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.
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.
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2024/feb/16/caitlin-clark-scoring-record-iowa-hawkeyes-basketball
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