Inside the decades-long struggle that made the Caitlin Clark phenomenon possible

In 1990, 34-year-old Carol Stiff, a basketball junkie who spent years coaching small college ball in the Northeast, packed away her clipboard and took an entry-level programmer position at what she considered a “little company” in Bristol, Conn.

Basketball had long been a part of Stiff’s life. Her uncle Don Donoher was one of Bobby Knight’s assistant coaches on the 1984 Olympic gold medal-winning team led by Michael Jordan. By middle school, she was playing youth basketball in Bernardsville, N.J., and one of her fondest memories was going to Madison Square Garden as a teenager with her mom in 1977 to watch Montclair State star Carol “Blaze” Blazejowski as part of a doubleheader called the Hanover Classic. It was the rare opportunity to see the top competitors play the game Stiff loved.

Despite an 11 a.m. tip-off, there was a crowd of over 10,000 people in MSG to see Blaze, whose scoring prowess and all-around game drew comparisons to Pete Maravich. Blaze could shoot. She could pass. She played with flair. Even without a three-point line, she scored 52 points.

“All of a sudden a light bulb went off,” Stiff said of the game. It showed her that the women’s game could thrive under the right circumstances. At her high school, after the boys’ team received Converse Chuck Taylors, the girls did, too, thanks to Title IX. But even that highlighted her beloved sport’s plight: It was rarely viewed as worthy enough on its own. But when the circumstances were right, its greatness could be seen.

Stiff played basketball and field hockey at Southern Connecticut State. Then, following coaching stints at Brown, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Western Connecticut, she joined ESPN.

One of her first tasks at the network was to input four-digit codes for all the programming, recording what was on each hour. She noticed that the format didn’t distinguish if games were played by men or women. In her third year, during a software redesign, she convinced her boss they should add a gender code. It was the first time the network tracked when women’s sports were on — or not — at the network.

Last April, the NCAA women’s national championship game between undefeated South Carolina and Iowa in Cleveland drew nearly 19 million television viewers, the largest audience in women’s college basketball history, and the most-watched basketball game — men’s or women’s — since 2019. Earlier games in the 2024 women’s tournament drew 14.2 million and 12.3 million viewers, respectively, and those followed a 2023 final watched by nearly 10 million, which had been an all-time high.

Why the interest in women’s basketball spiked is no mystery: the immense popularity of Caitlin Clark, the former Iowa and current Indiana Fever star. “There’s (Michael) Jordan, Tiger (Woods) and Caitlin,” said Fox president of insight and analytics Mike Mulvihill.

But before Clark turbocharged the awareness and popularity of women’s basketball, a foundation had to be built, ready and waiting for someone like her. It was constructed by people like Stiff, devotees of the game who long believed the structure and biases of the media business were holding it back. They pushed for more, fought for change, and set the stage on which Clark arrived.

“That stigma that was hanging over women’s sports for so many years — that it’s not athletic, it’s not fun to watch, it’s less than men’s — is being lifted,” said Sue Maryott, the Big Ten Network’s vice president of remote productions. “I think it all started with exposure. People weren’t watching because it wasn’t televised.”

In her third year at ESPN, and just weeks before the 1993-94 college basketball season began, Stiff was tasked with constructing ESPN’s women’s broadcast schedule. She assigned the games for each conference in the time slots she was given, typically Sunday afternoons. A year later, the slots given to her included a 3 p.m. ESPN spot on Martin Luther King Day in January. At the time, it was not considered coveted real estate, but Stiff wanted to make the most of it.

After first failing to get defending national champion North Carolina to agree to a game against UConn, an up-and-coming program in nearby Storrs, Stiff called Pat Summitt, Tennessee’s coach. Summitt had concerns about fitting the game on her schedule and didn’t love the idea of taking her team north in the winter. Stiff made her pitch, sounding like a coach trying to reel in a big recruit, noting that Robin Roberts — a former Division I player and an up-and-coming TV star — would be calling the game. Summitt finally agreed to do it: “For the good of the game.”

The teams entered undefeated, with UConn ranked No. 1 and Tennessee No. 2. A sold-out crowd of 8,241 saw the Huskies beat the Volunteers, 77-66, and the contest recorded a strong 1.0 rating (635,000 households). It was the first game in what would become the greatest rivalry in women’s college basketball history.

