DALLAS — After a month of doing what no woman had done before, Caitlin Clark did what athletes do all the time. She had tears in her eyes, a towel around neck and her head on teammate’s shoulder. She had no more basketball to play and nothing she could do about it. Monika Czinano was there to provide support, emotionally and physically, but no support was enough, emotionally or physically. Clark buried her head deeper into Czinano’s shoulder.
Clark introduced herself to so many sports fans during this NCAA tournament, but now all she could think about was goodbye. Czinano’s Iowa career is over. It ended with the Hawkeyes’ 102–85 loss to LSU in the national championship game.
Iowa fans will remember Czinano; many sports fans will forget. Basketball is a star-driven sport in a star-obsessed world, and Caitlin Clark could become the biggest star the women’s game has ever seen. But there, in a hallway outside Iowa’s locker room at American Airlines Center, Clark was far more concerned with where she has been than where she is going.
She walked to her postgame press conference with Czinano, a few steps ahead of Iowa coach Lisa Bluder, a ball of frustration and exhaustion and pride and disappointment, and she mostly kept it together until she started talking about children and home. Then she thought of all the little Iowans who followed her every move and she cried again. “I was just that young girl,” Clark said. All revolutions must begin somewhere. Clark will always be grateful for where she started hers.
What did we just watch? It was something more than a basketball tournament, something bigger than a national championship. Clark broke scoring records and viewership records. She made casual fans swoon and left Hall of Fame coaches wordless. Clark went to her state’s flagship university to play a game and became the reason we watch sports. She scored 41 points in the Elite Eight and 41 more in an upset of the nation’s best team, South Carolina, but if you only looked at the box scores, you got the plot but missed the movie.
The deep threes. The yo-yo dribbles followed by no-look passes. The leaning layups. All of it in the fast flow of the game, with 10 arms trying to swat the ball away. Clark painted masterpieces on the side of moving buses. There is no number for this, but it’s clearly true: Caitlin Clark has made more fans prefer women’s basketball to men’s than anybody ever.
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Teammate Kate Martin calls her “unguardable.” This is not the same as unstoppable. The loss to LSU was Iowa’s seventh of the year. Clark misses shots and commits turnovers. But there is really no way to force her to play, no scheme that weakens her discernibly.
If you trap her, she will pass to a teammate and leave you scrambling. If you get in her face, as South Carolina did, she will drive and score. If you provide help in the lane, she will fire a pass to an open teammate. If you sag off her, you’re too dumb to coach basketball; Martin, who made more than 40% of her threes this year, says she knows better than to play H-O-R-S-E with Clark.
“One minute you think you’re going to guard her a certain way,” LSU coach Kim Mulkey said Saturday, “then you watch the film and change your mind and go, ‘Oh, that’s not going to work.’”
If it were as easy as Clark made it look, she would have done it all before. Clark never won a high school state championship. Can you believe that? Dowling Catholic in West Des Moines won five titles from 1992 to 2014 but none with the best player the state ever produced. Clark went to Iowa City and immediately poured lighter fluid on the rest of the Big Ten. She led the Hawkeyes to regular-season and conference titles as a sophomore. She made All-American teams. By last spring, her career was not about how well she could play. It was about how big she could dream.
Seven Hawkeyes, including Clark, played on the same AAU team: the Iowa Attack. Clark was not always the best of them. She did not really begin to separate herself until she hit ninth grade, and then she really separated herself. At Iowa, she was scoring in bunches and playing with her pals, which was wonderful but raised a question: Could Clark become the player she wanted to be and still be the kid she was before?
In the second round of last year’s NCAA tournament, Iowa was upset by Creighton. Clark missed 15 of 19 shots and was visibly frustrated. She dismissed her demeanor afterward as the inevitable spills from carrying so much competitive juice:
“I think I’m an emotional player no matter the situation, good or bad. I think that’s how I’m going to play, really, if we’re winning, we’re losing, I’m playing good, I’m playing bad.”
That kind of answer has worked for so many greats over the years. Michael Jordan. Tom Brady. Serena Williams. But it wasn’t quite right for Caitlin Clark from West Des Moines.
Last Friday afternoon, before she took her pregame nap and then put South Carolina to sleep, Clark met with Brett Ledbetter, a performance consultant who works with the Hawkeyes. Clark and Ledbetter were both in the same Dallas hotel, but they met on Zoom, the way they had on a weekly basis all season, so they could record the session.
Ledbetter showed Clark a video clip from an Iowa scrimmage last October.
“Hey, what do you see when you see that?” Ledbetter asked.
