There’s at all times an indication.
Final spring, I first seen one thing particular was taking place after I couldn’t stroll half a block in Dallas with out working into massive packs of Iowa or South Carolina followers. There have been additionally my man buddies again house who, for the primary time, have been planning their weekend across the girls’s NCAA Match video games as a substitute of the boys’s. And all of the sports activities discuss radio channels have been discussing Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese. My spidey senses have been tingling.
I may really feel it in my bones that the game was primed for a breakthrough second, although I couldn’t have imagined that just about 10 million folks would tune in for the Iowa-LSU nationwide title sport, shattering the earlier document for viewership of a girls’s basketball sport. However I may inform that the barrier of apathy had been damaged; these girls, that late-game taunting, the game itself — it’d all be talked about for days and weeks and months to come back.
I’ve the identical feeling proper now.
One other large leap is coming for a sport that must be rising accustomed to those positive aspects. As we head into March Insanity, it’s the girls’s facet of the event that’s taking heart stage. It’s the girls’s stars who shine the brightest. It’s the girls’s sport with essentially the most intriguing storylines.
And … that’s not even debatable!
“We’ve been on a gradual incline,” USC coach Lindsay Gottlieb stated throughout my SiriusXM present Sunday night time. “You mix the star energy in our sport, the truth that you will have a few of these established stars that followers have actually constructed a relationship with like Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese, Cameron Brink — and you then add on this extremely dynamic freshman class.
“What we’re seeing is that ladies’s basketball is a very marketable entity. Individuals adore it. We’re in an area the place there’s an unbelievable quantity of pleasure round it. … It’s one thing that’s, actually, a motion.”
We’ve seen these insanely lengthy traces of followers ready to get into arenas — any enviornment — to see Clark play. Greater than 3 million folks watched Clark’s Hawkeyes beat Nebraska in extra time within the Large Ten championship sport on CBS, with the viewers peaking at 4.45 million (!) in extra time. Clark is so ubiquitous that she was mentioned a number of occasions throughout this yr’s NBA All-Star Weekend’s broadcast … whereas her State Farm commercials aired throughout its breaks.
GO DEEPER
Like Steph and Jimmer earlier than her, Caitlin Clark is a ‘as soon as in a lifetime’ expertise
ESPN lately introduced that this was its most-watched girls’s school basketball common season in additional than 15 years, its viewership up 37 p.c on ESPN platforms from final season. Its SEC championship final Sunday between LSU and South Carolina drew virtually 2 million viewers, and the Pac-12 title match on the identical day between USC and Stanford — the Trojans a No. 1 seed and the Cardinal a No. 2 seed within the upcoming event — drew extra 1.4 million viewers, up 461 p.c from final season’s championship. These three title video games out-rated three NBA weekend video games.
With extra eyeballs comes elevated familiarity for followers, each new and previous. Now, they know the celebs by first title solely. Caitlin. Angel. Paige. JuJu. Cam. Hannah.
Fast! Stroll into your neighborhood sports activities bar and ask somebody to call 5 males’s basketball gamers enjoying this week. Can they do it? I’m unsure I’d wager a beer on that.
Lately on his podcast, KG Licensed, Kevin Garnett made the identical level. “That is the primary time watching school basketball the place I do know extra ladies than guys,” he stated.”That is the primary time we’ve acquired girls’s basketball forward of males’s basketball. Girls’s school basketball is … electrical. It’s blowing the man’s sport out of the water.”
After all, that received’t matter a lot after we sit on our couches or bar stools for 14 straight hours on Thursday and 14 straight hours on Friday. We’ll watch the boys’s video games simply the identical, falling in love with Cinderellas though they bust our brackets. We’ll agonize over a coach’s horrendous late-game clock administration. And we’ll hold watching the boys as a result of theirs has lengthy been the very best postseason in sports activities.
However parity on the ladies’s facet has modified the calculus a bit. So has the transient nature of males’s school basketball; one-and-dones coupled with the switch portal has made it more durable than ever for gamers to turn into family names throughout the game nationally. And so lots of the males’s largest stars — its Corridor of Fame coaches — have retired and left the game with out its weightiness.
And that has opened a door for the ladies’s sport to run by way of. That is the game with gamers who keep three or 4 years and develop in entrance of our eyes. That is the game with its Corridor of Fame coaches nonetheless main the best way — many themselves acknowledged on a first-name foundation: Daybreak, Geno, Tara, Kim — at the same time as parity will increase and school athletics evolves below their ft.
So, this week, I’ll be most concerned about Clark’s final event run and whether or not she will be able to will the Hawkeyes to a different Last 4. I’ll need to see JuJu Watkins, the freshman phenom who has revitalized USC’s girls’s program, on the large stage for the primary time. I’ll need to fake I’ve half of the vitality in my each day life that Notre Dame’s Hannah Hidalgo does on protection in only one sport. I’ll be on pins and needles ready to see if South Carolina can full an ideal season after falling simply brief a yr in the past.
There’ll undoubtedly be the standard Neanderthal takes, males who nonetheless attempt to declare that “no one” watches girls’s basketball regardless of all the proof on the contrary. These opinions now get shouted down by the dads who bond with their daughters by taking them to video games and the mothers of little boys who put on Clark jerseys and don’t assume there’s something unusual about idolizing a feminine athlete. These males can cling to their foolish little outdated punchlines that make no sense anymore, whereas we watch compelling basketball and be a part of this rocket ship because it rises.
“Eyes have been opened final yr, and we simply fed off of that momentum, and it didn’t ever cease,” Notre Dame coach Niele Ivey informed me Sunday. “Nice groups, nice gamers — the ladies’s sport is simply sizzling.”
(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; Images of Angel Reese, Caitlin Clark, Hannah Hidalgo: Eakin Howard / Adam Bettcher / Icon Sportswire, Joseph Weiser / Icon Sportswire)