It’s hard to ‘wrap your head around’ national stardom of Caitlin Clark, Iowa women’s basketball

CLEVELAND — Jan Jensen remembers the days of needing to recruit fans as well as athletes.

“We would go talk to any church group, Rotary club,” said Jensen, the longtime associate head coach of Iowa women’s basketball.

Jensen said she’d tell the groups, “Please come watch, please take a look.’”

Thursday was a vivid reminder of how far the Hawkeyes have come since then as they prepare for their second consecutive appearance in the Final Four this weekend in Cleveland, Ohio.

“You can look at this locker room, right?” Jensen told The Gazette while standing in a room so crowded with reporters that it was often difficult to move around.

Before that, the main news conference room — one that can comfortably sit more than 50 people — was overflowing to the point that nearly a dozen people stood in the adjacent hallway as Caitlin Clark, Kate Martin and head coach Lisa Bluder answered questions.

Iowa’s overwhelming popularity has been evident in attendance numbers at home and on the road. Iowa sold out its entire allotment of season tickets (and stopped accepting deposits as early as last April).

Away from Carver-Hawkeye Arena, Clark & Co. regularly saw sellouts or record-breaking crowds across the country. Iowa’s only regular-season games to not sell out or set an attendance record came during the Gulf Coast Showcase in Estero, Fla., in November over the Thanksgiving weekend.

Holly Rowe: ‘frenzy’

ESPN sideline reporter Holly Rowe, who will be on the call for this weekend’s Final Four games, has taken note of the unique “frenzy and hysteria” around Clark and the Hawkeyes throughout the 2023-24 season.

“I was trying to remember if I’ve ever seen anything like it, and the thing I could come closest to is Tim Tebow,” Rowe told The Gazette. “After Tim Tebow won the Heisman for Florida (in 2007), he was hounded everywhere he went. … I think this might even be more or bigger than Tim’s was back in the day.”

When Rowe went to Iowa’s game at Nebraska this year, she met a fan who had driven 1,000 miles with her three daughters “just to watch Caitlin play.”

“People who may have never cared about women’s basketball before are interested in her and interested in Iowa,” Rowe said. “It’s opening a lot of people’s eyes.”

Clark is not the only one driving the appeal either.

“People are going crazy for Gabbie Marshall and Kate Martin,” Rowe said. “People do love that whole team.”

It is to the point that many people without an obvious connection to Iowa have become Iowa fans, as ESPN commentator (and Hall-of-Famer) Rebecca Lobo observed while walking around Albany last week and seeing people wearing Clark shirts.

“I’m assuming they’re people who have come from Iowa,” Lobo said. “Some of them were, but there were also people from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, Boston area, New York, Connecticut, all over New England who are Iowa fans.”

Monday’s Elite Eight win over LSU averaged 12.3 million viewers, making it ESPN’s most-watched college basketball game — men’s or women’s — in the network’s history. It was a considerably higher total than last year’s national championship game, which had 9.9 million viewers.

“I think we were all blown away,” Lobo said. “We thought it was going to be really high, but I didn’t think it was going to be that much more than the championship game.“

The 12.3 million viewers on Monday outnumbered all but one 2023 regular-season college football game, with Michigan-Ohio State on Fox the one exception. It also outperformed all but one game from last year’s NBA Finals and every game from last year’s MLB World Series.

“That really puts into perspective exactly where women's basketball is going and the type of excitement around our game,” Clark said.

Iowa’s new norm

As impressive as the 12.3 million viewers were, record-breaking ratings have become the new norm at Iowa.

The Hawkeyes have broken the records for most-watched women’s basketball games on six networks — ABC, ESPN, Fox, FS1, NBC and the Big Ten Network. That is in addition to the NBC streaming service Peacock.

The national attention on Iowa has “shined a light on our conference,” said Megan Kahn, the Big Ten’s vice president for women’s basketball.

Fox, CBS and NBC all aired Big Ten women’s basketball games on their over-the-air broadcast channels — an investment that is not exclusive to Iowa but certainly affected by Iowa.

“Especially from the Fox perspective, they saw the growth in women’s basketball, and they saw the numbers that Caitlin could draw,” Kahn said in Cleveland. “Everyone’s seeing what the ratings can do and that they’re attracting legit eyeballs and sponsorship dollars and investment in the women’s game.”

The Hawkeyes’ popularity helped the Big Ten sell out its women’s basketball postseason tournament this year, becoming the first Power Five conference to accomplish such a feat.

"Carver-Hawkeye North did not disappoint,“ Kahn said, referencing the Hawkeye-heavy crowd at the Target Center in Minneapolis.

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‘Been a blur’

Martin — a sixth-year senior who has seen average home attendance more than double in her time at Iowa — said it is “fun to be in the position that we are and be role models and people that others can look up to.”

But amid the 37-game-and-counting grind, Martin and others acknowledged it also can be difficult to “really recognize and realize what is happening.”

“As a competitor and being involved in this moment, it's hard for you to wrap your head around,” Clark said. “When you step on the court and you're playing for 40 minutes, you're not thinking, ‘Oh, my gosh, there's 12 million-plus people watching this game at home.’ That's not going through your mind.”

Jensen, now in her 24th season on the Iowa staff, is hoping the team’s secretary has been keeping “highlights of articles or whatever” for her to later enjoy.

“Maybe someday when I’m retired in my rocking chair, I’ll read about the ’23-’24 season and be like, ‘That happened?’ ” Jensen said. “I’ve loved it, but it’s been a blur.”

The aftermath of the win over LSU was the “longest I’d say this whole year where we just kind of felt happy” rather than preparing for the next thing, Jensen said.

“We did take a moment, rose a glass, and that was a fun day,” Jensen said.

But after that brief window of celebration, Jenni Fitzgerald — an assistant coach and, as Jensen described her, “our chief guru of scout prep” — gave the scouting report on Final Four foe UConn to the rest of the coaching staff on the plane from Albany to Cleveland.

It was back to business as usual.

Will it last?

The question for Iowa — and college women’s basketball as a whole — after this weekend is how much of the Clark-induced momentum continues after she is off to the WNBA.

"Of course, there’s going to be a dip because she has sort of been the singular phenomenon that’s driven everything,“ Lobo said. ”But I still think our numbers are going to be a lot higher outside of Caitlin Clark games than they have been in the past.“

Iowa might not have a generational talent on its roster in 2024-25, but USC will join the Big Ten next year with freshman phenom and All-American JuJu Watkins.

The Hawkeyes, Jensen said, will “become your best version without a generational talent.”

“The trick will be just to keep playing really pretty basketball,” Jensen said. “If you’re a basketball fan, you can appreciate, ‘That’s a pretty play,’ and, ‘That team’s fun.’ … Everybody likes a winner, so that’s the goal.”

It helps that Iowa has plenty of incoming talent expected to arrive in 2024 and 2025, most notably 2025 five-star recruit Addie Deal.

“You understand there’s Caitlin,” Jensen said. “I think North Carolina way back understood there was Michael Jordan. But North Carolina still competed (after Jordan was gone).”

For the next few days, though, the Hawkeyes can enjoy at least one game — or possibly two — with Clark directly fueling the fervor.

“It doesn't get old seeing so many people talk about women's basketball,” Clark said Thursday in Cleveland. “For me, that's the greatest thing. I know it will only continue to grow more.”

Comments: john.steppe@thegazette.com

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