Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese and Paige Bueckers already making presence felt for US national team

BERLIN (AP) — Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese and Paige Bueckers are going to be the next generation of players to lead the U.S. women’s national team. They’re already making their presence felt in their first major international competition.

Clark and Bueckers each scored 14 points in the opening win over China on Friday while Reese had nine rebounds and played strong defense on 7-foot-3 Zhang Ziyu. Next up is Italy on Saturday.

The blueprint for the American success over the past three decades, which has seen eight straight Olympic gold medals and four consecutive World Cup titles, has been to build rosters with experienced veterans mixed with the next set of young stars. That way they'll be ready when their names are called.

“I think it’s all cyclical,” said Sue Bird, the first managing director of the national team. “You know, I think if you go back, it’s always kind of been that the amount of vets versus newcomers — if you wanted to like categorize it that way — does fluctuate and move through time. This cycle of players is younger, but obviously (Kelsey) Plum and A’ja (Wilson) would have tipped the scale the other way if they had played.”

Bird said there’s always been that passing of the torch. She played her first World Cup in 2002 and was a backup to Dawn Staley. By the 2006 tournament, she was leading the U.S. — a spot she held alongside Diana Taurasi until both retired from international play a few years ago.

Now it's Breanna Stewart and Wilson, who is missing this tournament for health reasons, as the veteran leaders. Eventually it will be Clark, Reese and Bueckers. For now, they are part of the second-youngest World Cup team the Americans have fielded, with an average age of just under 27 years old, over the past three decades. They are just a little bit older than the 1994 team that won bronze.

“We can kind of rely on each other, lean on each other,” Reese said of her young teammates. “This is our first big national event, so being able to play with each other, learn each other and go through these learning process together, it’s fun."

Many of them had played together on younger U.S. teams and had success, but playing for the senior team has a different feel to it.

Stewart made her national team debut in the 2014 World Cup. She was still in college then. Now 32, she's the leader of this squad.

“This is just kind of like the rite of passage,” Stewart said. “You continue to keep showing up and it becomes your turn. You got Paige, Angel and Caitlin who played on teams when they were younger and they keep coming back. So when it's their time this shift isn't as dramatic. They are faces that are known throughout the program.”

One thing that's new to that trio, who are each 24, is coming off the bench. All understand the importance of the roll.

“We were talking about it on the bus: Like, none of us have ever come off the bench before. So it’s our first time kind of seeing it from a different perspective,” Reese said. “Seeing how the game is played and then being able to go in and already know what’s going on. I think that that’s a different perspective for me.”

Reese said coach Kara Lawson has talked to the group, which also includes Aliyah Boston, Sonia Citron and Kiki Iriafen, and explained that the key is to not have there be any letup when they come in.

“There's no drop-off,” Reese said. “I think our young and turnt group is going to be around for a while.”

The young players, who are competitors in the WNBA, already are starting to form a chemistry with one another on the U.S. team.

“Obviously it’s really fun to play with Paige,” Clark said after practice. “I’ve grown up playing against her, and with her, from a very young age. Very fun experience to be here, I think she’s one of the best off-ball players in the league. She cuts really well, she has a great feel for the game. I think our chemistry has been really good. Just gaining more and more momentum through that as we go through the tournament.”

See AP’s full WNBA coverage here

China's Han Xu guards United States' Angel Reese during the Women's Basketball World Cup match between China and the United States in Berlin, Friday, Sept. 4, 2026. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)

China's Li Yuan guards United States' Caitlin Clark during the Women's Basketball World Cup match between China and the United States in Berlin, Friday, Sept. 4, 2026. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)

China's Chen Yujie guards United States' Paige Bueckers during the Women's Basketball World Cup match between China and the United States in Berlin, Friday, Sept. 4, 2026. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)

United States' Aliyah Boston, left, and Angel Reese guard China's Zhang Ziyu during the Women's Basketball World Cup match between China and the United States in Berlin, Friday, Sept. 4, 2026. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)

United States' Caitlin Clark shoots a free throw during the Women's Basketball World Cup match between China and the United States in Berlin, Friday, Sept. 4, 2026. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)

NEW YORK (AP) — Robin Morgan, a wholesome child star of the 1940s and ‘50s who grew up to become an all-American radical as a poet, essayist, editor and second-wave feminist, has died. She was 85.

