– Slam dunk. This weekend, the world’s best women’s basketball players will match up in Indianapolis for the
WNBA All-Star Game. For the league’s stars, the weekend and the hype around it is a sign of how far the sport has come and how much opportunity there is for a top player today.
But 85% of the league’s players aren’t chosen as All-Stars—and despite the growing
sponsorship opportunities in women’s sports, many players still must figure out what comes after their professional careers. Rasheeda Clark is a former WNBA player who has found excellence off the court, in a very different field: fast-food franchising.
Clark played D1 basketball at Pepperdine, played for USA Basketball, and was drafted in the WNBA’s third round in 2001 (she’d been expected to be a first-round pick, but suffered an injury her senior year). Between 2001 and 2003, she played for three WNBA teams—the Portland Fire, the Charlotte Sting, and the Connecticut Sun. Her time of play coincided with a change in fortunes
for the WNBA as teams began folding following financial restructuring of team ownership. Of those three teams, only the Connecticut Sun is still around—although Portland’s new WNBA franchise will start play in 2026
with the same name in homage to the city’s first.
Clark’s injuries—and the WNBA’s low player salaries, around $37,000 at the time, she says—ultimately led her to leave the sport. She started looking elsewhere for the satisfaction she got from basketball’s teamwork and leadership opportunities. As an athlete, she felt she was sometimes at a disadvantage breaking into the business world; while her fellow students were interning and exploring job fairs, she had been training and traveling for games. She got into retail operations, and then was chosen for PepsiCo’s
famed management training program, which helped her gain more formal experience—her business version of “training camp.”
Rasheeda Clark went from playing in the WNBA to overseeing $724 million in sales for a major Wendy’s franchisee.Courtesy of Flynn Wendy’sToday she is the president of Flynn Wendy’s, the Wendy’s segment of the largest franchisee operator in the U.S. She oversees more than 300 Wendy’s locations, almost 10,000 employees—and $724 million in annual sales. She’s one of seven presidents within the Flynn Group, which also runs franchising operations for Applebee’s, Arby’s, Panera, Pizza Hut, Planet Fitness, and Taco Bell.
Post-retirement, today’s athletes are pursuing a range of paths, from
podcasting and sports commentating, to investing and startups, to coaching and
team ownership. Players are eager for more former athletes to work in league offices, too. For Clark, that didn’t feel like an option at the time. “It was almost like I had to cleanse my system of it,” she remembers. “I would have continued to try to be on a team or go, ‘Maybe I’ll give it one more shot.’ For me, it wasn’t an option. But those are very viable avenues for current players.”
She urges corporations to recognize athletes’ unique skill sets—helping those who wish to enter new industries to make the jump as she did. Athletes have a “die-hard mindset,” she says. At the same time, they know that “no one victory is won by the individual effort of one player on the team,” she says. “You’re always collaborating, learning the roles of other players on the court in order to be successful.”
Emma Hinchliffeemma.hinchliffe@fortune.comThe Most Powerful Women Daily newsletter is Fortune’
s daily briefing for and about the women leading the business world. Today’s edition was curated by Sara Braun. Subscribe here. 
