WNBA was totally unprepared for Caitlin Clark: 'That's unfortunate but that's what happened'

Indianapolis Star

a day ago

INDIANAPOLIS -- The day after Caitlin Clark declared for the 2024 WNBA draft, USA Today sports columnist Christine Brennan made a phone call to a top official in the league.
"Do you know how big this is?" Brennan asked.
That official said Clark's arrival was the biggest thing to happen to the WNBA since Maya Moore came into the league.
What? Wait. What? Brennan was shocked.
Moore, a Hall of Famer, was called the "greatest winner in the history of women's basketball" by Sports Illustrated in 2017. She was a talented, beloved superstar in the league, and she deserved all the attention. But outside the league, Moore went virtually unnoticed.
Clark? She was going to capture the attention of an entire nation. Brennan had been covering Clark and the WNBA for years, and she could see it coming. This official clearly had no idea.
"That interaction tells you everything about the utter lack of preparation, or even understanding, by the league of what was coming," said Brennan, whose book "On Her Game: Caitlin Clark and the Revolution in Women's Sports," comes out July 8. "And that's unfortunate. But that's what happened."
Clark's entrance to pro women's basketball would be nothing like Moore's. Clark would be bigger, more monumental, more earth shattering and game changing than anything that had happened in modern day women's sports.
The so-called Clark Effect would be monstrous, potent, and it would be real.
"How did the WNBA not see this coming?" said Brennan. "One of the reasons for having so badly mismanaged Caitlin Clark's arrival in the WNBA is because, did they truly not believe this could happen to the WNBA? Were they so relegated to second class citizenship by the male-dominated mainstream sports media that they just never believed this would be possible?"
The league would quickly see that this Clark phenomenon was very possible.
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It was May 9, 2024, in downtown Indianapolis, the first preseason game for the Indiana Fever with Clark debuting as a rookie in the league.
As fans descended on Gainbridge Fieldhouse, Clark had traffic backed up on Alabama Street for more than three blocks heading south into the parking garage across from the fieldhouse. It was 6 p.m. on a Thursday and a crew of workers directing cars had their jobs cut out for them.
Tony Dunkin was used to crowds jamming up the lane he works on Level 1 of the garage for the Pacers and other events, but he had never seen anything like this for a Fever game and definitely not for a preseason WNBA game.
The cars were packed in, maneuvering around orange cones, clamoring to get their vehicles into a parking spot so they could get themselves into a seat.
"This is what a Pacers game usually does," Dunkin said, "not the Fever. I call it the Caitlin effect."
Security staff working at a Delaware Street entrance into the fieldhouse for Clark's first preseason game with the Fever were shocked. There were fans waiting outside two hours before the doors opened to pour into the arena. Waiting for a preseason WNBA game. In 2023, the year before, the Fever averaged 4,067 fans a game.
"14,000 of them tonight," said Beverly Franklin. "Now, if they can just have a crowd like this for every game, that would be awesome."
Clark said the same thing just a few hours later, after she stuffed the stat sheet as the Fever beat the Atlanta Dream 83-80 in the team's only preseason home game. She said the same thing to the crowd of 14,000, who had roared with every mention of her name during the game and rose to their feet with every shot she took.
"You all were amazing. Thanks for coming out for a preseason game," Clark said as she was interviewed on court after racking up 12 points, eight rebounds and six assists. "I hope you'll keep coming back."
Coming back. They did.
The Clark Effect would reverberate throughout the league, an effect that a season and a half later has turned, to put it mildly, complicated.
Brennan says it didn't have to be complicated, if only the league had taken some initiative to prepare other players in the WNBA for what was coming with Clark.
"The league failed the players," Dr. Harry Edwards, an American sociologist and civil rights activist, says in the book. "The WNBA not only missed an opportunity to prepare players for this moment, they set the traps along the path that the league was going to travel."
Edwards told Brennan the WNBA needed to understand and prepare for the "disappointment and anger" some Black players, in particular, would be experiencing due to Clark's ballyhooed arrival.
"This was predictable," he said. "It's human nature for people not to be happy for you when you're new and successful, especially if it's in an arena where they have toiled all their lives and not come close to the kind of reward or applause that (Clark) is receiving."
Through the years, before Clark ever laid a hand on a ball on a pro basketball court, the WNBA has stood for equality, often being described, according to Brennan, as "a Black, gay league."
The most recent statistics reveal that 63.8% of WNBA players are Black, while 19.1% are white, according to a 2023 report on the WNBA by The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida. While that study didn't include sexual identity, "a substantial portion of the league identifies as LGBTQ+," writes Brennan.
The league "often has been under attack because a third of the players in the WNBA are identified as being part of the LGBTQ+ community," commentator and writer Jemele Hill said at the 2024 Association for Women in Sports Media conference.
"And into this world landed Caitlin Clark, a white, straight, 22-year-old woman who had not played a second in the WNBA," Brennan writes, "but already was a national phenomenon and about to become the face of the league."
Clark is a player who can be a bit of a hothead. She has racked up her own share of technical fouls and is not a player to back down, clapping in the faces of opponents and sometimes having to be calmed down on the bench.
She is also a player who has endured an endless surge of rough play and technicals committed against her.
As that has played out in the WNBA since Clark arrived, there have been racial undertones that cannot be denied when it comes to the coverage and the treatment Clark has received, Ellen Staurowsky, a professor of sports media in the Park School of Communications at Ithaca College in New York, told IndyStar in September
