Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese aren’t the only women’s basketball players getting more scrutiny over their play and security. Paige Bueckers, the presumptive No. 1 pick of the 2025 WNBA Draft (and possible future Washington Mystics guard?) recently received a protective order from an alleged online stalker.
The 2024 WNBA season has seen a lot of increased attention by fans who otherwise wouldn’t be followers of the league, or perhaps women’s basketball in general. With Indiana Fever rookie guard Caitlin Clark and Chicago Sky forward Angel Reese now in the WNBA, more people are tuning in. All of that’s great. But that also means that the league will also have to start handling more drama around fans and other social media followers who take things too far.
This WNBA season, the Washington Mystics have stayed under the radar despite the growth that many other teams experienced, at least until their recent winning stretch the last couple weeks. But Washington, the District itself, was in the center of one of these Clark-Reese rivalry spats when a Fever fan tried to confront Chicago Sky guard Chennedy Carter at the team’s hotel last June.
And now, another famous basketball player who MAY be the Mystics’ next franchise player is on the news because of a man who is charged of electronically stalking her the last several months.
According to multiple reports including ESPN and the New Canaan Advertiser, Robert Cole Parmalee, a 40-year-old man from Oregon, was charged in Connecticut state court of breach of peace, electronic stalking, and harassment to a Connecticut Huskies women’s basketball player, namely Paige Bueckers.
From reading all of these articles and even seeing some of these posts, here’s what happened.
- Parmalee allegedly direct messaged Bueckers on social media as early as last February. She reached out to UConn police about it.
- UConn administration became aware of Parmalee in June. However, law enforcement determined that the messages Parmalee sent as well as his public posts on social media networks like TikTok weren’t criminal.
- Parmalee posted some bizarre messages about Bueckers on TikTok, including fake wedding invites with him showing an engagement ring and threatening those who wanted to get in his way of getting to her.
- He FLEW to Bradley International Airport near Hartford from the west coast.
- Connecticut State Police arrested Parmalee after he was walking down a highway on an unrelated arson charge from Oregon near the airport. That arson charge is now expected to be dropped.
- I’m not a lawyer, but I wonder how someone with an outstanding warrant can be allowed to fly on a plane.
Ultimately, Parmalee will be in jail on a $100,000 bond and will be in court later this fall. In the meantime, Bueckers has a protective order against him, rightfully so.
But this article isn’t simply about the alleged “Paige Bueckers stalker.” Rather it’s on a bigger trend I’ve seen in women’s professional basketball this year. There’s a lot more coverage, which is great. But the potential security issues players face, whether it’s an angry fan over a play, or a creepy stalker, has also increased.
And though Bueckers isn’t a WNBA player yet, she will almost definitely be next year. And given today’s era of NIL deals, Bueckers now gets paid, and she has attended Mystics games at Entertainment and Sports Arena, including this year. Considering that she won’t be as big of a celebrity in the DMV like she would in Connecticut, now that we know about this alleged stalker, thank God he didn’t decide to come to ESA.
There is no one solution on how the WNBA can improve the physical security of its players. But given that Bueckers should be playing somewhere in the league in 2025, the league should start investing into more strategies and methods to minimize these things from happening in the future.
Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.