SPECIAL FEATURE · MARK TWELVE RECOVERY
What Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese teach us about competing hard and refusing to hate.
On September 4, 2026, in Berlin, Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese walked onto the same floor wearing the same three letters across their chests. For three years, the sports media sold them to us as enemies. That night they were teammates, and Team USA beat China to open the FIBA Women’s Basketball World Cup. Clark finished with a double-double. Reese did the unglamorous work: rebounds and relentless defense.
The rivalry was always mostly a story told about them rather than by them. And two women who have each spoken openly about their Christian faith have spent three years quietly declining to play the roles they were assigned.
There is something in that worth carrying back into the rooms where recovery happens.
The competition was real. The hatred never was.
Clark and Reese have been playing against each other since AAU ball, back around eighth or ninth grade, long before Iowa, LSU, and the 2023 national championship game that turned them into a national story. Reese has said plainly that the two of them have never had a problem with one another. At LSU’s media day that fall she said, “Oh my gosh, I love Caitlin,” called her a great player and a great teammate, and floated the idea that they might suit up together someday. That was 2023. In 2026, it happened.
Clark has been just as direct. Asked why she and Reese are constantly pitted against each other, she noted that they play different positions and rarely guard one another, and described the relationship this way: “We’re not best friends, by any means, but we’re very respectful of one another.”
Both things are true at the same time. They compete ferociously. And, as Reese has put it, “there is no hate.”
Here I want to be careful, because the honest version of this story is better than the tidy one.
Neither Clark nor Reese has publicly said that faith is the reason they respect each other. I could not find a quote to that effect, and I am not going to manufacture one. What is clear is that faith is not incidental to either woman.
Clark was raised Catholic in West Des Moines and attended Catholic schools through high school. As a sophomore at Dowling Catholic, she described what she valued about the place: “We get to live our faith every day.” She is not especially vocal about it in postgame interviews where she tends to talk about her teammates and the next game, but people who have known her since childhood describe someone formed by it.
Reese is far more public. She has posted openly about being one of God’s children and has shared messages such as “As for me, I will never stop loving God.” When the criticism comes, and it comes constantly, that is where she goes.
So: two women, differently expressive, both shaped by Christian faith, who have consistently refused to hate each other in a culture that would have paid them well for the performance. I don’t think that is a coincidence. I also don’t get to prove it. What I can say is that their conduct looks like something Scripture actually asks of us, and that is worth naming out loud.
As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.
Proverbs 27:17
Notice what that proverb does not say. It does not say soft things sharpen iron. It does not say agreement sharpens iron. It says iron sharpens iron: friction, pressure, resistance, heat. The verse assumes the competition. It simply tells you what the competition is for.
Clark is a better player because Reese exists. Reese is a better player because Clark exists. Neither of them arrived here by being handled gently. That is a very different picture of conflict than most of us carry around.
Three things.
1. The story people tell about you is not who you are. Reese has talked about how the culture insists on casting a good girl and a bad girl, and how she decided she could live with being the villain if the game grew because of it. Almost everyone who walks into recovery has been handed a role by somebody: the screw-up, the disappointment, the one who ruined Christmas. Some of those labels were assigned by people who genuinely love them. Most are not accurate. None are permanent. You are not obligated to become the character your family, your town, or your own worst season wrote for you.
2. Resentment is optional, even when the offense is real. Reese has spoken about the ugliness she has absorbed from parts of Clark’s fanbase, including racism, and has said she does not believe Clark stands behind any of it. That is a hard distinction to hold when you are the one taking the hits. She held it anyway. In recovery, we talk about resentment constantly, because it is the thing most likely to take a person out. What she modeled is the discipline of refusing to hand the wrong person the bill.
3. You will need people who push you. Recovery is not a solo sport. The people who help most are rarely the ones who tell you what you want to hear. A good sponsor, a good coach, a good brother or sister in Christ is iron, and iron is uncomfortable by design. If everyone in your circle agrees with you about everything, you are not being sharpened. You are being flattered.
It is not from a game between them. It is from March of this year, when both women were wearing USA across the chest against Spain. Clark took a hard foul driving the lane and went down. Reese, the supposed archenemy, walked over and helped her up off the floor.
Nothing about that required a press conference or a statement. It required two people who had never actually been enemies to keep being who they were when the uniform changed.
Recovery works the same way. The person sitting next to you at the meeting may have been your competition, your supplier, your ex, or the one you have spent years blaming. Put the same jersey on both of you and something else becomes possible.
Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these.
Mark 12:31
Not the neighbor you would have picked. The one who happens to be on the floor next to you.
Team USA opened against China on Friday. Clark and Reese were on the same bench, in the same colors, chasing the same thing. Caitlin scored 14 points, had 11 assists, and had zero turnovers. Angel had five points, nine rebounds (five offensive), a block, and +18 plus-minus. Team USA won 94-61.
Somewhere between 2023 and now, without ever staging a reconciliation, these two women of faith quietly demonstrated something a lot of us are still working on: you can compete against someone with everything you have and still refuse to hate them.
That is worth more than a trophy. And it is available to every one of us, today, in whatever room we walk into next.
Kelsey Dallas, “How faith shaped Caitlin Clark’s rise to fame,” Deseret News / Yahoo Sports (April 5, 2024) · Andrew Holleran, “Angel Reese Isn’t Shy About Where She Stands On Religion,” The Spun / Yahoo Sports (July 30, 2025) · Chris Cwik, Yahoo Sports, Team USA vs. China, 2026 FIBA Women’s Basketball World Cup (September 4, 2026) · CBS Sports (October 2023; “Unapologetically Angel” podcast coverage) · Sports Illustrated / TIME Athlete of the Year interview coverage (December 2024) · Yahoo Sports, Team USA vs. Spain (March 2026).
Mark Twelve Recovery Foundation provides Christian recovery coaching. Recovery coaching is not counseling, therapy, medical care, or clinical treatment, and nothing here should be read as clinical advice or as a substitute for care from a licensed professional. If you are in crisis, call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline) or dial 911.