Iowa Hawkeyes guard Caitlin Clark celebrates setting the NCAA women’s scoring record in a game against the Michigan Wolverines at Carver-Hawkeye Arena. JEFFREY BECKER (USA TODAY SPORTS VIA REUTERS WITH)
When she was a child, her father couldn’t find a girls’ basketball team, so he put her in a boys’ basketball team. At 22 years old, Caitlin Clark has revolutionized women’s college basketball, even breaking men’s records. After leading the Iowa Hawkeyes to their third consecutive Big Ten championship (one of the groups in the first university division), the guard will now try to go as far as possible in the national championship, which she begins this week. Whether she succeeds or not, she has already managed to be more popular than any male college player and set the all-time college basketball scoring records. The professional league (the WNBA) awaits her arrival with an expectation comparable to that raised last year by Frenchman Victor Wembanyama in the NBA. In Indiana, where she got the first pick in the draft in the lottery, she is already eagerly awaiting her.
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Not only is she a bomber with amazing aim, capable of scoring again and again from where the rest of the players don’t even dare to try. She also puts up blocks, grabs rebounds and provides assists non-stop. When she is overwhelmed by two rivals – which is frequent, given her offensive power – she is able to find the solution and hand the basket to a teammate as if it were nothing. But, at 1.81 meters tall, she is also skilled at driving into the basket or shooting from mid-distance. For all these reasons, she is compared to Stephen Curry and there is speculation that she has an impact on women’s professional basketball similar to what the Golden State Warriors star caused in the NBA.
“I have watched her for a long time and I have realized how powerful she is on the court. The curious thing is that the way he plays, the distance and the level of difficulty of his shots are, obviously, very similar to the way I play,” Curry himself praised this week in an interview on CBS. “His shooting is his superpower, but the rest of his game is just as polished as that, so it’s something to watch,” he added. The record of 162 three-pointers in a single college season set in 2008 by Curry, the best three-pointer in basketball history, is one that Clark has broken.
Clark was a precocious talent. After leaving the children’s team, he began to play with older teammates. Universities were already courting her when she was a schoolboy, before even reaching high school. With her athletic gifts, she was also a starter (and outstanding scorer) on the soccer team, although she left it to focus on the basket. After finishing high school, she rejected other offers and decided to stay at the University of Iowa. In her first college game she scored 27 points. Weeks later, she recorded her first triple-double (10+ points, rebounds and assists). She finished the season as the absolute leader in points, assists, field goals and three-pointers.
In her second year of college, apart from a few individual records and leading the statistics in various categories (including points and assists per game), she led her team to win the Big Ten title, with best player honors for her. . However, in the national championship, the Hawkeyes were upset in the second round on one of Clark’s rare bad days. In the third season it was already causing a sensation throughout the country. Her pavilions were filled to see her and the television audience skyrocketed. While she continued to break records and, after winning the Big Ten title, she led her team to the final of the national championship, but was defeated by the Louisina State Tigers of Angel Reese, the Barbie of the Swamps, another of the basketball stars. female university.
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2024-03-25 16:51:35
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