In 1990, 34-year-old Carol Stiff, a basketball junkie who spent years teaching small school ball within the Northeast, packed away her clipboard and took an entry-level programmer place at what she thought-about a “little firm” in Bristol, Conn.
Basketball had lengthy been part of Stiff’s life. Her uncle Don Donoher was one in all Bobby Knight’s assistant coaches on the 1984 Olympic gold medal-winning crew led by Michael Jordan. By center college, she was enjoying youth basketball in Bernardsville, N.J., and one in all her fondest reminiscences was going to Madison Sq. Backyard as a teen together with her mother in 1977 to look at Montclair State star Carol “Blaze” Blazejowski as a part of a doubleheader known as the Hanover Basic. It was the uncommon alternative to see the highest opponents play the sport Stiff cherished.
Regardless of an 11 a.m. tip-off, there was a crowd of over 10,000 individuals in MSG to see Blaze, whose scoring prowess and all-around recreation drew comparisons to Pete Maravich. Blaze may shoot. She may move. She performed with aptitude. Even with out a three-point line, she scored 52 factors.
“Rapidly a light-weight bulb went off,” Stiff mentioned of the sport. It confirmed her that the ladies’s recreation may thrive underneath the fitting circumstances. At her highschool, after the boys’ crew acquired Converse Chuck Taylors, the ladies did, too, due to Title IX. However even that highlighted her beloved sport’s plight: It was not often considered as worthy sufficient by itself. However when the circumstances had been proper, its greatness could possibly be seen.
Stiff performed basketball and discipline hockey at Southern Connecticut State. Then, following teaching stints at Brown, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Western Connecticut, she joined ESPN.
One in all her first duties on the community was to enter four-digit codes for all of the programming, recording what was on every hour. She seen that the format didn’t distinguish if video games had been performed by males or girls. In her third 12 months, throughout a software program redesign, she satisfied her boss they need to add a gender code. It was the primary time the community tracked when girls’s sports activities had been on — or not — on the community.
Final April, the NCAA girls’s nationwide championship recreation between undefeated South Carolina and Iowa in Cleveland drew practically 19 million tv viewers, the most important viewers in girls’s school basketball historical past, and the most-watched basketball recreation — males’s or girls’s — since 2019. Earlier video games within the 2024 girls’s match drew 14.2 million and 12.3 million viewers, respectively, and people adopted a 2023 ultimate watched by practically 10 million, which had been an all-time excessive.
Why the curiosity in girls’s basketball spiked is not any thriller: the immense reputation of Caitlin Clark, the previous Iowa and present Indiana Fever star. “There’s (Michael) Jordan, Tiger (Woods) and Caitlin,” mentioned Fox president of perception and analytics Mike Mulvihill.
However earlier than Clark turbocharged the attention and recognition of ladies’s basketball, a basis needed to be constructed, prepared and ready for somebody like her. It was constructed by individuals like Stiff, devotees of the sport who lengthy believed the construction and biases of the media enterprise had been holding it again. They pushed for extra, fought for change, and set the stage on which Clark arrived.
“That stigma that was hanging over girls’s sports activities for thus a few years — that it’s not athletic, it’s not enjoyable to look at, it’s lower than males’s — is being lifted,” mentioned Sue Maryott, the Massive Ten Community’s vp of distant productions. “I believe it began with publicity. Folks weren’t watching as a result of it wasn’t televised.”
In her third 12 months at ESPN, and simply weeks earlier than the 1993-94 school basketball season started, Stiff was tasked with setting up ESPN’s girls’s broadcast schedule. She assigned the video games for every convention within the time slots she was given, sometimes Sunday afternoons. A 12 months later, the slots given to her included a 3 p.m. ESPN spot on Martin Luther King Day in January. On the time, it was not thought-about coveted actual property, however Stiff needed to benefit from it.
After first failing to get defending nationwide champion North Carolina to conform to a recreation towards UConn, an up-and-coming program in close by Storrs, Stiff known as Pat Summitt, Tennessee’s coach. Summitt had issues about becoming the sport on her schedule and didn’t love the thought of taking her crew north within the winter. Stiff made her pitch, sounding like a coach making an attempt to reel in a giant recruit, noting that Robin Roberts — a former Division I participant and an up-and-coming TV star — can be calling the sport. Summitt lastly agreed to do it: “For the nice of the sport.”
