Caitlin Clark’s record-setting season
Yesterday, South Carolina faced off against Caitlin Clark’s Iowa for the NCAA Basketball Championship. And not since Magic Johnson’s Michigan State faced off against Larry Bird’s Indiana in 1979 has a final commanded so much national attention.
Of course, the most notable difference is that, unlike Michigan State and Indiana, South Carolina and Iowa were playing for the women’s title. And the remarkable thing is that, unlike Johnson and Bird, Clark alone accounted for much of the attention this final commanded.
In fact, her record-setting regular season had sportscasters hailing her as the most exciting player in college basketball. Period.
College basketball star Caitlin Clark of the Iowa Hawkeyes became the all-time leading scorer for both women and men in NCAA Division I history Sunday afternoon when she made a single free throw to end the second quarter against Ohio State. …
Clark’s innate showmanship and ability to amuse (and sometimes frustrate) crowds of thousands, as Maravich himself did, is one of the reasons she’s the most recognizable person in college athletics.
(MSNBC, March 3, 2024)
Even I jumped on the bandwagon. I hailed her as yet another torchbearer for my abiding contention that women are better than men in every field of human endeavor that does not require brute strength.
In sports, from Serena Williams in tennis to Katie Ledecky in swimming and Mikaela Shiffrin in Skiing, women athletes have been far more exciting to watch in recent years.
So, it’s understandable that most sports fans wanted to see Clark cap her college career by leading her team to a national championship. The problem is that South Carolina was making its own rendezvous with destiny, trying to cap an elusive perfect season. It also had personal business to settle with Iowa from last year’s tournament.
South Carolina spoils Clark’s fairytale ending
A year after a stunning Final Four defeat that ended what could have been a perfect season and national championship run, the South Carolina Gamecocks finished the job Sunday in historic fashion.
South Carolina defeated the Iowa Hawkeyes 87-75 in the women’s NCAA tournament title game to become the 10th team in Division I history to complete an undefeated season (38-0), joining UConn (6 times), Baylor (2011-12), Tennessee (1997-98) and Texas (1985-86) as the only programs to achieve such a feat.
(ESPN, April 7, 2024)
But talk about the thrill of victory (setting all kinds of scoring records) and the agony of defeat (ending her college career, having led her team to the final dance twice only to get tripped up each time).
Yet, no less a person than South Carolina coach Dawn Staley took time out of her celebration to acknowledge Clark. Staley echoed what sportscasters have said all season long as she praised and thanked Clark for “lifting up” women’s basketball to the point where it’s getting better ratings than men’s basketball — NCAA and NBA.
Granted, Staley probably empathized with Clark. She also led her college team (the University of Virginia) to the final dance twice and came up short.
But Exhibit A of the Clark effect is that yesterday’s women’s final was on the widely accessible broadcast station CBS. Whereas today’s men’s final has been relegated to the less accessible cable station TBS.
I’ve been lamenting for over a decade about TV executives putting the men’s final on broadcast TV and relegating the women’s to cable. After all, the message this was sending to young girls is that male chauvinism, sexism, and discrimination against women in sports not only still exist but are blithely tolerated.
So, congratulations to the women of South Carolina on their championship! This feat is all the more remarkable because none of the starters from last season returned this year.
Staley coached a completely new starting five line-up. And she’s the first Black coach (man or woman) to lead a team to a perfect season.
Coach Staley on trans in women’s sports
I’d be remiss not to comment on Coach Staley endorsing trans women participating in women’s sports. I couldn’t disagree more.
I could demonstrate my point if Staley would accept this simple challenge:
- Let’s select a team of NCAA men’s players who have no chance of being drafted into the NBA, dress them in drag, have them declare they’re trans (since Staley says self-identifying as such is all it takes), let them scrimmage against her women’s team, and instruct them to manhandle the women players as much as the rules allow. Then let’s see how Staley feels about trans participating in women’s sports.
Respectfully, unless it’s only for exhibition, I say let men compete against men, women against women, trans women against trans women, and trans men against trans men. Period.