Dear Caitlin Clark:
I just want to thank you for all that you’ve done for girls’ sports. I’ve been a sports fan for all of my long life, and I can count on one hand the number of times that I have witnessed a phenomenon such as the one that you have created.
Other than the LA teams that I grew up rooting for or the Arizona ones that I now call my favorites, Iowa has always held a special place in my heart. My high school team wore the same black-and-gold color scheme as the Hawkeyes. My mom grew up in Iowa and several of her brothers played sports in high school and college in Iowa and Nebraska. My uncle, Alfonso DiMarco, was a star quarterback at the University of Iowa. He would later become a Hall of Fame high school football coach and athletic director at Dowling High School, your alma mater.
I could tell you horror stories about the days before Title IX. I had twin sisters who were great softball players. They won the LA high school championship when they were sophomores. Right before the start of their junior-year season, their coach died unexpectedly. Instead of conducting a quick search for a new coach, the school’s administration just canceled the season.
A year later, the school still hadn’t hired a coach (it was just a girls’ sport, after all), so, at the age of 18, I coached them for free. We won the championship, but unlike the football banquet that the school paid for at the fancy hotel, we went to that new In-N-Out place that had just opened.
Things got better after Title IX, although a whole lot of men had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into the 20th century. Here in Tucson, girls had to play softball in the winter so that the boys could have the gyms to themselves. (The girls played basketball during baseball season.)
It was so bad that a “legendary” (which, you know, means “old”) coach, in defending the obviously sexist policy, went so far as to say, “It’s for the best because it’s more important for boys to get college scholarships (than for girls).”
Even when educators accepted Title IX (many, begrudgingly), there was still some overt pushback and widespread subtle sexism. You’d hear stuff like, “Yeah, girls should be allowed to play, but who’s going to want to watch it?”
Here in Tucson, the University of Arizona’s men’s team, a national powerhouse since the 1980s, sold out McKale Center every game for decades. Meanwhile, the UA women’s team often had crowds totaling in the hundreds. Supporting girls’ and women’s sports couldn’t be forced. People couldn’t be cajoled or shamed into doing it. The transition had to come naturally.
It took a highly improbable run by the Arizona Wildcat women’s team to the WNIT championship one year, followed by a spot in the NCAA Championship game the next year (the COVID-19 year) to make Arizona women’s basketball cool. Now, the UA women average 8,000 or 9,000 fans per game and have the best attendance in the Pac-12.
It can probably be argued that it would have happened eventually, but those magical two years acted as evolutionary turbo-charging, allowing a few steps to be skipped in between.
That brings us to you. You’re causing our sports society to skip a few steps all by yourself. Your off-the-charts athleticism, your passion for the game and your willingness (even desire) to be the ambassador to a new era in women’s basketball make you a legend in your own time.
I also want to thank you for the help that you’re giving me and other girls’ coaches. For the past several years, the number of girls who play basketball has been falling off all over the country. There are several possible reasons for this. Here in Arizona, because the weather is good, soccer is played during basketball season, in the winter, so kids who might have chosen to do both sports now have to choose.
To me, volleyball is the culprit. A couple of decades ago, high school girls would play volleyball and then head right into basketball. Back then, the (ugh!) club volleyball season would start in early March, after the high school basketball season ended. But the clubs, sensing a shot at more money, began expanding the club “season” to where it now begins, literally, the day after the high school state championships.
However, while volleyball is cool, basketball is now cool! You have elevated the game and become a national craze in the process. Good for you. I hope you have another wild run to the NCAA Final Four like last year. You deserve it, but so do women from Stanford and South Carolina and Connecticut.
Thanks to you, young girls all over the country are dreaming the dreams that they deserve.
