Caitlin Clark effect extends to the CEO suite

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Most of the little girls who covet an autograph from basketball phenom Caitlin Clark won’t play in the WNBA. But Clark’s talent, character and charisma inspire them to play team sports in grade school through high school. That strain of the Caitlin Clark effect could lead them to the CEO suite as adults.

There’s still a paucity of women leading companies, especially public corporations. In 2024, only 10.4% of Fortune 500 companies are led by women. Three Minnesota women CEOs are on the national list — Beth Ford of Land O’Lakes, Corie Barry of Best Buy and Teresa Rasmussen of Thrivent.

Like Clark, Ford is a native of Iowa, where she was on the basketball, tennis and track-and-field teams in high school. Kelly Skalicky, CEO of Stearns Bank, is a member of the Minnesota High School Basketball Hall of Fame for her exceptional career with the Albany Huskies. Vicki Holt, former CEO of Maple Plain-based Protolabs, was a varsity swimmer at Duke University.

That early exposure to girls’ and women’s sports gave these three women the confidence and leadership skills to compete in classrooms and in their workplaces. By being in sports competition, they learned lessons about how to set goals. As they built their careers, they weren’t afraid to take risks or fail.

When Ford, Skalicky and Holt were in high school, the percentage of girls involved in competitive sports was much lower than it is today. During the 2022-23 school year, boys filled 119,352 slots on Minnesota teams, while girls occupied 99,742 positions on teams, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations. In these statistics, a multisport athlete is counted two or more times.

To gain more insights about the relationship between sports and corporate talent pipelines, I interviewed two women who are Twin Cities-based CEOs. They illustrate how sports prepare women for the rigors of the business world.

Katie Lorenson is president and CEO of Alerus Financial Corp., and was a three-sport high school athlete in tiny Oklee. That’s the northwest Minnesota community that was home to Coya Knutson, who in 1954 became the first woman to win a Minnesota congressional seat.

“I was the first one in my family to go to college,” Lorenson said, and the traits she acquired through sports provided her with a foundation to succeed in college and business. A two-time basketball captain, she learned how to communicate with fellow teammates. “If you can nail communication among your team in the company that you are running or in the business that you are in, that solves a lot of issues before they become problems,” she said.

She also maintains that sports create an important mental toughness in participants. “A big part of it, for women especially, is confidence, self-esteem and having successes, but also having failures and building that resilience,” Lorenson said.

“Many of the teams that I was on were losing teams,” she said with a laugh. But she added that fact didn’t diminish her inner drive or motivation. In her mind, she said, she would be thinking: “I want to be better. I want to climb higher.”

In any leadership role, she said, “confidence is everything.” The confidence gained through sports competition positions girls and women for later success in corporate suites.

That was the case with Beth Wozniak, chair and CEO of nVent, which had $3.3 billion in sales last year. Wozniak was on the swim team when she was growing up in southern Ontario.

“You learn how to behave at a young age with a team and how to support one another,” Wozniak said. “Think about business. You work in large teams, small teams.” Sports teams, she said, help people understand how to pursue common goals.

“Different people on your team have different skills,” Wozniak said. “How do you best utilize those skills? There are so many things you learn when you are in sports that translate to business.”

With Caitlin Clark as a role model and higher participation rates of girls in sports, we should expect that we’ll see more girls developing higher career aspirations. It’s incumbent upon parents, schools and community organizations to ensure girls have access to a broad range of sports opportunities.

Liz Fedor is the senior editor at Twin Cities Business and a former Star Tribune business reporter and editor.