The groups entered undefeated, with UConn ranked No. 1 and Tennessee No. 2. A sold-out crowd of 8,241 noticed the Huskies beat the Volunteers, 77-66, and the competition recorded a robust 1.0 score (635,000 households). It was the primary recreation in what would grow to be the best rivalry in girls’s school basketball historical past.
Nonetheless, there have been no postgame interviews. A repeat of “The Sports activities Reporters” needed to be rushed onto ESPN.
On Nov. 30, 1996, 30-year-old Brent Clark and 27-year-old Anne Nizzi had been married at Saint Francis of Assisi Catholic Church in West Des Moines, Iowa. The following day, the Iowa and Iowa State girls’s basketball groups resumed their rivalry after a five-year break at Carver-Hawkeye Enviornment in Iowa Metropolis. The Hawkeyes received, 64-53, earlier than an introduced crowd of 5,061. The sport was not televised.
In the course of the 1994-95 girls’s school basketball season, Connecticut went 35-0 en path to a nationwide championship, turning into solely the second girls’s crew to finish a season undefeated. The crew’s star, Rebecca Lobo, was probably the most seen girls’s basketball participant since USC’s Cheryl Miller within the Eighties. Lobo appeared on “Late Evening with David Letterman,” and he or she and her teammates had been featured on the “Reside with Regis & Kathy Lee” morning present.
As a child, Lobo watched girls’s basketball each likelihood she received. “Which implies I didn’t watch it in any respect,” she mentioned. She minimize out footage of Miller from Sports activities Illustrated and positioned them in her locker. Because the 1996 Olympics approached, Lobo had grow to be one thing by no means seen earlier than within the girls’s recreation: a bonafide media sensation, even when she was a bit participant on the star-studded Crew USA.
The U.S. girls received gold, boosting the launch of the WNBA the following 12 months. The primary WNBA season consisted of 28 regular-season video games for every crew with the nationwide broadcasts break up between NBC, ESPN and Lifetime. There have been three playoff video games, with the one-game semifinals simulcast on ESPN and Lifetime, whereas the Finals had been on NBC.
That very same 12 months, ESPN received the printed rights to the NCAA girls’s championship, taking it from CBS. Over time, CBS turned out some large numbers, most notably with 11.84 million viewers for the 1983 ultimate that includes Miller. Nonetheless, the community didn’t develop the sport. ESPN received the rights by providing to air extra video games and by being keen to have a day of relaxation for the groups between the nationwide semifinals and the ultimate, which Stiff and others urged the community to place into its supply.
“We received the NCAA deal finished. Then the Olympics after which the WNBA, it was like a trifecta,” Stiff mentioned.
In late June 1997, in entrance of an introduced crowd of 17,780, the New York Liberty, led by Lobo and Teresa Weatherspoon, beat Phoenix, 65-57 in Lobo’s first WNBA recreation.
“The group was not simply girls. It was dads who needed their youngster, boy or woman, to see it and have aspirations,” mentioned Blazejowski.
By then, Blaze had retired as a participant and was the Liberty’s GM.
In January 2002, The Des Moines Register listed 25 beginning notices from three Des Moines-area hospitals on web page 5B. The kid born to Brent Clark and Anne Nizzi-Clark was merely listed as “daughter.”
Caitlin Clark, like Carol Stiff, was born right into a sports activities household. Her father, Brent, was inducted into the Simpson (Iowa) Faculty Athletics Corridor of Fame as a basketball and baseball participant. Her maternal grandfather, Bob Nizzi, coached highschool soccer at West Des Moines Dowling Catholic, one in all Iowa’s dynastic large-school applications.
She had a big prolonged household on her mom’s aspect, however as one of many few women, Clark was teased relentlessly and developed an obsessive need to show herself to her older cousins. Clark was 5 when she expressed an curiosity in enjoying basketball, however there have been no groups in central Iowa for ladies that younger, so her father signed her up for boys groups that he coached. By the second grade, she was so dominant that folks complained {that a} woman shouldn’t be allowed to play with the boys.
