The Caitlin Clark Phenomenon
All eyes are on college basketball’s biggest star as March Madness tips off. Is the Iowa Hawkeyes legend having a moment or leading a movement?
If I ever have kids, and I ever tell them about what it felt like to watch Caitlin Clark, I wonder if, instead of being all like, “OK, Grandma, let’s get you to bed,” they’ll gather around the proverbial campfire and listen with bated breath. I wonder if they’ll know the stories already, like they know the creases in their palm, but if they’ll listen anyway because each retelling of the legend brings up fresh insights.
They will know about her, if Clark gets her way. She’ll etch herself into history books like she’s nestled herself into the public consciousness and become a nationwide fascination: She hits gutsy game-winners and walks with a fuck-around-and-find-out oomph. She runs the Iowa Hawkeyes offense, no. 1 in the nation for three years running, like an orchestra conductor wielding a magic wand in one hand and an axe in the other. She inspires. She terrifies. She commands. She berates. Her logo shots feel like extended miracles, ripping through the air of her inevitability. Somewhere between her game-winner against Indiana last year and breaking the NCAA’s all-time scoring record, she became the biggest star in college basketball, a chart-topping phenomenon whose record-breaking feats have attracted record-breaking crowds, selling out arenas and taking the sport’s television ratings to new heights.
College basketball, for all its folklore heroes, has never seen a star like Clark. Imagine if Steph Curry cupped his ears at opposing fans to raise the decibel level of their boos after he hit a geometry-altering 3. Imagine if JJ Redick, with his villainous pageantry, somehow started winning people over. Imagine if Trae Young had an entire sport on his back. Imagine if Pete Maravich’s passing verve and stylistic influence were reincarnated in the present day. But then imagine if Maravich, whose all-time NCAA scoring record Clark broke earlier this month, could have eased the barometric pressure of life in the fishbowl with a sports psychologist instead of with alcohol. Imagine if his ambitions, outsourced from his demanding father, were his own. By the end of his college career, Pistol Pete was run ragged by the hamster wheel of consistent miracle making, sapped of the creative ingenuity that drew the world to him.
But “Ponytail Pete,” who watched Maravich highlights as a kid, still relishes setting the bar impossibly high and subverting our expectations. Let’s flash back to the night of February 15, when Clark broke the NCAA women’s all-time scoring record (previously held by Kelsey Plum). Before the game, the moment dripped with so much preordained legacy making that you almost forgot that Clark had been held scoreless in the fourth quarter of Iowa’s previous game. The giddiness of anticipation was morphing into the burden of expectation, and it was easy to wonder whether the accomplishment Clark was eight points away from would fall flat.
But Clark came out of the gates swinging, the loss to Nebraska four nights earlier evidently fresh in her mind. In the first minute of the game, she rattled off five quick points, a layup and an off-screen 3. It was Clark at her best, metabolizing failure into greatness, the showman dribbling in lockstep with the steely-eyed competitor. Everyone, including Clark’s defender, knew what she wanted to do next. It just seemed right for her to break the record with a signature logo 3. Clark carried the ball up the floor and tried stutter-stepping her opponent into giving her space. But, aware of Clark’s intentions, Michigan’s Laila Phelia stayed glued to Clark beyond 40 feet. And so Clark momentarily exercised restraint, relinquishing the ball to a teammate. “I thought about doing it a couple possessions earlier, but I was a little tired,” Clark said after the game. “I needed to catch my breath a little bit.”
Stating your intentions can be self-defeating, like handing an opponent the scouting report. But Clark has never shied away from her ambitions. She’d do what she set out to do, regardless of who tried to stop her. At the 7:47 mark of the first quarter, after racing the ball up the court in transition, Clark pulled up 35 feet away from the rim, parallel with the Mediacom logo and the hawk’s crest, and nailed the triple that made her the leading all-time scorer in women’s basketball. The inevitability of the moment, in the end, enhanced its impact. She then proceeded to drop another 41 points, finishing the game with a career-high 49. A YouTube comment on a replay of the game asks a pertinent question: “How is it possible for such an anticipated milestone to be delivered with such a grand performance?”
It wasn’t until Clark saw her number and last name, now inscribed into the spot where she took off, that she realized it was that long of a shot. “This has to be in the wrong spot,” she told Good Morning America. It wasn’t. Clark is surprising everyone, including herself.
As March Madness tips off, Iowa’s placement in the treacherous Albany 2 bracket will make Clark’s path back to the Final Four, and her pursuit of an elusive championship, even harder. My brain says there’s no way they’ll go all the way, that the road is too steep. It likely includes (1) Kansas State and 6-foot-6 Ayoka Lee, who dropped 22 points and 12 rebounds against Iowa in one of its four losses this season, and (2) either UCLA or LSU, who beat Iowa in the national championship game last year and will likely be waiting if the Hawkeyes make it past the Sweet 16. This season UCLA and LSU are no. 1 and no. 3 in rebounding rate, respectively, according to Her Hoop Stats, and either one might be too much for the Iowa frontcourt, which is headlined by 6-foot-2 Hannah Stuelke, regardless of her rapid improvement through the year. The path could be too daunting. Or by the end of the tournament, maybe it’ll all be merely another plot device in the escalating legend of Clark, before she heads to the WNBA.
