Caitlin Clark: the supernova driving women’s basketball to new heights

Caitlin Clark, the University of Iowa basketball star, became the NCAA women’s career scoring leader on Thursday night in classic Caitlin Clark fashion: pulling up from parallel to the logo at center court and launching a three-pointer that went straight through the rim. She did it barely two minutes into the game, and fittingly, her basket made the scoreline Clark 8, Michigan 6.

Related: Caitlin Clark becomes NCAA women’s basketball’s all-time scoring leader

Eventually, Clark’s teammates scored a few baskets, too. Because Clark is a completist, she only kept scoring after that. She finished with a career-high 49 points, 46% of Iowa’s total, in a 106-89 home victory over Michigan. It was the most points any Iowa player has ever scored in a game, breaking a record Clark set earlier this season.

Clark’s 3,569 career points (and counting) are the new gold standard, putting her ahead of former Washington guard Kelsey Plum, who scored 3,527. (Pete Maravich’s five-decade-old men’s Division I record of 3,667 points is not that far off.) Women’s college basketball has had so many brilliant talents down the years that the 22-year-old Clark is not universally accepted as the greatest player ever, not that sports fans ever agree on such things anyway. There are cases to be made for Connecticut’s Breanna Stewart and Southern California’s Cheryl Miller, among others. But in terms of pure offensive electricity, neither women’s nor men’s college hoops has ever seen a player quite like Clark. She is a scoring threat from virtually anywhere on the hardwood, her ability to set up her teammates with outlandish passes is almost as strong as her scoring talent, and she has been stunningly consistent over her four seasons in Iowa City.

A native of Des Moines, the state capital, Clark was a gift to the Hawkeyes when she committed to join the program in 2020. A year before her college career began, Iowa graduated the National Player of the Year in forward Megan Gustafson. Somehow, Clark has had an even more prolific career, winning the same honor last year and looking like a shoo-in to repeat this season. Clark was always a prolific scorer since averaging 27 points as a freshman in 2020-21, good enough to make the All-America team in her first year.

But it is the constant, gradual improvement in Clark’s game that has made her an all-time superstar over the past few seasons. This year she averages a career-best 33 points with her best shooting percentages yet.

Clark is the most famous college basketball player, men’s or women’s, by a wide margin. Not since Zion Williamson played at Duke in 2019-20 has the sport seen an athlete capture hearts and minds – or, more pertinently, social media feeds – like Clark has done. Williamson achieved his notoriety with highlight reels of incredible alley-oops and slam dunks, which he had been pulling off throughout his high school career. He was a national figure before he even got to college. Clark’s rise has been different; she was a top recruit herself, but her consistent theatrics over a four-year career have made her a household name.

No one player defines an entire sport, at least not since Tiger Woods rebuilt golf in his image. But Clark is front and center of a boom time for women’s college basketball. Every Iowa game is either a sellout or (in the case of away games) an occasion for a team to set its own women’s hoops attendance record. She has drawn enormous TV ratings, with audiences as large as 2m people tuning in for some Iowa games. (The most watched women’s games of this season have almost all been Clark’s). Nearly 10m viewers watched her in the national championship game of the NCAA tournament against LSU last year, a game LSU won. Clark will have another go at the title this year, with even more eyeballs watching.

Clark is the avatar for a period of rapid growth in the women’s game. She is one of several female college athletes who has built an enormous social media following and racked up a portfolio of high-profile endorsements, including Gatorade, Nike,and Goldman Sachs. Increased interest in stars like Clark has helped drive the sport to new commercial heights, as demonstrated by the NCAA women’s basketball tournament anchoring a lucrative new television deal with ESPN. (Number-crunchers determined that the tournament was worth $65m a year to the network, roughly a tripling of its former value.)

Not long from now, Clark will become the No 1 pick in the WNBA draft. She will almost certainly play her professional games with the Indiana Fever, who won the rights to the top choice in December’s draft lottery and will hope to get just a fraction of the enormous business bounce Clark has provided to a college program that now packs its arena every night. The business of Caitlin Clark is scoring the basketball with freakish efficiency, something she’s done better than any other player in NCAA history. And the business of college basketball, in general, now revolves around how many people will watch her do it on any given night.