After a dazzling college career that smashed records on and off the basketball court, Caitlin Clark’s legacy as a trailblazing icon for women’s sports is already secure, and she showed that when a record-breaking average of 18.7 million viewers tuned in to watch Sunday’s women’s National Collegiate Athletic Association championship game.
ESPN said that audience figures for the game, which saw the University of South Carolina take down Clark and the University of Iowa Hawkeyes, peaked at 24 million viewers.
The numbers made the game not only the most watched women’s college basketball game in history, but also the most-watched basketball game of any kind — men’s or women’s, college or professional — since 2019.
Photo: Kirby Lee-USA TODAY
Now, as the 22-year-old prepares to be chosen with the No. 1 pick in next week’s WNBA draft, experts are predicting Clark might have the same kind of transformative effect on women’s professional basketball.
WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert on Monday said that Clark and the next generation of women’s basketball players would be economic engines that ensure the league’s financial footing for the next 30 years.
Engelbert told CNBC that the WNBA expects to see its media deals double in value, from about US$50 million a year to US$100 million, when they are next negotiated in 2025.
“We hope to at least double our rights fees,” Engelbert said. “Women’s sports rights fees have been undervalued for too long. So we have this enormous opportunity at a time when the media landscape is changing so much.”
The arrival in the WNBA of Clark and other college stars such as Louisiana State University’s Angel Reese and South Carolina’s Kamilla Cardoso could have the same kind of impact as the 1980s rivalry between Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, which helped create the modern NBA, Engelbert said.
“I think we’re setting the league up with this next media rights deal not just for the next three to five years but for the next 30,” Engelbert said. “If you look at the history of men’s sports, do we have our ‘Bird-Magic’ moment like the NBA?”
The WNBA class of 2024 would bring with them built-in audiences from college basketball and, significantly, substantial social media followings.
Clark’s 258,000 followers on X is more than 100,000 followers more than Breanna Stewart, the current WNBA Most Valuable Player. Reese — affectionately nicknamed ‘Bayou Barbie’ — could bring her X following of 415,000 to the WNBA.
Clark’s impact on the business of college basketball in the past few seasons is well documented.
This season, she and the Hawkeyes set or broke attendance records in all but two of their games, US National Collegiate Athletic Association data showed.
The University of Iowa women’s basketball program generated US$3.8 million in the 2022-2023 season. That was up from US$1.7 million a year earlier.
Already there are signs that the “Caitlin Clark Effect” is starting to wash over the WNBA. The Indiana Fever, the club who are guaranteed to take Clark with the top draft pick on Monday, sold out seats for games against the Connecticut Sun and the Los Angeles Sparks within hours of putting them on sale.
Courtside seats for the May 28 game with Los Angeles in Indianapolis were being offered for US$660 on one resale Web site.
It is not just Indiana who expect to cash in on Clark’s box office appeal.
The Las Vegas Aces have already announced plans to move their July 2 home game against Indiana from their 12,000-seat Michelob Ultra Arena in Las Vegas to the bigger, 20,000-capacity T-Mobile Arena.
Mary Jo Kane, a professor at the University of Minnesota and founding director of its Tucker Center for Research on Girls and Women in Sport, says Clark has been an “unprecedented tsunami of impact and influence.”
“No one has been able to capture the kind of magic or lightning in a bottle like Caitlin Clark has done,” Kane told National Public Radio in a recent interview.
Clark derives satisfaction from a collegiate career that redefined the popular appeal of women’s sport.
“When you’re given the opportunity, women’s sport thrives and that’s been the coolest part for me on this journey,” said Clark, whose achievements this season included breaking Pete Maravich’s 54-year-old all-time college basketball scoring record.
“We started the season playing in front of 55,000 people, now we’re ending it in front of 15 million people on TV. It just continues to get better and better and that’s never going to stop,” she said.
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