Hours before the start of Monday’s WNBA Draft, OutKick founder Clay Travis announced that his outlet has been denied credentials for the event, which is set to take place at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York.
Travis seemingly implied that the credentials were denied after his outlet had asked whether men should be able to play women’s basketball in the leadup to the women’s Final Four and national championship game.
Earlier this month, OutKick’s Dan Zaksheske generated headlines when he used the press conferences prior to the women’s national championship game as a platform to ask South Carolina head coach Dawn Staley and Iowa’s Lisa Bluder about transgender women’s inclusion in sports.
“Damn, you got deep on me, didn’t you? I’m on the opinion of, if you’re a woman, you should play,” Staley said. “If you consider yourself a woman and you want to play sports or vice versa, you should be able to play. That’s my opinion.”
When Zaksheske followed up and asked broadly if “transgender women should be able to participate in college basketball,” Staley answered resoundingly, “Yes.”
Zaksheske was also said to have asked multiple beat writers about South Carolina’s national anthem policy — whether they were usually out on the court pregame or not — during his time in Cleveland for the Final Four. He wrote about this credential rejection at OutKick Monday, including the following paragraph under a header of “The media doesn’t want to lose access to Caitlin Clark, other star female athletes”:
This is the easiest one to prove. After OutKick asked Staley about transgender athletes, the WNBA refused to give us a media credential for Monday night’s draft. The WNBA claims we missed its deadline by less than one day and simply does not have room in a 3000 person venue for even one more journalist. You can decide if that sounds credible.
So, if you ask about biological men playing women’s sports during one of the biggest weekends in American women’s sports history, you don’t get to cover the sport anymore.
With or without OutKick in attendance, all eyes in Brooklyn and across the nation will be on Iowa’s Caitlin Clark as the Indiana Fever holds the top spot in Monday’s WNBA Draft.
[Clay Travis on X]
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.