Iowa star Caitlin Clark’s championship pursuit takes her to Albany, weeks before

NEW YORK — Caitlin Clark is set to see quite a bit of New York over the next few weeks.

With Monday night’s hard-fought victory over West Virginia, Clark’s No. 1-seeded Iowa Hawkeyes booked their tickets to Albany, where they’ll face Colorado on Saturday in the Sweet 16 round of the NCAA Tournament.

Clark finished with 32 points in the 64-54 win, clinching yet another scoring record. The generational superstar’s 1,113 points in 2023-24 are the most ever in a single season of Division I women’s basketball, passing Washington’s Kelsey Plum, who scored 1,109 in 2016-17.

The 22-year-old Clark this season already became the all-time scoring leader among both women and men in NCAA Division I basketball, and now boasts 3,830 career points.

The senior guard’s pursuit of her first national championship now takes her to Albany’s 17,500-seat MVP Arena, where the Hawkeyes are set to tip off Saturday at 3:30 p.m.

Clark, college basketball’s biggest star, heads to New York’s Capital Region with tremendous hype, with all of the tickets on the resale website StubHub exceeding $200 for Saturday’s two-game session. Those tickets also include entry for UCLA vs. the defending champion LSU Tigers, whose coach, Kim Mulkey, added extra intrigue over the weekend by threatening a lawsuit over an unpublished Washington Post story she ripped as a “hit piece.”

Monday marked Clark’s final game at Iowa City’s Carver-Hawkeye Arena, where she played her home games the past four seasons.

“I wish I could have stayed on court for a while and soaked it all in a little longer,” Clark said. “I don’t think that there’s a better way we could go out than just a gritty, resilient win. Honestly, to me, it was almost the opposite of Iowa basketball in a way, but I think that’s what makes it that much sweeter.”

Clark led the Hawkeyes to the national championship game last season but lost to LSU. That 2023 tournament run included back-to-back 40-point games by Clark, including against previously unbeaten South Carolina in the Final Four.

The 6-foot Clark leads the nation with 31.8 points per game this season and has scored at least 27 in both of her tournament games this year.

“I don’t think people always realize how hard it is to get to this point,” Clark said Monday. “It’s really special. It’s unique. Not many teams ever get to do this. There’s 360 teams in women’s college basketball, and we’re one of 16 that get to come and practice tomorrow. I’m just really grateful that I get to do that [and] have another week with this group.”

Clark declared last month for the WNBA draft at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where she’s widely expected to go first overall to the Indiana Fever. The draft is set to take place April 15.

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