In 2000, one other star emerged at UConn.
“It was the Diana Taurasi period, when all the blokes on SportsCenter may say her identify,” Stiff mentioned. “It was virtually like, ‘She performs like Larry Fowl.’”
Nonetheless, Stiff was annoyed. Sports activities TV is usually a chicken-and-egg recreation. Occasions don’t obtain prime-time slots except they ship large scores. However it’s tough to earn the very best numbers with out the most effective slots.
“So I’d hear, ‘Carol, it doesn’t charge,’” Stiff remembered. “I’d say, ‘It doesn’t charge, as a result of nobody can see it.’ They are saying, ‘Carol, it doesn’t charge so advertisers don’t need to purchase it.’ It was that vicious cycle.”
Stiff largely needed to work with time slots on Sundays, competing with the NFL or the ultimate spherical of some PGA occasion — typically with Tiger Woods charging to a win.
“I saved combating through the years for higher home windows,” Stiff mentioned. “‘I would like higher home windows, guys. All I get is Sunday afternoons? Are you kidding me?”
Lastly, in 2005, ESPN gave the ladies’s recreation Massive Mondays on ESPN2. But it was a bittersweet improvement. These video games had been up towards the boys’s model of Massive Monday that featured behemoths like Duke and North Carolina.
Three years later, Maya Moore arrived at UConn and led the Huskies to 2 undefeated seasons, 4 Closing Fours and two nationwide championships. She was an even bigger guard who may dribble, shoot and move — an earlier model of Caitlin Clark — and he or she was twice named nationwide participant of the 12 months. Sports activities Illustrated labeled her “the best winner within the historical past of ladies’s basketball.”
But for many of Moore’s time in Storrs, a lot of her video games had been proven solely on Connecticut Public Tv.
In 2012, 10-year-old Clark traveled together with her household three hours north from Des Moines to Minneapolis to attend a Minnesota Lynx WNBA recreation and see her favourite participant: Moore, who was in her second season with the Lynx.
The Clark household watched the Lynx play the Seattle Storm, then lingered afterward. Moore and some different Lynx gamers remained on the court docket, and Clark couldn’t include herself. She sprinted towards Moore.
“I didn’t have a cellphone, I didn’t have a Sharpie, I simply gave her a hug and I ran away,” Clark mentioned. “And he or she simply gave me a hug again. It’s simply one thing that’s caught with me, that one interplay can change any person’s life.”
Round that point, Clark was recognized by youth sports activities coaches in central Iowa as a superb basketball participant and in addition an elite soccer expertise. On April 26, 2013, a photograph of Clark appeared for the primary time in The Des Moines Register. She was pictured together with her U11 crew from the West Des Moines Soccer Membership. The identify of her crew:
Blaze.
After the ultimate of the 2015 girls’s World Cup in Canada produced the most important soccer viewers in United States historical past, executives at Fox had a brainstorm.
Fox acquired the Ladies’s World Cup rights as one thing of a throw-in with the boys’s World Cup contract. There was no further payment. It received large merely by amplifying a property it already owned. Executives knew that the rights to Massive Ten girls’s basketball had been equally baked into the boys’s rights that Fox managed.
On the similar time, with leisure shifting off ad-supported broadcast networks to streaming companies like Netflix, fewer girls had been watching TV. “We’ve felt for some time that we’ve received a transparent incentive to attempt to construct out that feminine viewers,” mentioned Mulvihill, the Fox president of perception and analytics.
Fox’s giant possession stake within the Massive Ten Community allowed it to make use of that channel as an incubator. Fox executives programmed a big slate of ladies’s video games on the Massive Ten Community and sat again and watched.
Clark’s cousin Audrey Faber was a four-star hooper at Dowling Catholic who would go on to grow to be a three-time All-Massive East choice at Creighton. One February afternoon, when Faber wanted to look at The Des Moines Register workplace as a part of the paper’s all-area crew, 13-year-old Clark tagged alongside.
John Naughton lined highschool sports activities for The Register for 31 years till his retirement in 2019. Naughton mentioned hiya to Faber after which motioned to Clark.
