After decades of treatment as second-class citizens, female college athletes are surpassing men in popularity, interest, and financial potential.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Caitlin Clark’s remarkable season is how many people have been watching it.
All but two of the University of Iowa women’s basketball games have sold out or set an attendance record, according to the university’s athletic department. Iowa sold out its season-ticket allotment in August—three months before the first game—and teams hosting Clark have found her to be a one-woman boon to the local economy. An Associated Press analysis found that Iowa road games have seen a 150 percent increase in average attendance. Tickets to the February game in which Clark set the all-time college women’s scoring record were, at about $400 on the secondary market, the most expensive in the history of women’s college basketball—until the game, two weeks later, in which she passed the men’s all-time scoring leader, when the average resale ticket went for $546. Clark has made Iowa games competitive in TV viewership with NBA games and the highest-profile men’s college matchups. Heading into the NCAA tournament, she is easily the most famous player in college basketball, if not all of college sports.
And yet Clark’s singular level of stardom obscures an even bigger shift taking place in college sports: After decades of treatment as second-class citizens, women are surpassing men in popularity, interest, and financial potential. The second-most-famous player in American college basketball is also a woman. So, arguably, are the third-, fourth-, and fifth-. Aside from dedicated hoops fans, most Americans probably don’t know much about Zach Edey, Purdue’s hulking center and the presumptive men’s national player of the year for the second year in a row. Many more people have heard of Angel Reese and JuJu Watkins. Eventually, the men’s game will get another zeitgeist-dominating star, but it could be a while, given that the most famous men’s prospects don’t spend much time, if any, in college. Zion Williamson came through the ranks for one year in 2019. Victor Wembanyana didn’t play in college at all, nor did three other top-five picks in last year’s NBA draft.
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Clark’s greatness as a player is a big part of her mainstream breakthrough, but it’s not the whole story. Clark sits at the intersection of several major shifts in the economics of college sports, and she arrived at the perfect moment to accelerate and take advantage of those changes. The new ability of college athletes to monetize themselves and build individual brands has led to a women’s hooper, not a football or men’s-basketball player, becoming the biggest draw. Clark is the first star of this magnitude to emerge from women’s college sports, but she will not be the last. More than any scoring record, her legacy will be proving that there’s no ceiling on how popular women’s sports can be.
Clark is astonishing to watch. She makes shots from every zip code and slings deft passes that call into question how many eyeballs she has. The only college-basketball fan who can look away from her is the Ohio State student who ran into her while rushing the court after one of Iowa’s rare losses. Clark seems comfortable with her stardom. She signs endless autographs, takes pictures with kids, and talks often with the press. “Watch her postgame, trying to leave the gym,” the longtime Iowa sports writer Patrick Vint told me. “It’s like the Beatles.”
But all of that talent and charisma would probably not have been enough to make Clark such a cultural sensation even five years ago. Women’s sports have historically gotten short shrift from campus administrators and the NCAA, who too often have treated women’s sports as little more than a box to be checked for Title IX–compliance purposes.
Only recently have sports’ power brokers come to see women’s athletics less as an obligation than as a potential growth property. Some of that stems from an obvious and overdue realization: Fans enjoy watching women’s sports. Softball competes with and sometimes beats college baseball for viewers. Ratings are up for gymnastics and volleyball. But just as crucial was the NCAA’s 2021 decision, made under legal and political pressure, to allow athletes to be paid for the use of their name, image, and likeness. That reform didn’t just permit booster payments from the local car dealership. It created a financial incentive for college athletes to build their individual brands on social media and leverage those followings into lucrative endorsement deals. The biggest college stars today are well-known personalities—athlete-influencers, essentially—who carry individual marketing value. And, perhaps surprisingly, given the dominance of football compared with other college sports, these stars are disproportionately women. The Olympic gold-medal gymnast Suni Lee, who competed until November 2022 at Auburn, has about 3.1 million total followers on Instagram and TikTok. She sometimes shared a gym with LSU’s Olivia Dunne, who has 13 million. Compare that with LSU quarterback Jayden Daniels, the most recent winner of the Heisman Trophy, who has just shy of 200,000 Instagram followers.
At the highest levels of stardom, collegiate women have outpaced men at building online followings. (Two notable exceptions are the University of Colorado quarterback Shedeur Sanders and the University of Southern California guard Bronny James. Not coincidentally, their fathers are two of the most famous American athletes of all time.) Basketball has the most stars: Clark, UConn’s Paige Bueckers, LSU’s Reese and Hailey Van Lith, USC’s Watkins, and Stanford’s Cameron Brink are among the big-ticket social-media presences. This freshly monetized star power is combining with the broader recognition of how fun the games are to generate an overall boom for the sport itself. The right to broadcast the NCAA women’s-basketball tournament is valued at $65 million a year in a new agreement with ESPN, more than triple its worth under the previous agreement, signed in 2010.
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Clark is at the tip of the spear, having proved to be a sought-after partner for blue-chip companies, including Gatorade, Nike, State Farm, and Goldman Sachs. Some commentators have speculated that she may be at the top of her earning capacity right now, rather than in the WNBA, where she will make roughly $77,000 in salary as a rookie next year. The WNBA doesn’t have as big a fan base as the college game. Attendance is rising, but no WNBA team sold out more than 12 of 20 games in the 2023 season. Even Brittney Griner’s return last May—a marquee event celebrating a marquee player—didn’t fill the house. In professional markets with lots of entertainment competition, the roar of the crowd will not be the same as it was on campus.
But we’ve also never seen a player enter the WNBA with as much hype as Clark. As the recent No. 1 WNBA draftee Aliyah Boston explained in an interview with the sports reporter Khristina Williams, “These brands still want to follow you. Your fan base does not change.” Clark, as the consensus best player in the draft, will join Boston on the Indiana Fever, which once again owns the first pick. Clark already has a deal in place with the Indiana company that sponsors the team’s arena.
Clark’s economic power is even more striking considering the broader sports-business dynamics right now: With the notable exception of the NFL, getting fans excited about anything in sports these days is a big lift. Attention spans are short. Young people are interested in other things. Leagues are scrambling to make games shorter in order to keep spectators engaged, and many teams across sports are struggling to get butts in seats. One person in the college-sports industry right now has a demonstrated ability to cut through those headwinds, to make every game she plays feel like the most important game that’s ever been played. She happens to be a woman. And whoever succeeds her as the face of college basketball will probably be a woman too.
Support for this project was provided by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
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