Morgan's death was confirmed Saturday by the Women's Media Center, an organization she cofounded with Jane Fonda and the celebrated author and activist Gloria Steinem, who died Wednesday.

During the 1960s and ’70s, Morgan embodied and inspired historic changes in how women lived and thought. As she was happy to point out, the onetime “Ideal American Girl” and adored “Little Robin Morgan” was a rule breaker and justice seeker with a notable list of achievements, along with a prison record and an FBI file.

Women's Media Center President Julie Burton called Morgan “one of the architects of the contemporary women’s movement,” hailing her writing and “global leadership for justice and equality." The statement didn't specify the location, date or cause of Morgan's death.

Morgan was at the center of the some of the defining moments of what came to be called second-wave feminism, expanding upon the achievements of the suffragists a half-century earlier. In 1968, she was among the organizers of the first protest against the Miss America pageant, joining fellow activists in tossing their bras (soon mythologized as burning) into a “Freedom Trash Can.” The 1970 essay anthology she edited, “Sisterhood is Powerful,” is considered one of the essential texts of the modern women’s movement.

Her legacy was one of deeds, words and images. Morgan is widely credited with coining the term “herstory,” the feminist reworking of “history,” and popularizing the clenched fist/female symbol icon of the liberation movement. Her poem “Monster,” with such lines as “I want a women’s revolution like a lover/I lust for it,” was quoted at feminist rallies and beyond. Her poem “Arraignment” helped capture the movement’s embrace of the late Sylvia Plath and condemnation of her husband, poet Ted Hughes, whom Morgan and others blamed for Plath’s suicide in 1963. Morgan’s rhyming couplet “I accuse/Ted Hughes” inspired the title for Sonic Youth’s “J’Accuse Ted Hughes.”

Labeled an “anarchist housewife” in one government report, Morgan confronted the establishment, left and right. In 1970, she and fellow protesters were arrested and jailed after occupying the offices of the avant-garde Grove Press, whose owner, Barney Rosset, was fighting employees’ efforts to unionize. In the widely reprinted 1970 essay “Goodbye to All That,” she called out activists and libertines from Abbie Hoffman and Hugh Hefner to Dave Dellinger and the music group the Fugs.

"Goodbye to the male-dominated peace movement, where sweet old Uncle Dave can say with impunity to a woman on the staff of Liberation magazine, The trouble with you is you’re an aggressive woman,” she wrote.

“Goodbye to the idea that Hugh Hefner is groovy ’cause he lets Conspirators come to parties at the Playboy Mansion — goodbye to Hefner’s dream of a ripe old age. Goodbye to Tuli and the Fugs and all the boys in the front room — who always knew they hated the women they loved. Goodbye to the notion that good ol’ Abbie is any different from any other up-and-coming movie star who ditches the first wife and kids, good enough for the old days but awkward once you’re Making It.”

In her personal life, Morgan had male and female lovers and was married for more than 20 years to the gay poet Kenneth Pitchford, with whom she had a son, the musician, activist and record company executive Blake Morgan. She once described her marriage as a “two member commune” and was so resistant to labels that she remembered being “straight-baited” by feminists who thought she should be a lesbian and chastised by conservatives who assumed she was a lesbian.

In her 2001 memoir “Saturday’s Child,” she expressed joy and amazement at how her life turned out and how she was able to retain “a threadbare, somewhat surreal sense of humor.”

“Put that in your apple pie and smoke it,” she wrote.

