Renee Montgomery On Opting Out of the WNBA, Social Justice, and Protesting the National Anthem
The Tight Rope
SpkerBox Media
4.9 • 605 Ratings
🗓️ 29 July 2021
⏱️ 15 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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Why did 2x WNBA Champion Renee Montgomery opt out of the 2020 season? In this throwback episode, Renee sits down with the professors to discuss why she felt called to leave basketball to focus on social justice reform.
Renee Montgomery, a native West Virginian, has completed her 11th season in the WNBA, now playing for the Atlanta Dream. She was drafted 4th overall by the Minnesota Lynx in 2009. She won National Championships with the UCONN Huskies in 2009 and professionally with the Minnesota Lynx in 2015 and 2017. In the 2018 WNBA season, she broke a WNBA League record for most 3 pointers made in a half (7).
This past WNBA season, she reached the 500 mark for 3 pointers, making her 12th on the all-time list. In addition to her WNBA basketball career, Renee has started her own non-profit (Renee Montgomery Foundation - RMF) whose mission is to provide fun experiences to youth and families and teach them life lessons through principles learned in sports. Montgomery has opted out of the 2020 WNBA Basketball season to focus on social justice reform.
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Creator/EP: Jeremy Berry
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Let me ask you a question about the context of the WMBA right now, because it seems that you are part of a cohort of a number of women who are protesting in different ways, right? You're taking time off to |
| 0:24.3 | focus on these fantastic initiatives, but many women, if not all of the players recently, just |
| 0:31.7 | walked off the court during the national anthem. Am I getting that right? You are. They walked off |
| 0:37.3 | before the anthem. Some people didn't make it You are. They walked off before the anthem. |
| 0:38.4 | Some people didn't make it all the way off the court by the time it started playing, but you're |
| 0:42.6 | correct. The players wanted to be in the locker rooms during the anthem. And so talk about that. |
| 0:47.9 | What was the decision and the thinking that went into that and was there disagreement? Was it |
| 0:52.9 | unified? You know, How would you characterize how that |
| 0:55.7 | developed? Yes, team by team based, but there's a unity there because now you see a lot of |
| 1:01.1 | teams doing it. And the idea behind it is we all have seen the chat about kneeling, is that |
| 1:06.7 | disrespectful what to do during the anthem? So there's this whole thing around the anthem now that |
| 1:11.3 | is a topic of discussion. And so the players, I guess they kind of took everything out of it and just |
| 1:16.5 | was not going to be on the court. Everyone can enjoy the anthem how you prefer to enjoy it. And then |
| 1:21.3 | let's play ball. So I think that it was a great solution in the sense that they got to make their |
| 1:25.7 | statement. They didn't want to whatever they wanted to do something during the anthem, they got to make their statement. They didn't want to, |
| 1:27.8 | whatever they wanted to do something during the anthem, they got to make their statement by |
| 1:31.1 | not being on the court. And then people that didn't want to see anything and wanted to keep |
| 1:34.8 | sports and everything different, perfect. Now the anthem just stand there and it's a clear court |
| 1:39.9 | for you. So I just love how the players in the WMBA have been just a unified unit. |
| 1:46.9 | We've been moving, even I'm outside of the bubble, and I feel very connected to the players |
| 1:51.4 | inside the bubble. So I like the continuity there. |
| 1:55.6 | Yeah, yeah. And women, women Hoopers were the first, if I'm not mistaken, to take a knee before a game before the whole Colin Kaepernick thing took off. |
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