However, there were no postgame interviews. A repeat of “The Sports Reporters” had to be rushed onto ESPN.

On Nov. 30, 1996, 30-year-old Brent Clark and 27-year-old Anne Nizzi were married at Saint Francis of Assisi Catholic Church in West Des Moines, Iowa. The next day, the Iowa and Iowa State women’s basketball teams resumed their rivalry after a five-year break at Carver-Hawkeye Arena in Iowa City. The Hawkeyes won, 64-53, before an announced crowd of 5,061. The game was not televised.

During the 1994-95 women’s college basketball season, Connecticut went 35-0 en route to a national championship, becoming only the second women’s team to complete a season undefeated. The team’s star, Rebecca Lobo, was the most visible women’s basketball player since USC’s Cheryl Miller in the 1980s. Lobo appeared on “Late Night with David Letterman,” and she and her teammates were featured on the “Live with Regis & Kathy Lee” morning show.

As a kid, Lobo watched women’s basketball every chance she got. “Which means I didn’t watch it at all,” she said. She cut out pictures of Miller from Sports Illustrated and placed them in her locker. As the 1996 Olympics approached, Lobo had become something never seen before in the women’s game: a bonafide media sensation, even if she was a bit player on the star-studded Team USA.

The U.S. women won gold, boosting the launch of the WNBA the next year. The first WNBA season consisted of 28 regular-season games for each team with the national broadcasts split between NBC, ESPN and Lifetime. There were three playoff games, with the one-game semifinals simulcast on ESPN and Lifetime, while the Finals were on NBC.

That same year, ESPN won the broadcast rights to the NCAA women’s championship, taking it from CBS. Over the years, CBS turned out some big numbers, most notably with 11.84 million viewers for the 1983 final featuring Miller. However, the network failed to grow the game. ESPN won the rights by offering to air more games and by being willing to have a day of rest for the teams between the national semifinals and the final, which Stiff and others urged the network to put into its offer.

“We got the NCAA deal done. Then the Olympics and then the WNBA, it was like a trifecta,” Stiff said.

In late June 1997, in front of an announced crowd of 17,780, the New York Liberty, led by Lobo and Teresa Weatherspoon, beat Phoenix, 65-57 in Lobo’s first WNBA game.

“The crowd was not just women. It was dads who wanted their child, boy or girl, to see it and have aspirations,” said Blazejowski.

By then, Blaze had retired as a player and was the Liberty’s GM.

In January 2002, The Des Moines Register listed 25 birth notices from three Des Moines-area hospitals on page 5B. The child born to Brent Clark and Anne Nizzi-Clark was simply listed as “daughter.”

Caitlin Clark, like Carol Stiff, was born into a sports family. Her father, Brent, was inducted into the Simpson (Iowa) College Athletics Hall of Fame as a basketball and baseball player. Her maternal grandfather, Bob Nizzi, coached high school football at West Des Moines Dowling Catholic, one of Iowa’s dynastic large-school programs.

She had a large extended family on her mother’s side, but as one of the few girls, Clark was teased relentlessly and developed an obsessive desire to prove herself to her older cousins. Clark was 5 when she expressed an interest in playing basketball, but there were no teams in central Iowa for girls that young, so her father signed her up for boys teams that he coached. By the second grade, she was so dominant that parents complained that a girl shouldn’t be allowed to play with the boys.

In 2000, another star emerged at UConn.

“It was the Diana Taurasi era, when all the guys on SportsCenter could say her name,” Stiff said. “It was almost like, ‘She plays like Larry Bird.’”

Still, Stiff was frustrated. Sports TV can be a chicken-and-egg game. Events don’t receive prime-time slots unless they deliver big ratings. But it is difficult to earn the highest numbers without the best slots.

“So I’d hear, ‘Carol, it doesn’t rate,’” Stiff remembered. “I’d say, ‘It doesn’t rate, because no one can see it.’ They say, ‘Carol, it doesn’t rate so advertisers don’t want to buy it.’ It was that vicious cycle.”

Stiff mostly had to work with time slots on Sundays, competing with the NFL or the final round of some PGA event — often with Tiger Woods charging to a win.