“Who is that this?” he requested.
“I’m Caitlin Clark, Audrey’s my cousin,” she answered.
“Perhaps I’ll write about you sometime,’” Naughton responded.
On Nov. 22, 2016, Clark performed her first recreation as a freshman at Dowling Catholic Excessive. She scored a team-high 14 factors, grabbed six rebounds, dished 5 assists, pulled three steals and had one turnover in a 75-26 win. Two months later, on Jan. 25, 2017, The Des Moines Register launched Clark to its readership with a photograph and quote from Clark following her 21-point recreation in a win towards Des Moines Roosevelt.
A day later, Naughton included a bit on Clark in his women basketball pocket book. He wrote, “Received my first likelihood to look at West Des Moines Dowling Catholic freshman Caitlin Clark play Tuesday. She’s the actual deal.”
Clark scored 368 factors that season and led her crew to the state match, the place she scored 11 factors in an 87-64 loss to crosstown rival West Des Moines Valley. The sport was streamed by the Central Iowa Sports activities Community. It was the primary of Clark’s video games aired stay to a large viewers.
Clark led the state in scoring as a senior (775 factors) and junior (781), however she by no means received a state title. Her senior 12 months ended with a four-point loss in a regional ultimate. Clark scored 40 factors and grabbed 10 rebounds. It wasn’t a state match recreation, so it wasn’t televised.
The COVID-19 pandemic eradicated crowds through the 2020-21 school basketball season, which made it look like Clark performed her freshman season at Iowa in obscurity.
Her first school recreation got here on Nov. 25, 2020, towards Northern Iowa, and aired on BTN-Plus, a pay-per-view stream. She scored 27 factors in 26 minutes in entrance of an introduced attendance of 365.
Clark’s first 9 video games had been streamed on BTN-Plus. Her first televised contest happened Jan. 9, 2021, at Northwestern. BTN’s Lisa Byington and Meghan McKeown known as the motion. It was the primary of 9 of Clark’s video games to air on BTN that season.
Fox executives began to note that Clark’s video games drew about 30 % extra viewers than the opposite video games it aired on BTN.
The 2021 NCAA Match happened within the San Antonio bubble. Within the Candy 16, Iowa confronted UConn, which featured fellow freshman Paige Bueckers. ABC aired the conflict, the primary time in 16 years an over-the-air community televised an NCAA girls’s match recreation. UConn received 92-72 in a recreation that drew 1.5 million viewers, the a lot of the six video games ABC aired that match.
In her sophomore season, Clark’s Iowa telecasts on BTN had been 98 % increased than different girls’s video games. By her junior 12 months, Clark had totally smashed the hen or egg dilemma that Stiff ran up towards when making an attempt to get good slots for ladies’s basketball video games at ESPN. Clark was must-see TV, with 12 video games airing on both ABC, Fox or ESPN, up from 5 mixed in her first two seasons. The Hawkeyes broke BTN’s scores report 4 totally different instances, and the Iowa-LSU championship recreation on ABC generated 9.9 million viewers.
For Clark’s ultimate season, 9 Iowa video games aired on both ABC, NBC, CBS or Fox, and each Massive Ten recreation was accessible on community tv or Peacock streaming. Clark’s video games set girls’s basketball viewership data on eight totally different tv or streaming platforms.
The BTN’s Maryott, who oversees practically all the community’s stay sports activities besides soccer and males’s basketball, noticed the influence Clark had within the viewership numbers, however she additionally skilled it anecdotally. Her 84-year-old mom, Jean, briefly was in a nursing house final winter for cardiac rehab.
“I’m calling to verify on her, and he or she’s like, ‘Oh, honey, I’ve received to go. We’ve received pizza being delivered to the nursing house and we’re watching Caitlin tonight,’” Maryott mentioned.
Her mom had by no means paid consideration to sports activities till Clark got here to Iowa.
Fox started to search for successes outdoors of Iowa and Clark. Final Thanksgiving, following its Lions-Packers’ 12:30 p.m. recreation, Fox aired a males’s school recreation that drew 5 million viewers after which a girls’s recreation — Indiana and Tennessee — that drew 1.18 million. It was a brand new report for a girls’s basketball recreation on that community.
