Before Caitlin Clark was the darling of the basketball world, she was just a child following her dreams. In 2024, Clark and her family shared one of her childhood videos where she was pretending to be a professional athlete. Her mom became the announcer as the family even simulated the cheers of the crowd that she would later hear in Iowa and Indiana. Years later, she has engraved herself in basketball history by pushing the game forward. Now Clark and the Fever side reveal that eureka moment where they fell in love with the game.

“Growing up, I played just about every sport. Soccer, basketball, I ran track, I did golf, I did tennis, I did softball,” Clark said in a new social media post from the franchise. “There’s probably more, but I played a lot of sports growing up.”

While Clark played multiple sports, soccer stood out. Clark starred for her high school varsity soccer team for two years before zoning her focus in on basketball for her final two years at Dowling Catholic High School. She made varsity as a freshman and excelled as she scored 23 goals during her freshman season and was named first-team all-state in basketball. It was the second prominent sport for Clark.

It has shaped her basketball game as well.

“I give soccer a lot of credit, just angles and understanding how to pass to your teammates, how to pass on the move, how to pass where they’re gonna be, not where they are,” she revealed last year.

But she discovered basketball right in her driveway.

“Anything that had to be competitive with my brothers, especially in the driveway, was always ending in tears,” Caitlin Clark further said. “There were a lot of neighborhood boys that would come over and play knockout, three-on-three, or five-on-five with us in the driveway. Somebody would end up getting hurt. Somebody would end up crying. But they were also really fun too.”

Those games ultimately fueled Clark’s competitiveness, flowering later in her high school career. And the rest, as they say, is history. Much like Clark, Sophie Cunningham also revealed that she was a multisport athlete as a child.

“I did golf, volleyball, swimming, soccer, gymnastics, softball, and a little bit of baseball,” Cunningham said. 

Cunningham was athletic from a young age, earning a black belt in taekwondo at just six years old. At Rock Bridge High School in Columbia, she competed in basketball and volleyball and even made history as the first female to score points for the school’s football team.

As Cunningham and Clark migrated from other sports to basketball, Kelsey Mitchell’s story was the same. She “tried every sport” as a kid, but it was her father who diverted her early into basketball. 

“My dad. He introduced me to basketball as a whole,” Kelsey Mitchell said. “My brothers played it first, and I just kind of followed their lead. One day after Saturday — you know how the Saturday basketball games go—we played basketball on Saturdays, and I just fell in love with it.”

But it’s one thing to fall in love and another to dive in and try to make it professionally.

Aliyah Boston had to make the decision quite early. Boston was born in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, and first got interested in basketball around age 9 after watching her older sister Alexis play.

At the age of 13, she decided to leave everything behind and travel with her sister to Massachusetts before joining the Worcester Academy a year later. But the moment when she realized she could make it was years later after this move. 

“I first realized I could do this profession, I’d say when I was in the eighth grade. When I moved to the States and got into my first AAU tournament, college coaches started recruiting me,” Boston said. “That was mind-blowing to me.”

Every Fever player has had a different journey. Each has experienced their own ups and downs, which have helped them become the player they are today. For Caitlin Clark, it started with driveway battles with anyone who would play.

For Boston, it was a leap of faith away from home. For Cunningham and Mitchell, it was family and competition. Different beginnings, but all eventually led to the same place, Indiana.