Caitlin Clark says that she always dreamed of playing in the WNBA – and dreamed of playing in front of big crowds – but the seismic transformation she has inspired in women’s basketball has still taken her by surprise.
“Being on the magnitude it is,” she told CNN Sports recently, “is kind of hard to imagine.”
During the Indiana Fever’s first game of the new season in May, the excitement levels were at a fever pitch. Journalists covering the game against the Chicago Sky compared the energy both inside and outside of the packed 17,000-seat arena to a championship game, not the opener of a 44-game regular season.
Her teammates dreamed it too, though many wondered if they’d ever experience it personally during their careers. During that home opener, Indiana’s 37-year-old Dawanna Bonner became the WNBA’s third-highest scorer of all time, but all the hoopla at Gainbridge Fieldhouse was something new.
“The atmosphere was insane,” Bonner explained to CNN Sports. “I don’t think I’ve ever played in front of that many people before, I was a little shellshocked. You see it on TV, but to be in it, it’s like, ‘Whoa!’”
Since its inception in 1996, the WNBA alone was never able to fully support professional players, and Bonner spent 16 years supplementing her income from the Phoenix Mercury and the Connecticut Sun by playing in the Czech Republic, Spain, Russia, China, Israel, Hungary and Turkey.
She said, “To have all those fans screaming for you is a pretty cool experience, you’ve gotta get used to it!”
Inspirational evolution
Fever guard Kelsey Mitchell, 29, is now in the eighth year of her professional career and she’s also having to adjust to the intensity of life at the epicenter of a women’s sports revolution.
“It’s an experience,” Mitchell chuckled, explaining to CNN Sports that the intensity isn’t just confined to the court in front of packed arenas. “The media, the constant eyes, some of the eyes you least expect. I’ve been in the league a while, so this is kind of new for me. I knew it would get here eventually. I didn’t expect the impact, but it’s such a positive and beautiful way.”
Even the younger players, like 24-year-old Lexie Hull, appreciate that the explosion in the popularity of the women’s game could not have been taken for granted.
“I was talking to Caitlin in the locker room, and we said, ‘How lucky are we to lace up our shoes and do this for a living, as a job?’” Hull told CNN. “The amount of people who come out every night and support us and cheer for us, it’s pretty surreal.”
Some of those young fans are now dreaming of following their idols into the league. Eleven-year-old Kamryn Thomas and her friend Merridy Kennington and their moms drove 300 miles to see Clark and the Fever play in Atlanta against the Dream.
“I think both of our dreams is to be in the WNBA,” Kamryn said confidently, while Merridy said that Clark is doing more than just inspiring them: “I just feel that watching her makes me better and better.”
A change from years past
Excitement in women’s basketball might seem normal to such young fans, but their parents have told them that it wasn’t always this way.
“I’ve explained to her that I grew up playing college basketball and it was never like this,” said Stephanie Thomas. “Caitlin Clark has delivered something to women’s sports that I don’t think anybody else could deliver, and I think she’s got a lot of women excited to see the future of their athlete daughters.”
This moment in women’s sports is long overdue, and everybody touched by it seems to recognize that things will never be the same again.
Hull said she spent four years playing basketball and studying for a degree at university, assuming that she’d get a regular job at the end of it.
“I didn’t think I’d be playing basketball every day,” she explained to CNN Sports. “This is (now) a real option for girls, they can have these dreams in first and second grade, being a basketball player is now a legitimate goal to have. I just can’t imagine what the sport is going to look like when players have been playing with that goal in mind for 15 years.”
While some WNBA players might struggle to say that the rapid transformation of their sport is down to one player, the ticket prices for recent Fever games make Clark’s impact hard to deny. TickPick reported a 71% decrease in ticket value when she was injured on the sidelines, while Sports Illustrated reported prices plummeting from $393 down to just $7.
“I like to think our team is here for her,” Mitchell said. “So, whatever she does, she keeps changing the world, and we’re here to support it.”
Clark herself says she can’t imagine where things might go from here. She can remember being the young fan looking up with wide eyes and big dreams and she understands the responsibility that she carries now.
“I try to make as much time as I can to sign an autograph because that can really impact somebody’s life. Maybe they’re going to put that up in their room and look at it every day and have something to dream about, it’s not something I take lightly at all,” the superstar guard said to CNN.
“A lot of people didn’t believe that women’s sports would be in the moment that it is today. It’s going to continue to grow and I’m lucky to be a part of it. I think, really, the sky’s the limit.”
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