What Caitlin Clark’s Fans Are Missing

Earlier this month, Iowa star Caitlin Clark surpassed basketball legend Pete Maravich to become the all-time leading scorer in Division I basketball history—the first time a woman has held this distinction.

But amid the jubilation over this milestone have been disappointing reminders of just how much of women’s basketball history is forgotten—sometimes at the expense of the Black women who helped nurture and grow the sport when it was considered an afterthought.

NCAA records show that Clark unseated the University of Washington guard Kelsey Plum as the leading scorer for women. But that’s wrong: Another player named Lynette Woodard actually held that record.

Woodard scored those points back when women’s sports were governed by the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW), which tracked individual player records. When the NCAA took over the organization, in the early ’80s, it counted only individual coaching accomplishments and school win-and-loss records. It didn’t preserve individual player statistics, which means that many athletes have not received the credit they deserved for shaping the game.

None of this is Clark’s fault. She announced this month that she is forgoing a fifth year of eligibility to enter the WNBA draft, and has been playing brilliantly. Clark has brought unprecedented attention to the women’s game, as evidenced by the record-setting crowd she helped draw to the Big Ten tournament in Minneapolis last week. In fact, Clark has been selling out arenas all season; many fans have lined up for hours to see her play.

Last year, the NCAA women’s basketball national championship game was the most-watched women’s basketball game ever, in large part because of the budding rivalry between Clark and Angel Reese of Louisiana State University, who defeated Iowa 102–85. With this being Clark’s final NCAA tournament, the expectation is that this year’s women’s tournament will be an even bigger ratings blockbuster, especially if the Hawkeyes make it to the Final Four.

[Jemele Hill: Angel Reese meets the same old stereotypes]

Unfortunately, it’s taken Clark’s massive popularity—and her breaking some hallowed all-time scoring records—to resurface not only Woodard’s historic accomplishment and her overall impeccable career but the achievements of so many other women who have been crucial to the sport’s success.

Woodard was an Olympic gold medalist who joined the Harlem Globetrotters in 1985, becoming the first woman to ever play for a men’s professional team. While she was in attendance for Clark’s notable performance against Ohio State, she told ESPN, “I don’t think Lynette Woodard would have this moment without Caitlin Clark.”

And not just Woodard. Pearl Moore actually scored more points while at a small college than Clark, Woodard, and Maravich when she played for Francis Marion College in Florence, South Carolina, from 1975 to 1979.

The NCAA has a long history of failing to properly support women’s sports. Just two years ago the NCAA was forced to publicly apologize after the former University of Oregon player Sedona Prince posted a video on social media showing how substandard the training facilities were for the women’s players competing in the tournament compared with the men’s. This same organization fought against the passage of Title IX—the landmark legislation passed in 1972 that prohibited discrimination in federally funded higher-education institutions based on gender and mandated fair opportunities for female athletes. In 1976, the NCAA tried unsuccessfully to sue its way out of complying with Title IX. The NCAA eventually complied with the law by essentially executing a hostile takeover of the AIAW.

Maybe some of that hostility remains, because the refusal to acknowledge the individual AIAW records doesn’t make any sense, and it does a disservice to not only Clark but the new fans she’s brought to the game who would be better served knowing the game’s complete history. For example, as remarkable as it is that Clark is averaging 32 points a game this season, during the AIAW days, Carol Blazejowski averaged 38.6 points a game in her final season at Montclair State College—the highest single-season scoring average for a woman. But according to the NCAA, that record doesn’t exist either.

Other prominent sports leagues have successfully integrated records from preexisting and competing leagues. In 2020, Major League Baseball announced that it was adding Negro League baseball statistics to its official records, recognizing about 3,400 Negro League baseball players as MLB players. The NFL also integrated statistics from its onetime rival, the American Football League, which the NFL merged with in 1970.

But Clark’s popularity and the NCAA’s shoddy behavior are much more than just entry points to discuss equitable record keeping. The attention Clark has drawn also opens a wider conversation about how many Black women, such as Woodard and Moore, have been marginalized in this sport despite their invaluable contributions.

Although both Moore and Woodard have been inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame—perhaps the highest honor for a basketball player—the NCAA not recognizing their scoring records is an insult to their legacies. Sports media have also played a role in dismissing the magnitude of what these athletes have accomplished. The University of Massachusetts researchers E. Nicole Melton and Risa Isard released a study in 2021 that showed a deep discrepancy in media coverage between white and Black WNBA players. The research focused on 2020, when Black women accounted for 80 percent of the postseason WNBA awards, including the Most Valuable Player award. According to the report, Black WNBA players on average received 52 media mentions while their white counterparts received 118. A’ja Wilson, the 2020 WNBA MVP, for instance, received half the media coverage of the white player Sabrina Ionescu that season, though Ionescu played in only three games that year due to injury.

White players are aware of this disparity. When the University of Connecticut star Paige Bueckers accepted her award for best female college athlete at the 2021 ESPYs, she expressed her gratitude for the Black women in basketball, because she knew their contributions tended not to be viewed with the respect they deserve.

“With the light that I have now as a white woman who leads a Black-led sport and celebrated here, I want to shed a light on Black women,” said Bueckers, who was the reigning Naismith national player of the year at the time. “They don’t get the media coverage that they deserve. They’ve given so much to the sport, the community, and society as a whole, and their value is undeniable.”

While celebrating Clark’s accomplishments and decorated NCAA career, we should also remember the pioneers who helped carry her to this inflection point in the sport. The very least that legends such as Moore, Blazejowski, and Woodard deserve is having their accomplishments properly included in the history of the game.