LOS ANGELES -- Ten months after suffering season-ending injuries, Indiana Fever star Caitlin Clark is still overcoming the mental aspect of making a comeback.
"I think the hardest part of injury is something I'm still really battling and almost struggling with is just the mental hump of getting over everything," Clark said Wednesday in her pregame media availability before the Fever played the Los Angeles Sparks.
"I understand my body too well to a point now," she said, "and it's something I wasn't in touch enough with before my injuries. And now I understand it very well. You just become hypercautious about certain things."
Entering Wednesday, Clark has played just one WNBA game since her season was shut down in July. That was Indiana's season-opening loss to the Dallas Wings on Saturday, during which Clark went to the tunnel twice to get her back worked on and "adjusted."
After the game, Clark said that her back "gets out of line pretty quickly" and that her trips off the bench were to "get my back put back in place a little bit."
She returned and played eight more minutes.
"That moment where my back tightened up, I think I almost got confidence from that because I came back in and I played eight more minutes, so I felt great," Clark said Wednesday. "It's something I can take confidence from. But it's going to take me a little bit to really get over the mental hurdle of trusting my body."
Indiana coach Stephanie White said it's not uncommon for young players to not know the proper mechanics of their bodies, and sometimes they don't get exposed until they suffer a different injury. White said it was going to be an ongoing thing for Clark, as well as the other players on the Fever's roster.
At shootaround Wednesday morning, White said she is always trying to figure out how to manage Clark's workload and the team's.
"In a perfect world, you have a pretty consistent rotation and nobody's playing heavy, heavy minutes. So we'll be really strategic with everybody early in the season," White said. "We were, unfortunately, in a situation where people had to play heavy minutes last year because of our injuries. And we'd like to be better about managing those through the course of the regular season."
White said Clark would not be under a minutes restriction against the Sparks.
In the game against Dallas, Clark played 30 minutes -- her first 30-minute game since last season.
"I ran 4.6 miles in that game on Saturday, so it's a lot of stress on somebody's body and just the face and the physicality of it too," Clark said. "So that's something I will continue to get used to, but I feel really good."