At the hottest place to be on a cold February night, a sellout crowd packed Williams Arena Wednesday to see Caitlin Clark do, basically, what she does.
Break records.
And she did: Clark’s three-pointer — her eighth of the game — with 4 minutes and 29 seconds left in Iowa’s 108-60 win over the Gophers made her the highest-scoring woman to ever play Division I basketball with 3,650 points.
Afterward Clark paid homage to those who came before her, particularly Lynette Woodard’s Division I record she had just bested by a point. It came when Woodard played for Kansas up until 1981, before the NCAA sanctioned women’s basketball, when the sport was governed by the Association of Interscholastic Athletics for Women, whose scoring records the NCAA basically ignores.
”The NCAA doesn’t want to recognize women and what they did,” Clark said. “But [what they did] speaks to the foundation these players laid for us, for us to have the opportunity to play in front of crowds like this, in environments like this.”
It was the second-ever crowd of 14,625 in Gophers history and yet another sellout in Clark’s tour around the Big Ten Conference. Many thousand of them were Hawkeyes fans, including young girls who came early and stayed late hoping to get an autograph.
In between: Clark scored 33 points with 10 rebounds and 12 assists, leading five players in double figures for Iowa (25-4 overall, 14-3 in conference play).Really, just a few minutes into the game, it became clear the only real drama was whether Clark — who already passed Kelsey Plum for the NCAA record — would surpass Woodard. But the crowd got their money’s worth.
”Obviously she’s the most dominant player, the best player, to have played in the women’s game,” Gophers coach Dawn Plitzuweit said. “Bar none. To do what she does, game after game, is almost mind-boggling.”