Besides “Saturday’s Child,” she completed more than 20 books, including “The Word of a Woman: Feminists Dispatches,” and the poetry collections “Monster” and “Dark Matter.” She followed “Sisterhood is Powerful” with “Sisterhood is Global” (in 1984), and “Sisterhood is Forever” (2002), featuring such contributors as Gloria Steinem, Simone de Beauvoir and Eve Ensler. For several years, she was editor-in-chief of Ms. Magazine.

Steinem would call her an ideal “utility player,” gifted in almost every way a protest movement might require. As an organizer, she helped found such 1960s feminist groups as New York Radical Women and Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell (W.I.T.C.H.). She was part of the Youth International Party, the left-wing “Yippies” led by Hoffman and Jerry Rubin among others, but soon became disgusted with how the group treated women and left.

In 1984, she was a founder of an early feminist think tank, the Sisterhood Is Global Institute. In 2005, she, Steinem and Jane Fonda launched the Women’s Media Center, which has a mission to support “the visibility, viability and decision-making power of women and girls in media.”

More recently, she hosted a syndicated radio show and remained active despite being diagnosed with Parkinson’s, which inspired several poems and a TEDWomen talk in 2015.

In a different era, she might have been just another forgotten child star. Born in 1941 in Lake Worth, Florida, and raised in New York, she never saw her father while growing up and was told — falsely — by her mother that he was dead. Her mother also shaved a year off her age, claiming she was born in 1942, to make her early public career seem even more impressive.

The blonde, talented Robin was modeling by age 3, hosted her own “Little Robin Morgan” radio show at age 5 and around the same time was featured on the radio (later television) game show, “Juvenile Jury.” From 1949-57, she appeared in the hit TV domestic comedy series “Mama” and made appearances on “Robert Montgomery Presents,” “Kraft Theater” and other shows.

She would meet some of the era’s biggest stars, from Abbott and Costello to Sal Mineo, and was popular enough to inspire such commercial tie-ins as Robin Morgan dolls. Magazines described her as “unspoiled” and “courteous” and “the ideal girl-next-door,” immune from “violent outbursts of antagonism against established society.”

But off camera, and sometimes on, she was so apart from her image that her first “serious” childhood poem began: “Go, rage, winter the world with despair.” During one broadcast of “Juvenile Jury” the question was whether a boy deserved to be spanked. Morgan was supposed to joke that he should wear padding under his pants, but instead declared that all physical punishment was wrong.

As she recalled in “Saturday’s Child,” producer Dan Ehrenreich squeezed her shoulder so hard that Morgan could feel his fingernails. He turned her microphone away and eventually placed his hand over her mouth.

“I realized that I loved and respected that child who fought back in what was the first political act I recall ever daring to make,” Morgan wrote.

Once in her late teens, she began taking classes at Columbia University, attended poetry workshops and became politically active. She marched for civil rights and ending the Vietnam War and met protesters, artists and such poets as W.H. Auden and Anthony Hecht, who gave her a man’s eye view of the creative process, “But, my dear, women should be poems, not write them.”

In 1962, she met Pitchford at a Manhattan party. Once the other guests (“boozy bikers” and “stoned, hallucinating Joffrey dancers”) had left and the host urged to go with them, Pitchford lit candles, put Dvorak’s “New World” symphony on the record player and became her “First.” They later walked for hours and ended up on a downtown park bench.

“You have such an air of possibility about you, Robin” he told her. “It makes me believe anything can happen.”

FILE - Robin Morgan, 5, who presides over a 15-minute network canned-music show every Saturday morning, poses for a photo in New York on Aug. 8, 1947. (AP Photo/Robert Kradin, File)

Robin Morgan, a child television actor, poses for a photo in New York on April 24, 1954. (AP Photo/Bob Wands)

FILE - Robin Morgan, left, and Jane Fonda attend the Women's Media Center's 21st anniversary Women's Media Awards at Tribeca Rooftop, March 5, 2026, in New York. (Photo by Andy Kropa/Invision/AP, File)

FILE - Women's rights activist Robin Morgan attends a Women's Liberation conference in New York on May 28, 1970. (AP Photo/Ed Ford, File)