Darianna Littlepage-Buggs started her first WNBA training camp by doing what many young players do when they walk into a league full of talent: she asked the veterans for help. Earlier this week, the Mystics rookie said on media day that she reached out to several of the younger players she had tracked closely, including Kiki Iriafen, Georgia Amoore and Lucy Olsen.
“Oh, I talked to all of them,” Littlepage-Buggs said. “I talked to Kiki and Georgia and Lucy especially.”
The conversation fits a camp in Washington that opened this week with a remarkably young roster. The Mystics invited 18 players, and 12 of them were rookies. Of the other six, four had been rookies just last year, including Sonia Citron, which left only two camp invitees with more than one season of WNBA experience: Shakira Austin, who has four years in the league, and Michaela Onyenwere, who has five.
That youth shows up everywhere in the room. Iriafen and Olsen are both 22, and Amoore is still listed as a rookie for statistical purposes after spending last season recovering from a torn ACL. The result is a camp where almost everyone is learning at the same pace, even if some of the names are fresher to the league than others.
Madison Scott captured the mood in one line: “We’re the young ones, but also the old ones at the same time, on this team.” It is a strange but workable setup for Washington, where the usual hierarchy has been blurred by numbers rather than design. In a league where experience usually shapes the first days of camp, the Mystics are starting from almost scratch.
That is what makes Littlepage-Buggs’ first move so telling. She did not wait to be handed advice; she went looking for it from players who were rookies last year and are now being asked to help anchor a camp built around inexperience. The same dynamic is showing up across the league, where a fresh group of players is trying to settle in alongside established teams such as the Las Vegas Aces, who have become a benchmark for how quickly a roster can be defined when the pieces are in place.
Washington’s challenge now is to turn that youth into structure before camp moves on to harder evaluations. For Littlepage-Buggs, the early lesson was simple: in a room this young, even the rookies are starting to sound like veterans.
