Caitlin Clark and the WNBA: The right time, and about time

“We have a lot of amazing players, but not enough people know all the amazing people. We’ve got Caitlin now. Just the gravitational pull she is having will put more eyes on the WNBA, so we’re going to get more visibility. And any of that helps.”

 — Liberty coach Sandy Brondello

Caitlin Clark, who is well on the way to becoming the richest athlete in the history of women's team sports, will take the court Sunday in Brooklyn looking to win her third  game as a professional basketball player.

Barclays Center likely will be sold out again for Clark and the Indiana Fever’s second appearance at the arena this season, with a significant portion of the crowd there to cheer on the WNBA rookie who has brought so many new fans into the game.

Clark’s style of play and the way she captivated fans earlier this year while setting an NCAA scoring record at Iowa have been a game-changer for women’s basketball, elevating it from a borderline niche sport to one that can lead off a SportsCenter newscast and land an athlete on SNL.

Thanks in large part to Clark, the WNBA finally is having its moment. Why her? Why now? Clark, 22, is far from the first great women’s  player to come into the league. What is it about her that makes her so appealing to sponsors and fans? Why are some anointing her the Michael Jordan of women’s basketball even before she plays a full season in the WNBA?

The tidy and easy answer to all these questions is that Clark is a generational player who by sheer will and talent will forever raise the profile of the women’s game. The reality, however, is a bit more complicated. The so-called Caitlin Clark Effect owes as much to the changes in college sports and the attitudes of society and media at large as it does to her decidedly incredible ability and exciting style of play.

Clark is  a great player with great timing, starting with her freshman year at Iowa, when she led  her team to the Sweet 16 in 2021.

That tournament was the one in which players blew up social media with photos that showed disparities between the women’s and men’s weight training and other facilities, prompting the NCAA to hire an outside firm to review equality issues. As a result of the Kaplan Report (a 2022 study that criticized gender inequality in the NCAA Division I basketball tournaments), the NCAA approved the use of the term March Madness to be used in promoting the women’s tournament and increased the amount of spending it used in promoting and staffing both tournaments.

At the same time, 2021 was the first year that athletes could begin signing NIL deals. In its first year, Clark signed deals with Hy-Vee Supermarkets, H&R Block and Topps. By the time she graduated, Clark had made $3.1 million from NIL deals and was appearing in national commercials for Gatorade, State Farm and Nike.

“The NIL has had just a tremendous impact on her,” said Meredith Geisler, an assistant professor of sports management at George Washington who has three decades of experience working with WNBA and NBA athletes. “Look at all the players prior to that who were incredible players — A’ja Wilson, Sue Bird, Diana Taurasi — they all made names for themselves in college basketball, but not at the level Caitlin has been able to capitalize on because of NIL.”

Remember that magical year in 2017 when Kelsey Plum set the NCAA women’s scoring record at Washington? The bet here is that, unless you were a dedicated women’s college basketball fan, you weren’t even aware then that it happened. Plum did not draw sellout crowds everywhere she played. There were no regular updates on SportsCenter.

Contrast that with the attention that Clark, already appearing in national commercials as a junior, received during her senior season when she broke Plum's record  and then Pete Maravich’s NCAA scoring record. Fans, many of whom might have first been introduced to Clark through a State Farm commercial with Jimmy Butler, were helping to sell out her games on the road and turn her NCAA Tournament games into must-see television.

Liberty coach Sandy Brondello, who has coached a number of WNBA greats — including Taurasi, Breanna Stewart and Jonquel Jones — believes that anything that brings more exposure and money to the WNBA is a good thing.

“We have a lot of amazing players, but not enough people know all the amazing people,” Brondello said. “We’ve got Caitlin now. Just the gravitational pull she is having will put more eyes on the WNBA, so we’re going to get more visibility. And any of that helps.”

It does, yet it is complicated

It can’t be ignored that the WNBA player attracting the most advertising dollars is white in a sport that is 80% women of color, and identifies as straight in a sport that has a significant gay population.

“She’s a phenomenal player and deserves recognition, but the WNBA didn’t start with Caitlin Clark,” said Risa Isard, an assistant professor of sports management at the University of Connecticut. “We’ve seen a bit of an erasure of her predecessors who have built the league to get to this moment, especially those who have different gender and race expressions.”

There is statistical evidence that the preference for covering white WNBA players over Black players is significant.

Isard and Nicole Melton, co-director of the Laboratory for Inclusion and Diversity in Sport at the University of Massachusetts, counted every time an active WNBA player’s name was mentioned in more than 550 online articles from ESPN, CBS Sports and Sports Illustrated during the 2020 season.

One of the more glaring findings was that 2020 WNBA MVP A’ja Wilson, who is Black, received half as much media coverage as Sabrina Ionescu, the Liberty’s first pick in the 2020 WNBA Draft, who is white. Ionescu played in only three games before a season-ending injury. Overall, using methods to control for points and rebounds, it was found that Black players received less than half the coverage of their white counterparts.

Unlike in men’s sports, many decisions about a female athlete’s marketability still hinge on her perceived attractiveness. And many of those making that decision are a less diverse group than the players and fans themselves.

“There’s a lot of data across the history of sports that the sex appeal, or the perceived hetero sex appeal, of a woman athlete has driven a lot of the decisions of sponsorship in women’s sports,” Isard said. “We know a lot of the decision-makers in these spaces are largely white men. When they are making these kinds of gut decisions about what is marketable, it’s not always data-driven.”

Without getting into the particulars of her race and sexual orientation, Geisler agrees that Clark checks a lot of boxes, adding that it’s the perfect convergence of the right player at the right time.

Brondello, who has seen many changes in the league since she started her career as a player in 1998, believes the time is coming when WNBA players will be appreciated and compensated for the great athletes they are. She notes that other athletes now are getting the attention that they have long deserved and mentioned that Wilson finally is getting her own signature shoe, making her the first Black WNBA player to have one.

“The WNBA is all about inclusion. It’s all about athletes,” Brondello said. “Caitlin is an amazing athlete. There are so many amazing athletes here. We have wonderful Black athletes. We have wonderful white athletes. And sexual orientation? That has nothing to do with sport.

“In the end, we have more eyeballs on our sport. The winner here is the WNBA.”

By Barbara Barker

barbara.barker@newsday.commeanbarb

Barbara Barker is an award-winning columnist and features writer in the sports department at Newsday. She has covered sports in New York for more than 20 years.