It’s worth noting that Sarah Ashlee Barker is not a Caitlin Clark-level player. She was a rookie during the 2025 season, coming off the bench for the Los Angeles Sparks, averaging 3.1 points per game. Still, it’s unsurprising to us rational thinkers that a professional was able to beat a guy who appeared to have no basketball skills whatsoever.
This phenomenon of men who play sports recreationally and think they’re better than professionals is not exclusive to female athletes. NBA player Brian Scalabrine, who some consider to be one of the worst NBA players of all time, took up some of his haters on the challenge of playing him one-on-one back in 2013. He absolutely dominated them. He was 35, way past his physical prime, and the guys he played were no chumps. They were young former Division 1 college basketball players, and he proved just how large the disparity between the pros and college basketball is.
Many viewers of the Sarah Ashlee Barker video argued that this matchup was not even close. He didn’t even appear to be a YMCA hooper. He was just some random guy talking down about WNBA players online. Commenters argued that if she played against a Division I male college basketball player, or even an advanced rec league player, he would’ve won. These kinds of hypotheticals are constantly swirling around conversations about female athletes. Even if they beat a man in a real matchup, dudes always ponder the question of who would beat her in a hypothetical matchup that was slightly different.
This kind of debate goes back to the most famous “Battle of the Sexes” in 1973. A 29-year-old tennis player, Billie Jean King, was challenged by a 55-year-old tennis player named Bobby Riggs. He proposed that female tennis players were inferior and that even at his advanced age (for an athlete), he could beat any of the top female players. He lost. Some argue that what Billie Jean King did wasn’t as remarkable as the public response to it would lead you to believe, because she was at her top physical prime, and Riggs clearly was not. That argument fails to consider that King was not the only female player that Riggs played in 1973. A few months before playing King, Riggs beat Margaret Court, the world's number one female tennis player at the time.
The reason we don’t see many top female athletes playing in matchups like “Battle of the Sexes” is because hypotheticals like, “Could a high school boys basketball team beat a WNBA team?” are rarely asked in good faith. When games between professional women and amateur men take place, fans use them as opportunities to degrade female athletes and undervalue their skills. Take, for example, when a team of boys under 15 beat the US Women’s National Team in a friendly scrimmage in 2017. The women were preparing for an international competition and were not giving it their all. Misogynistic fans take that as proof that teenage boys are far superior to these women, leaving out the context that this game was friendly and these women were just trying to have some wholesome fun.
Maybe it’s true that a Division 1 male college basketball player could beat A’ja Wilson in a one-on-one. The reason top WNBA players like her don’t put this hypothetical to the test is not that they’re insecure about their own skillsets or are afraid of healthy competition. They just know that games like this are rarely interpreted by so-called “fans” in good faith. They know that if they lose or win, it doesn’t matter; their accomplishments and victories will be discredited in some way. They know people who wax poetic about WNBA players' hypothetical matchups against men don’t care if they’ve won MVP four times or have won three WNBA championships in four years. They wouldn’t be obsessed with these hypotheticals if they actually respected the athletes in the WNBA.
These players know that if they lose to even one dude in an exhibition game that has no bearing on their professional athletic career whatsoever, it makes conditions for professional female athletes even worse. Every online conversation about WNBA players negotiating for better working conditions and higher pay will be littered with responses about how they lost to XYZ male players, and therefore don’t deserve to make good money for putting their bodies on the line for the entertainment of millions.
Professional female athletes should also be able to casually play the game they love for fun without worrying about whether they win or lose. It’s unfair that they have to carry the burden of having society disvalue their athletic skill and labor simply because they lost a silly, goofy, non-professional game. We live in a world where far too many people see female athletes as either delicate creatures who are far too weak to ever compete against any man in any context or figures that solely serve the purpose of inspiring their daughters to play sports at school. While it’s easy to laugh at YMCA guys who think they’re better than professional female athletes, it’s important to examine the YMCA guy within us all.
