By Gordon Fischer

May 9, 2026

The Indiana Fever lost their season opener today, 107-104, to the Dallas Wings. Close game. Kelsey Mitchell put up 30. Arike Ogunbowale led Dallas with 22. Caitlin Clark missed a potential game-tying three at the buzzer that rimmed out. And during the same game, Clark quietly became the fastest player in WNBA history to reach 1,000 points, 250 rebounds, and 250 assists. So, you know, a lot happening in one afternoon.

But here is what stuck with me, and what I want to write about. Clark looked uncomfortable for stretches of the game. Several times she went back to the tunnel for treatment, came back out, played, went back again. This is the same player who exited the preseason home opener early with a knee scare just over a week ago. She was cleared to play today, and she did play, and she played hard, and she nearly tied it at the end. So this is not a “should she have been out there” post. The Fever’s medical and training staff are professionals. Clark is a professional. Together, they made the call.

This is something I see in nonprofit work all the time, and yet it almost never gets talked about directly. The people running your organization are going “to play hurt.” Sometimes literally! More often, figuratively. How your board and your organization handle such issues is one of the quiet tests of governance.

The “play through it” instinct

Elite athletes are wired to play through things. So are good executive directors. So are good board chairs. So are most of the people who end up in nonprofit leadership in the first place. They care, the mission is real, the stakes feel enormous, and there is always one more thing to do. Nobody volunteers to lead an Iowa nonprofit because they are looking for an easy gig.

The trouble is that “play through it” without a structure around it becomes “burn out and quit,” or worse, “burn out and stay resentful for another two years.” I have watched it happen. The ED who hasn’t taken a real vacation in three years. The board chair who is also chairing the capital campaign and also serving on the audit committee. The treasurer who is doing the bookkeeping because the part-time bookkeeper left in October and nobody got around to replacing her. They are all going back to the tunnel between possessions, and they are all telling themselves they are fine.

What the training staff is for

Here is the part I want Iowa nonprofit boards to think about. Clark has a training staff. They watched her in warmups. They watched her in the first quarter. They pulled her back when something looked off. They cleared her when she was ready. They will look at film tonight and they will be in her ear tomorrow morning. That is the job, and the job is constant.

Your nonprofit’s “training staff” is your governance structure. It is the chair checking in with the ED in a real way, not just “how are things going” at the top of the board meeting. It is the executive committee paying attention to whether the ED has used any vacation. It is the audit committee actually asking the treasurer, “is this still working for you, or do we need to hire somebody?” It is the personnel committee making sure the staff handbook has reasonable PTO and that people are taking it. It is the board having an honest annual conversation about whether the chair, the ED, and the key committee chairs are sustainable in their roles, or whether the role itself needs to be split, or whether somebody on the bench needs to start getting minutes.

None of this is glamorous, and very little of it shows up meaningfully on a 990. But it is the difference between a team that can absorb a bad night and one where a single tweaked something becomes a season-ending problem.

The governance test

So a question for your next board meeting, sometime in the next month, ideally on the agenda and not in the parking lot afterward: who on our team has been going back to the tunnel? The ED who is “fine” but has not taken a Friday off since January? The board chair who told you in March she was tired? The development director carrying two open positions on her team? Name them. Then ask the harder question: what are we, as the people who actually have authority over this, going to do about it?

That is governance. Not the policy binder, not the 990, not the strategic plan on the shared drive. The thing where the people in charge notice that a key player keeps walking back to the tunnel, and they actually do something about it before the buzzer-beater rims out.

One more thing

A close loss in May is not the end of anything. The Fever play Wednesday at the Sparks. They have a season ahead of them. Caitlin Clark just made history, in a loss, while uncomfortable, and she will be on a plane to Los Angeles in a couple of days. That is what professionals do.

What I am asking is that you treat the people running your nonprofit with the same seriousness that the Fever treats Caitlin Clark. Watch them. Build the structure around them. Pull them out when they need to come out. Put them back in when they are ready. And build a bench, like we talked about in previous posts, so that nobody on your team has to play 40 minutes a night for 44 games.

If you are on the board of an Iowa nonprofit and somebody on your team has been going back to the tunnel a little too often this year, I offer a genuine free one-hour consultation to any Iowa nonprofit. No strings, no catch, no pitch at the end.

📧 Email: gordon@gordonfischerlawfirm.com. Tell me who on your team needs a
breather, and what’s keeping them from getting one. We’ll work on it together.

######