What the LA Clippers Taught Me About Showing Up
I spent years training in ballet. Classical, disciplined, exacting work. So when the invitation came to join the NBA LA Clippers as a cheerleader and dancer, my first instinct was quiet resistance. I remember thinking, almost without apology, that this was a step down. I had performed on serious stages. I had worked with real choreography, real stakes. A basketball court felt like the wrong direction. I said yes reluctantly, and that reluctance turned out to be one of the more instructive mistakes of my career.
What I found at the Coliseum surprised me immediately. The scale alone reset my assumptions. Theaters hold a few hundred people on a good night. Arenas hold thousands. Performing in that space, even on the first timeout, even at halftime, demanded something different from me. It wasn't about technique in the way I understood technique. It was about presence. Projection without a proscenium. Energy that had to reach row 40 and still feel human to the people sitting courtside. I had never consciously worked that muscle before.
There was also something grounding about sitting on the court itself. In those days, the dancers were still positioned close to the floor during play, not tucked away in a corridor or a locker room. I watched the game from a few feet away. I could hear the sneakers on the hardwood, the coaches calling plays, the physicality of it all up close. Celebrities like Jack Nicholson were a few rows back. The whole atmosphere was charged in a way that no theater I had worked in quite matched. And I realized, slowly, that I had been confusing the word "serious" with the word "formal."
That distinction still shapes how I think about creative work today. Formal environments, meaning ones with a clear hierarchy of prestige, can make you feel like you're doing important work when you're really just doing expected work. Serious work is something else. It means full commitment, full attention, full presence, regardless of the venue. I wasn't less serious dancing at the Coliseum than I was on a Broadway stage. If anything, the unfamiliarity of the setting forced me to be more intentional, because I couldn't rely on the conventions I already knew.
I carry that lesson directly into interior design. People sometimes arrive with a fixed picture of what a "serious" home looks like. Neutral tones, a certain kind of furniture, an aesthetic borrowed from a magazine. And I understand the impulse, because I had my own version of it when I was younger. But the spaces that genuinely work, the ones clients still talk about years later, are rarely the ones that checked the expected boxes. They're the rooms where someone was brave enough to hang their son's painting above the fireplace instead of a gallery piece, or to bring in a color they actually loved instead of one that felt safe. That kind of confidence doesn't come from following a prestige hierarchy. It comes from knowing what you're actually trying to do.
Rebecca Jane Phillips is a name I've carried through all of it, from the ballet studios to the Clippers court to the design projects I take on now in Texas. And I think the thread connecting those chapters is simpler than it might look from the outside. Every time I assumed I already knew the value of something, I was usually wrong in at least one important direction. The Clippers job looked like a lateral move at best. It turned out to be a master class in scale, in presence, and in the difference between being trained and being ready.
I'm not sure I would have learned that lesson any other way. You can read about performing for thousands of people. You can study it. But until you feel it, until you're standing on a court that used to seem beneath you and realizing you have no idea how big "big" actually is, the understanding stays theoretical. Now when I'm working through a design project and a client hesitates over something unconventional, I think about that reluctant yes I gave the Clippers. Some of the best decisions start exactly that way. You can see more of how those early experiences shaped my approach on the about page, and I'm always happy to talk through a project if you want to get in touch.