It was interesting recently when USA basketball pointed out that its practice is to provide berths on the Olympic team as a reward to players who've put in time with the organization, so in case you’re wondering, Caitlin Clark isn't actually guaranteed to be going to Paris this summer.
Interesting, and hilarious.
How long after that balloon was floated did USA Basketball hear from NBC and (Team USA sponsor) Nike, suggesting that it would be in everyone's best interests if they stopped saying such stupid shit?
(In the same eye-rolling vein, Rudy Gobert’s lobbying to be the flag bearer for France at the opening ceremonies of the Games suggests he considers his Q rating to be on a level with, oh, Victor Wembanyama for example, or Kylian Mbappe, a superstar in soccer, apparently very popular in France.)
How Caitlin Clark Is Re-Shaping Women's Basketball Coverage
Try to imagine being in a conversation 20 years ago and predicting that the women’s version of March Madness would attract more eyeballs than the men’s tournament, and that one of the women would be so popular that when she went pro, her games would have to be moved to larger stadiums.
Now try to imagine being in a boardroom at USA Basketball headquarters and hearing, Hey, we beat Belgium by two in the final of the Olympic qualifying tournament a few months ago, we’re cool. And we need Rhyne Howard and Jackie Young. Caitlin who?
Watching Clark’s regular season WNBA debut for the Indiana Fever provided a few more thoughts on the topic of her influence, now and in the future.
Yes, she had 10 turnovers, way too many. But not many opposing teams are going to double team Clark with players as good as Dijonai Carrington and Alyssa Thomas, and it’s on Fever coach Christie Sides to counteract those doubles.
Sides is also going to need more support for this year’s No. 1 draft pick from last year’s No. 1 draft pick, Aliyah Boston, who had four points and six rebounds against the Mohegan Sun.
And, oh yeah, Clark did score 20 points to lead her team. In her first pro game.
But the score and the stats are almost irrelevant
The Sun sold out their home opener for the first time in 21 years. The ESPN broadcast featured an artistic and memorable Gatorade commercial featuring its shiny new client. Another spot, starring Sue Bird, Sabrina Ionescu and A’ja Wilson plugging CarMax might not have put anyone in mind of Meryl Streep, but the money spends the same.
So, let’s look at the strides women’s basketball has made, to best appreciate how far it has come.
The Growth Of Women's Basketball
Probably the most important figure in the history of women’s basketball is the late Pat Summit, who engineered the rise of the University of Tennessee Lady Vols from nothing to dominance.
As a high school student, Summitt and her family had to move so she could play basketball because her hometown didn’t have a girls team.
All three of Summitt's brothers received athletic scholarships to university, but her parents paid her way to college because there were no athletic scholarships for women.
She was an All-American at the University of Tennessee at Martin, and a co-captain for the U.S. when women’s basketball debuted at the Olympics in Montreal in 1976, winning silver.
Only eight years later, she was the coach of the American team that won Olympic gold.
She was already a college coach when she played at the Olympics, and as head coach of the Lady Vols, started out making $250 per month and washed the players' uniforms herself. Those uniforms were purchased with money earned at a doughnut sale.
(Imagine suggesting to Kim Mulkey that she should polish her baking skills to support her team).
“I had to drive the van when I first started coaching,” Summitt said to Time magazine in 2009. “One time, for a road game, we actually slept in the other team's gym the night before. We had mats, we had our little sleeping bags. When I was a player at the University of Tennessee at Martin, we played at Tennessee Tech for three straight games, and we didn't wash our uniforms. We only had one set. We played because we loved the game. We didn't think anything about it.”
By the time early-onset Alzheimer’s forced her to retire at age 59 in 2012, she had won the most games ever along with eight national championships and had an annual salary of two million dollars.
Twice, the University of Tennessee asked Summitt to consider taking over its men's team.
In the mid 90s, after Geno Auriemma led his UConn Huskies to a 35-0 national championship season in 1995 and the U.S. women went undefeated to win Olympic gold in 1996, not one but two women’s professional leagues were formed.
The American Basketball League started play in the fall of ’96 and the WNBA had its first game the following June.
The ABL was at first the better league, having secured most of the players from the gold medal winning squad, and offering higher salaries, though the WNBA was backed by the NBA.
The ABL lasted just two years, falling victim to their competitor’s access to funding and NBA marketing acumen.
Back to the topic of saying stupid stuff.
A’ja Wilson, she of the national commercial appearance during the WNBA season opener, and who is the first female athlete with a sponsorship from Ruffles, also has deals with Mountain Dew and Nike, which is about to release a signature shoe in her name.
This week, Wilson said a big part of Clark’s popularity is because she’s white.
“…you can be top notch at what you are as a black woman, but yet maybe that’s something that people don’t want to see,” said the 2023 WNBA finals MVP. “They don’t see it as marketable, so it doesn’t matter how hard I work. It doesn’t matter what we all do as black women, we’re still going to be swept underneath the rug.”
Wilson did not explain how someone with her own Nike shoe, a pretty big deal, is being swept underneath the rug.
What will also be interesting is when someone says Clark is popular not because of the logo three pointers she makes, but because she has a boyfriend.
The Fever’s opening game set a record for wagering on a WNBA game, the league issued more than 170 media credentials and for the first time, teams are flying charter.
Maybe buy Caitlin Clark a bag of Ruffles.