, that sort of thing,” Blauch said. “We look at those play types and look to hone in for our training, for our points of education going forward.”

Sans a few injuries, it was an excellent rookie season for Caitlin Clark, who led the Indiana Fever to their first playoff berth since 2016 and was named to the All-WNBA First Team. Clark averaged 19.2 points, 8.4 assists, and 5.7 rebounds per game en route to a near-unanimous Rookie of the Year campaign.