Who Gets Celebrated
Candace Parker was inducted Saturday night into the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame in Knoxville, joined by Elena Delle Donne, Amaya Valdemoro and Isabelle Fijalkowski; coaches Cheryl Reeve and Kim Muhl; television analyst Doris Burke; and posthumous veteran honoree Barbara Kennedy-Dixon. The ceremony wrapped elite achievement in the language of honor, but the machinery underneath stayed the same: a hierarchy that sorts a few names into immortality while the rest keep grinding through the system that made the spectacle possible.
Parker’s basketball journey started when she led Tennessee to two national championships, then continued in the WNBA, where she won three titles and two MVP awards. She also helped the U.S. win two Olympic gold medals. Those are the credentials that get polished into legend, the kind of résumé that institutions love to parade when they want to make domination look like inspiration.
The Ladder They Climbed
While accepting the honor, Parker said she had brothers who were eight and 11 years older than her and spent her life trying to do whatever they did. “Whenever I struggled when I was young, my mom would whisper ‘can do’ to me,” Parker said, referring to her nickname. “It reminded me to push the doubt away. I was a little girl who dared to dream. I whispered that to myself whenever I was scared. “Nobody creates in a vacuum. They have influences. We are our ancestor’s wildest dreams.”
That quote lands differently in a room built to crown individual greatness. Parker’s words point back to family, memory and inheritance, while the Hall of Fame format turns collective struggle into a trophy case. Chamique Holdsclaw, another Lady Vols legend who presented Parker at the induction, said, “She knocked down every bar set in front of her,” and “She changed the way the game looks. She brought creativity, skill and athletic ability.”
Parker is the 11th player and 17th person with Tennessee ties to be enshrined. Later this summer, Parker and Delle Donne will be inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts. The honors keep stacking, each one another layer of institutional approval for careers built inside leagues, colleges and national teams that demand obedience to their own structures.
The Institutions Behind the Shine
Delle Donne originally committed to play her college basketball at UConn but chose instead to stay close to her Wilmington home at the University of Delaware. She was a three-time Colonial Athletic Conference Player of the Year. She was the No. 2 pick in the 2013 WNBA draft. Delle Donne was a two-time WNBA MVP and was part of an Olympic gold medal-winning team.
Widely regarded as one of the most accomplished international players, Valdemoro made her mark in the WNBA. The native of Spain was part of the Houston Comets’ run of three straight titles. She also excelled in the EuroLeague. Fijalkowski was born in France and played college basketball at the University of Colorado. She played in the WNBA’s first two seasons for Cleveland. She became the French national team’s career scoring leader with 2,562 points.
The coaches and analysts were folded into the same ceremony of prestige. The head coach and executive since 2010 with the WNBA’s Minnesota Lynx, Reeve has won the league’s Coach of the Year honor four times and Executive of the Year twice. Reeve has led the Lynx to four WNBA titles. She was an assistant coach on two gold medal-winning Olympic teams before leading the U.S. to gold in 2024 as the head coach. Reeve took a break from the busy WNBA season to come to the induction ceremony. Her team plays at Dallas on Sunday.
After 37 years, Muhl announced his retirement as head women’s basketball coach at Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He won 1,108 games. Burke began working as a television analyst for Big East men’s basketball in the early 1990s. By 2017, she was a full-time NBA analyst for ESPN. Kennedy-Dixon, who died in 2018, was a player and longtime administrator at Clemson.
The ceremony offered a clean, polished version of basketball history: awards, titles, national teams, and the institutions that collect the labor of athletes and coaches and then hand back recognition on their own terms. The people at the top get plaques. The structure that sorted them there keeps running.