The annual conclusion of March Madness is the perfect time to recognize Iowa’s women’s basketball phenom, Caitlin Clark. Clark has been the face of women’s sports recently. Over the past couple of years, women’s sports, and Clark’s popularity, have reached larger demographics than ever before. Women’s NCAA Basketball this year has drawn in record breaking viewership. The championship game between Iowa and South Carolina beat the previous year’s LSU-Iowa championship, despite Iowa losing both.
Clark is the ideal person to be the face of women’s sports during this period of growth, hence her rapid rise to stardom. She has made a name for herself at Iowa and has already continued to see success after being the WNBA number one draft pick in the 2024 draft and now is on the roster for Indiana Fever.
Not only does Clark have a strong presence on the basketball court, but also a well known personality. She is known to be fierce with her opponents in the game, as seen through her interactions on the court with fellow basketball star Angel Reese, while still maintaining good sportsmanship and serving as an inspiration to young girls across the nation.
In fact, the June seventh Fever-Mystics game, Clark’s debut in Washington D.C., even had to move venues from their home arena of 2,000 seats to another with 20,000, and still sold out.
Following the WNBA draft, Clark signed a 28 million dollar Nike brand deal, adding her name to the esteemed list of Michael Jordan, Steph Curry, LeBron James, and countless other male basketball stars that have released a signature shoe. Clark, who has yet to debut professionally, is only the fourth active WNBA player to design a signature shoe with Nike.
Going beyond Clark, each year, women’s sports continue to break records, 2024 has especially had an impact on viewership of women’s sports.
The NCAA women’s basketball Iowa-South Carolina championship game attracted more viewers than the men’s championship for the first time ever.
Nebraska and Omaha Volleyball strayed from their typical court to play a game in Nebraska’s football stadium, which brought more than 92,000 attendees.
A brand new hockey league has emerged this year, the Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL). The league, comprising three American teams and three Canadian teams, has been a major success to say the least. In its inaugural year, the PWHL has also contributed to breaking viewership records, breaking the prior 2013 record for number of attendees at a women’s ice hockey game by more than 1,000 fans.
The abundance of attendance records broken this year alone proves that women’s sports is on a faster rise than ever before, and the future appears to be tremendously bright for these organizations and young female athletes. With women’s sports projected to break one billion dollars in revenue, 2024 is going to continue to be a revolutionary year for women’s sports. The legendary Caitlin Clark is just a small snapshot of a brand new, prospering era for women’s basketball and even more so, the larger picture of women’s sports.
