There’s all the time an indication.
Final spring, I first observed one thing particular was taking place after I couldn’t stroll half a block in Dallas with out working into massive packs of Iowa or South Carolina followers. There have been additionally my man buddies again residence who, for the primary time, had been planning their weekend across the ladies’s NCAA Event video games as a substitute of the lads’s. And all of the sports activities discuss radio channels had been discussing Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese. My spidey senses had been tingling.
I might really feel it in my bones that the game was primed for a breakthrough second, although I couldn’t have imagined that almost 10 million individuals would tune in for the Iowa-LSU nationwide title recreation, shattering the earlier document for viewership of a ladies’s basketball recreation. However I might inform that the barrier of apathy had been damaged; these ladies, that late-game taunting, the game itself — it’d all be talked about for days and weeks and months to return.
I’ve the identical feeling proper now.
One other large leap is coming for a sport that should be rising accustomed to those positive aspects. As we head into March Insanity, it’s the ladies’s aspect of the event that’s taking middle stage. It’s the ladies’s stars who shine the brightest. It’s the ladies’s recreation with probably the most intriguing storylines.
And … that’s not even debatable!
“We’ve been on a gradual incline,” USC coach Lindsay Gottlieb stated throughout my SiriusXM present Sunday night time. “You mix the star energy in our recreation, the truth that you might have a few of these established stars that followers have actually constructed a relationship with like Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese, Cameron Brink — and you then add on this extremely dynamic freshman class.
“What we’re seeing is that girls’s basketball is a very marketable entity. Individuals like it. We’re in an area the place there’s an unimaginable quantity of pleasure round it. … It’s one thing that’s, actually, a motion.”
We’ve seen these insanely lengthy strains of followers ready to get into arenas — any area — to see Clark play. Greater than 3 million individuals watched Clark’s Hawkeyes beat Nebraska in time beyond regulation within the Massive Ten championship recreation on CBS, with the viewers peaking at 4.45 million (!) in time beyond regulation. Clark is so ubiquitous that she was mentioned a number of occasions throughout this 12 months’s NBA All-Star Weekend’s broadcast … whereas her State Farm commercials aired throughout its breaks.
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ESPN just lately introduced that this was its most-watched ladies’s school basketball common season in additional than 15 years, its viewership up 37 % on ESPN platforms from final season. Its SEC championship final Sunday between LSU and South Carolina drew nearly 2 million viewers, and the Pac-12 title match on the identical day between USC and Stanford — the Trojans a No. 1 seed and the Cardinal a No. 2 seed within the upcoming event — drew extra 1.4 million viewers, up 461 % from final season’s championship. These three title video games out-rated three NBA weekend video games.
With extra eyeballs comes elevated familiarity for followers, each new and previous. Now, they know the celebrities by first title solely. Caitlin. Angel. Paige. JuJu. Cam. Hannah.
Fast! Stroll into your neighborhood sports activities bar and ask somebody to call 5 males’s basketball gamers taking part in this week. Can they do it? I’m unsure I’d wager a beer on that.
Lately on his podcast, KG Licensed, Kevin Garnett made the identical level. “That is the primary time watching school basketball the place I do know extra women than guys,” he stated.”That is the primary time we’ve acquired ladies’s basketball forward of males’s basketball. Girls’s school basketball is … electrical. It’s blowing the man’s recreation out of the water.”
After all, that gained’t matter a lot once we sit on our couches or bar stools for 14 straight hours on Thursday and 14 straight hours on Friday. We’ll watch the lads’s video games simply the identical, falling in love with Cinderellas though they bust our brackets. We’ll agonize over a coach’s horrendous late-game clock administration. And we’ll maintain watching the lads as a result of theirs has lengthy been the very best postseason in sports activities.
However parity on the ladies’s aspect has modified the calculus a bit. So has the transient nature of males’s school basketball; one-and-dones coupled with the switch portal has made it more durable than ever for gamers to change into family names throughout the game nationally. And so lots of the males’s greatest stars — its Corridor of Fame coaches — have retired and left the game with out its weightiness.
And that has opened a door for the ladies’s recreation to run by means of. That is the game with gamers who keep three or 4 years and develop in entrance of our eyes. That is the game with its Corridor of Fame coaches nonetheless main the best way — many themselves acknowledged on a first-name foundation: Daybreak, Geno, Tara, Kim — at the same time as parity will increase and school athletics evolves beneath their toes.
So, this week, I’ll be most enthusiastic about Clark’s final event run and whether or not she will will the Hawkeyes to a different Last 4. I’ll wish to see JuJu Watkins, the freshman phenom who has revitalized USC’s ladies’s program, on the massive stage for the primary time. I’ll wish to faux I’ve half of the vitality in my day by day life that Notre Dame’s Hannah Hidalgo does on protection in only one recreation. I’ll be on pins and needles ready to see if South Carolina can full an ideal season after falling simply quick a 12 months in the past.
There’ll undoubtedly be the standard Neanderthal takes, males who nonetheless attempt to declare that “no one” watches ladies’s basketball regardless of the entire proof on the contrary. These opinions now get shouted down by the dads who bond with their daughters by taking them to video games and the mothers of little boys who put on Clark jerseys and don’t assume there’s something unusual about idolizing a feminine athlete. These males can cling to their foolish little outdated punchlines that make no sense anymore, whereas we watch compelling basketball and be a part of this rocket ship because it rises.
“Eyes had been opened final 12 months, and we simply fed off of that momentum, and it didn’t ever cease,” Notre Dame coach Niele Ivey informed me Sunday. “Nice groups, nice gamers — the ladies’s recreation is simply sizzling.”
(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; Photographs of Angel Reese, Caitlin Clark, Hannah Hidalgo: Eakin Howard / Adam Bettcher / Icon Sportswire, Joseph Weiser / Icon Sportswire)