Beginnings and endings have a way of blending together. As Clark prepares for her final days in a Hawkeyes uniform, we don’t know yet whether this is her genesis or her apex. Will she have the staying power of Steph or burn out like Maravich? Or will she have a respectable, modest WNBA career as a sharpshooter and reappropriate her cult legend status into a basketball podcast that gets its start at The Ringer? Will this groundswell of excitement about women’s college basketball, which currently has more cultural relevance and compelling characters than the men’s game, follow Clark into the WNBA? Is the Caitlin Clark phenomenon a movement or a moment?
On the one hand, so much had to go right, beyond her own talent and drive, for Clark to pop off. It took the right team, the right timing, the right circumstances. It took Sedona Prince’s TikToks and a reckoning about equity between the men’s and women’s tournaments. The NCAA wouldn’t even allow women to use the March Madness branding until two years ago. It took the empowerment of Iowa coaches like Lisa Bluder and Jan Jensen, who allowed Clark to grow in her own way and who’d learned the six-on-six game, the earliest iteration of women’s basketball, from their mothers and grandmothers.
On the other hand—and this is part of the reason we are so captivated by her—you get the sense that by sheer will, Clark could have found her way into our lives no matter what. She has willed herself onto a stage that couldn’t have imagined her existence before her arrival, and now she is its most important character. She doesn’t ask for attention. Her greatness demands it. Again and again, she meets moments that have been years in the making and turns them into something bigger than anyone could have imagined. She insists on herself.
There’s a moment, relayed in Wright Thompson’s definitive ESPN profile, that stands out in this regard. Clark, a devoted Catholic, privately committed to Notre Dame out of high school because of allegiance to her parents. But as the days went on, her gut told her she had to stay in her home state, that she was meant to take on the weighty task of putting Iowa’s burgeoning basketball program on the map. It was Clark going her own way, feeding the growing kernel of her self-belief, that grew into what’s now the biggest story in sports. “Caitlin, she’s just unabashedly and unapologetically who she is,” Jensen, Iowa’s associate head coach, tells The Ringer. “And so many times, women, you second-guess, ‘Should I do that? Should I do that? Do I need to do this?’”
At the same time, Jensen adds, “We’ve had conversations, she and I, over the years, and I said, ‘Hey, don’t use you being passionate as an excuse, because sometimes you’re just a poor sport.’”
Clark could lose it on referees and on her teammates, who didn’t always catch her whip-fast passes. She had a hard time trusting them over the accuracy of even her most ill-advised 30-footers. She’s intense, and she hasn’t always understood the negative aspects of emotional transference. But over time, as her range deepened, her passes got bolder, and everyone else began to share her vision of herself, her Hawkeyes, and what’s possible on a basketball court, she started to trust her teammates back. Her composure steadied. She began to understand the power of her attention, and she has never been better at leveraging it to make her team better.
Eye rolls and impassioned arm raises have morphed into a locked jaw and deep breaths. Contested logo shots have become give-and-gos. In the third quarter of her career night against Michigan, she awkwardly ambled her way through setting screens to combat the Wolverines’ box-and-one defense. After hitting the go-ahead stepback 3 in overtime against Nebraska in the Big Ten championship, rather than waving her arms in the air and rousing the crowd, she pressed her hands down, reminding her teammates to stay calm and finish smart.
After beating Nebraska, she was asked about how her maturity has improved through the years. “Oh God, 100 times better,” she replied. “To be honest, I don’t think we win those if you have freshman and sophomore Caitlin. I just was never able to let it go and move on to the next. And that was always something I struggled with and something I knew I had to get better for this team to get where it wanted to be.”
It’s a process Clark has given fans a front-row seat to and part of the reason I think she will be in our lives for a long time. Basketball, absent pads and face-hiding helmets, is inherently revelatory. The glare of the spotlight, the stakes, the compounding pressure, the opponent’s scouting report—it’s all designed to strip you bare. It’s also a perfect vehicle not only for Clark to express herself, but for viewers to take in the full range of that expression. The secret of her showmanship: Most of the time, she isn’t really putting on a show. Her hopes, dreams, frustrations, and fears all play on her face, all the time. We can watch, through the course of a game, her doubt morph into resolve. We have watched, through the course of her career, the burden of singularity turn into trust. She is the rare kind of performer who, as she perfects her craft, can communicate essential truths about herself: her temerity, her pluck, and a capacity for growth as boundless as the scope of her dreams. I wonder whether she will always be this impossible to ignore.