Clark performed on BTN 43 instances throughout her 4 years at Iowa, counting the Crossover at Kinnick exhibition during which the varsity set the ladies’s basketball single-game attendance report (55,646). Her ultimate look was a win over Michigan in a 2024 Massive Ten match semifinal. Clark got here out of a postgame interview session and noticed Maryott within the hallway.
“I’ll see you guys tomorrow,’” she mentioned.
Maryott corrected Clark. Her recreation the following day would air on CBS.
“Then her face form of fell,” Maryott recalled. “I mentioned, ‘Caitlin, it’s been a thrill. Thanks.’ And he or she grabs me and hugs me and hugs Meghan, and he or she says, ‘Thanks guys for all the pieces you probably did.’ That hit me so onerous, as a result of I’m considering, ‘Thanks for what you probably did.’”
Caitlin Clark after being chosen No. 1 total by the Indiana Fever within the 2024 WNBA Draft. ((Sarah Stier / Getty Photographs)
Viewers adopted Clark into the WNBA this season. Her regular-season video games had been watched by 1.178 million viewers in comparison with 401,000 for all different non-Clark WNBA video games, a 199 % distinction. Whereas she is unquestionably the principle attraction, the league over the past 5 years underneath commissioner Cathy Englebert has elevated the variety of nationally televised video games from 80 to 200.
“It was the confluence of all this coming collectively on the similar time,” Englebert mentioned.
The WNBA receives $200 million per season within the NBA’s new tv contract with ABC/ESPN, NBC/Peacock and Amazon Prime Video. The WNBA was beforehand taking in round $65 million per season. There are budding stars and rivalries, with Englebert citing Clark, Angel Reese, Cameron Brink and the following technology rising in school, together with UConn’s Bueckers and USC’s JuJu Watkins.
“You’re looking on the strong subsequent decade of actual stars on this league,” Engelbert mentioned. She added: “Each time anybody asks me, ‘What’s subsequent? Growth? Examine. Media? Examine. Globalization of this recreation.”
In 2021, Stiff retired from ESPN throughout a spherical of layoffs. She was honored by the Naismith Memorial Basketball Corridor of Fame and received the John W. Bunn Lifetime Achievement Award. Her attain prolonged past basketball; she was instrumental within the enlargement of softball protection at ESPN.
She was among the many hundreds of thousands who watched Clark and Iowa versus LSU within the title recreation on ABC, and he or she was happy with the eye it acquired, however she additionally questioned what the quantity would have been if it had aired in prime time fairly than on a Sunday afternoon.
In an e-mail to his employees after the sport, ESPN president of content material Burke Magnus talked about Stiff and former high ESPN producer Pat Lowry, one other girls’s hoops advocate.
“Whereas the longer term is brilliant, I believed rather a lot in regards to the many contributors like Pat Lowry and Carol Stiff, who labored tirelessly for many years to construct up girls’s basketball slowly however absolutely,” Magnus wrote. “Every little thing we witnessed in Cleveland wouldn’t have been potential with out their efforts.”
ESPN’s chairman Jimmy Pitaro and Disney CEO Bob Iger adopted that up with textual content messages to Stiff, thanking her for her advocacy by means of the years.
Stiff, now the president of the Ladies’s Sports activities Community, performed a job in serving to dealer a recreation between UConn and the College of Southern California for Dec. 21, with Bueckers and Watkins stepping in because the must-see stars.
That recreation, performed within the 16,000-capacity XL Heart in Hartford, can be proven on Fox proper after a particular Saturday NFL matchup between the rival Steelers and Ravens.
“Clearly, we need to capitalize on the momentum behind girls’s basketball and assist set up new stars post-Caitlin,” Mulvihill mentioned.
That had lengthy been Stiff’s dream, to see what would occur if a girls’s recreation received a first-rate slot and lead-in like that.
Mentioned Stiff: “It’s going to be a wonderful recreation.”
(Illustration: Meech Robinson / The Athletic; Pictures: Elsa, Mike Powell, Damian Strohmeyer, Nathaniel S. Butler, Daniel, Andy Lyons / Getty Photographs)