Caitlin Clark can take women’s basketball to a level never seen before | Caitlin

Since the NCAA women’s basketball tournament final on Sunday drew more US television viewers than the men’s final for the first time in history, it has been hailed as a watershed moment for women’s sports in America. A vanguard of star players including Connecticut’s Paige Bueckers, LSU’s Angel Reese and Southern California’s JuJu Watkins have lifted the profile of the women’s game to unprecedented heights over the past few months while recalibrating expectations for how all women’s sports can be covered, commercialised and consumed.

But none of them have commanded the national consciousness quite like Caitlin Clark, the ponytailed once-in-a-generation talent from the University of Iowa whose modest 6ft frame belies her outsized impact on college basketball and American sports at large.

The 22-year-old native of West Des Moines, who broke Pete Maravich’s 54-year-old record to become the all-time highest scorer in major college basketball history earlier this year, carried Iowa all the way to the final, repeatedly setting new TV ratings benchmarks along the way. After the Hawkeyes were denied a storybook ending by South Carolina in Sunday’s title game, despite Clark leading all scorers with 30 points, Gamecocks’ head coach, Dawn Staley, had barely started her victory speech at Cleveland’s Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse before paying tribute to the woman of the moment, saying: “I want to personally thank Caitlin Clark for lifting up our sport. She carried a heavy load for our sport and it’s not going to stop here.”