“A different person,” Clark said.
Iowa’s coaches had called Ledbetter last summer. They had a special player, they said, with high expectations. Clark had always been a joy to coach in so many ways. She listens. She works. Teammates say that what seem like magical bits of improvisation are actually moves she has practiced many times. Clark also burns to win—she took losses hard even in AAU ball, when teams play a million games. Sometimes she would throw a water bottle or something, which wasn’t a big deal until she was.
Once a week, Ledbetter would meet with Clark, then the coaching staff, then the team. In their first meeting, Ledbetter asked Clark: What’s the difference between a leader and a performer? Her response: “A performer executes their assignment, and a leader elevates their team.” Clark focused on her “actions between the actions”: her body language and reactions when something went wrong. By the end of March, she could barely recognize herself.
A team built around one superstar is susceptible to petty jealousies and double standards. The Hawkeyes had to address a very different problem: They were so close they were wary of calling anyone out. Iowa Attack coach Dickson Jensen said during the Final Four, “This is a stage that they all dreamt up and never really thought it could ever happen.”
Put Clark at another school, and somebody would have winced when she missed a 25-footer. Put Clark at another school, and she might have tried too hard to blend in. At Iowa, the love was implicit and the roles were clear. Iowa was Caitlin’s team, not just because she wanted that, but because her teammates did.
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This spring, the Hawkeyes played with such cohesive ferocity that it seemed like they never let up. But of course they did. They just didn’t let up for long.
The Hawkeyes began the second half of their Elite Eight game against Louisville like a team that was running late and forgot something: sloppy turnover, missed shot, frenetic and disjointed basketball. Louisville cut the Iowa lead to 48–47. Martin missed a three. Louisville grabbed the defensive rebound. This is where most teams would sag and where some coaches might call a timeout. Iowa was not like most teams.
McKenna Warnock swiped the ball back from Louisville and passed to Gabbie Marshall, who drained a three. Then Louisville got Clark’ed. Clark pushed the ball up the floor and hit a cutting Warnock with a no-look pass that most players wouldn’t even think to try, then pushed the ball up again and hit the kind of three that separates Clark and Steph Curry from almost everyone else on the planet.
Like Curry has done so many times, Clark did not slow down and set her feet. She was fading left as she fired—exactly what coaches tell players not to do. But like Curry, Clark is so coordinated that her body seems exempt from the rules of physics. Like Curry, Clark is better off shooting quickly and off-balance, before the defense can catch up, then settling down and risking a contested shot. It is a gift that makes Clark, like Curry, play quicker than everybody else.
In 32 seconds, Iowa had zapped Louisville. The Hawkeyes led 56–47. Louisville called timeout. On her way off the floor, Clark looked at Kathryn Reynolds, Iowa’s director of player development, and tapped her open palm against her face. An ESPN announcer laughed and said, “I don’t know what that means.” But the Hawkeyes did. Clark was saying she was unfazed—after the bad start to the half, she and her teammates kept looking straight ahead.
Five days later, in Davidson, North Carolina, a retired men’s coach turned on ESPN.
Fifteen years ago, Bob McKillop watched his sophomore guard, Steph Curry, announce his presence to the world with a run to the Elite Eight. Curry was such a sensation that Cleveland Cavaliers star LeBron James went up to Detroit on the tournament’s second weekend just to watch him. McKillop knew before the rest of us that Curry was not just a freakish shooter. He was a complete and dominant force.
McKillop had only seen highlights of Clark. He wanted to watch her play South Carolina from his house, not a bar or restaurant, so he could focus.
Forty-one points, eight assists and six rebounds later, McKillop’s verdict: “She was absolutely sensational.” McKillop would never compare anybody to Curry. But he saw what highlights sometimes miss: “She uses these very special talents to be a great teammate.”
The season did not end the way Clark envisioned. Her silly technical foul in the third quarter, for a mild toss of the ball toward the basket, felt unjust on two levels: She barely did anything, and she had worked so hard all year to model behavior for her teammates.
But as Clark went from Czinano’s shoulder to the press conference to the hallway outside the locker room, she went from devastated to frustrated to starting to approach peace. She wished refs had called fewer fouls. She wished the Hawkeyes could have given LSU their best shot. But she did not wish she played anywhere else. She talked about Iowa, the fans from Iowa, the love from Iowa, and though she finished just short of the biggest dream an Iowan can have, she accomplished an even bigger one. This week, in gyms and driveways across the nation, little girls will pretend they are Caitlin Clark. Little boys, too.