"Research has shown that A'ja Wilson, one of the best WNBA players in history and she's getting half the coverage of Sabrina Ionescu," said Staurowsky. "There's no doubt and there's no question that there is a racial dynamic in all of this. And that cannot be discounted."
There is a very concrete way the league could have prepared players for what was to come, said Edwards, who has counseled players and leagues for decades. The WNBA should have established "a series of seminars" in the preseason for every team in the league, he says in the book.
"There are people out there who could have gone in and given those talks to each franchise," says Edwards, "experts and specialists from a sports sociological perspective with the understanding and grasp of the situation."
They could have told each team, Edwards says, "Hey, we have Caitlin Clark coming in and the media has grabbed ahold of this, the public has grabbed ahold of this, but let me tell you something, you sitting right here in this room, you set the stage for this."
Brianna Scurry, the first Black superstar in women's soccer and the goalkeeper for the 1999 U.S. women's soccer team, readily endorses Edwards' idea for having programming to prepare the players for this unprecedented time.
"That would've been absolutely brilliant to have something like that even if the players didn't themselves want to see things holistically, they would have at least been able to see someone talking about it and saying, 'OK, I may be angry about all this and feeling like we've been here this whole time, however I can find this silver lining in here," Scurry says in the book.
"But because the WNBA, unfortunately, didn't do that the players didn't even understand how big that tsunami was that was coming for them in a good way, and they were just woefully unprepared for it."
Brennan wants to make clear that when she says the players needed to be prepared for the moment "it's not because these players, Black and white, the veteran players, Black and white, it's not because they're damsels in distress. No, of course not," she says.
"They're strong athletes, most of them have college degrees. They are wonderful, accomplished young women. But nothing like this has ever happened before in the WNBA," Brennan said. "And frankly, you can make a strong case, nothing quite like this has ever happened, not only in women's team sports, but in all of team sports, men and women, where one league is lifted up to this extent by one person."
In December, IndyStar reached out to Dr. Ryan Brewer, a renowned valuation guru in the field of finance, asking him to put a price tag on Caitlin Clark -- what she meant financially to the WNBA, her city and the country in her rookie season with the Fever.
The numbers were so shocking that Brewer was sure he must have made some mistake. He ran the numbers again. Then again. And every single time, he got the same result.
"The numbers are so staggering," said Brewer, associate professor of finance at Indiana University Columbus. "They don't even seem real."
By Brewer's calculation, Clark was responsible for 26.5% of the WNBA's leaguewide activity for the 2024 season, including attendance, merchandise sales and television. One of every six tickets sold at a WNBA arena could be attributed to Clark.
Total TV viewership due to Clark was up 300% and 45% of total broadcast value came from Fever games. The league's merchandise sales catapulted 500%, with Clark ranking No. 1 followed by the Chicago Sky's Angel Reese, another rookie.
The Fever's regular-season game attendance averaged more than 17,000 fans, the first time a WNBA team has drawn more than 300,000 fans in a season. Clark's regular-season games were watched by 1.2 million viewers on average, which was 199% more than non-Clark WNBA games.
But, perhaps, the most astonishing number of all is Clark's economic impact on the city of Indianapolis, which Brewer says is upwards of $36 million.
"Now, let's take a breath for a minute and think about this," Brewer told IndyStar in December. "That's for one year. We're talking about one player."
What all those numbers mean, he said, is that the entire league is benefitting from the arrival of Clark.
"Caitlin Clark's presence, while polarizing for some people, is really a watershed moment for the league, and I just hope that all these amazing Black players are taking full advantage of the fact that the spotlight is on what they're doing now," Scurry says in the book. "I understand there's a lot of frustration and there's some anger because the league has been around for 27 years before she came.
"But my goodness, it's having this moment right now. And please, please, please as players in the league, do not let this opportunity pass you by to get yours."
Unfortunately, the disconnect between Clark and other players in the league was highlighted this week when Clark was voted as the ninth-best guard in the WNBA by fellow players, said Brennan.
"Here we are again. Because Caitlin was ranked first in fan voting overall," Brennan said. "That's a disconnect that is going to be problematic for the WNBA and its economics and its financial future moving forward. That's just a fact. It's such a disconnect between what the fans think and what the players think, that is a problem for the WNBA that should be addressed."
With the league's collective bargaining agreement open, "Clark is the most important person to them. This is the conundrum, right?" Brennan says. "Because they need her desperately in order to get more money because she is the economic rocket ship that's going to get them more money. I've never seen anything quite like this, and it's just absolutely fascinating."
Brennan, who covered Title IX, has had a front row seat to the controversy, the fights for equality and the upward rise of women sports, including the explosion of the WNBA with Clark at the center.
"And I never thought I would see this in my lifetime," Brennan says. "So to be able to chronicle it (in this book) I hope people enjoy the magic of Caitlin Clark and also enjoy the reporting on so many issues that are so important surrounding Caitlin Clark.
"I hope as a journalist, I've captured this moment, this time, this athlete. This is a remarkable moment in women's sports, in sports overall, and in our culture. Caitlin Clark isn't just one of the country's most popular athletes, she's one of the country's most popular people. She is that big. And it's an honor to write this."