“I kept fighting over the years for better windows,” Stiff said. “‘I need better windows, guys. All I get is Sunday afternoons? Are you kidding me?”

Finally, in 2005, ESPN gave the women’s game Big Mondays on ESPN2. Yet it was a bittersweet development. Those games were up against the men’s version of Big Monday that featured behemoths like Duke and North Carolina.

Three years later, Maya Moore arrived at UConn and led the Huskies to two undefeated seasons, four Final Fours and two national championships. She was a bigger guard who could dribble, shoot and pass — an earlier version of Caitlin Clark — and she was twice named national player of the year. Sports Illustrated labeled her “the greatest winner in the history of women’s basketball.”

Yet for most of Moore’s time in Storrs, many of her games were shown only on Connecticut Public Television.

In 2012, 10-year-old Clark traveled with her family three hours north from Des Moines to Minneapolis to attend a Minnesota Lynx WNBA game and see her favorite player: Moore, who was in her second season with the Lynx.

The Clark family watched the Lynx play the Seattle Storm, then lingered afterward. Moore and a few other Lynx players remained on the court, and Clark couldn’t contain herself. She sprinted toward Moore.

“I didn’t have a phone, I didn’t have a Sharpie, I just gave her a hug and I ran away,” Clark said. “And she just gave me a hug back. It’s just something that’s stuck with me, that one interaction can change somebody’s life.”

Around that time, Clark was known by youth sports coaches in central Iowa as an excellent basketball player and also an elite soccer talent. On April 26, 2013, a photo of Clark appeared for the first time in The Des Moines Register. She was pictured with her U11 team from the West Des Moines Soccer Club. The name of her team:

Blaze.

After the final of the 2015 women’s World Cup in Canada produced the largest soccer audience in United States history, executives at Fox had a brainstorm.

Fox received the Women’s World Cup rights as something of a throw-in with the men’s World Cup contract. There was no extra fee. It won big merely by amplifying a property it already owned. Executives knew that the rights to Big Ten women’s basketball were similarly baked into the men’s rights that Fox controlled.

At the same time, with entertainment moving off ad-supported broadcast networks to streaming services like Netflix, fewer women were watching TV. “We’ve felt for a while that we’ve got a clear incentive to try to build out that female audience,” said Mulvihill, the Fox president of insight and analytics.

Fox’s large ownership stake in the Big Ten Network allowed it to use that channel as an incubator. Fox executives programmed a large slate of women’s games on the Big Ten Network and sat back and watched.

Clark’s cousin Audrey Faber was a four-star hooper at Dowling Catholic who would go on to become a three-time All-Big East selection at Creighton. One February afternoon, when Faber needed to appear at The Des Moines Register office as part of the paper’s all-area team, 13-year-old Clark tagged along.

John Naughton covered high school sports for The Register for 31 years until his retirement in 2019. Naughton said hello to Faber and then motioned to Clark.

“Who is this?” he asked.

“I’m Caitlin Clark, Audrey’s my cousin,” she answered.

“Maybe I’ll write about you someday,’” Naughton responded.

On Nov. 22, 2016, Clark played her first game as a freshman at Dowling Catholic High. She scored a team-high 14 points, grabbed six rebounds, dished five assists, pulled three steals and had one turnover in a 75-26 win. Two months later, on Jan. 25, 2017, The Des Moines Register introduced Clark to its readership with a photo and quote from Clark following her 21-point game in a win against Des Moines Roosevelt.

A day later, Naughton included a section on Clark in his girls basketball notebook. He wrote, “Got my first chance to watch West Des Moines Dowling Catholic freshman Caitlin Clark play Tuesday. She’s the real deal.”

Clark scored 368 points that season and led her team to the state tournament, where she scored 11 points in an 87-64 loss to crosstown rival West Des Moines Valley. The game was streamed by the Central Iowa Sports Network. It was the first of Clark’s games aired live to a wide audience.

Clark led the state in scoring as a senior (775 points) and junior (781), but she never won a state title. Her senior year ended with a four-point loss in a regional final. Clark scored 40 points and grabbed 10 rebounds. It wasn’t a state tournament game, so it wasn’t televised.

The COVID-19 pandemic eliminated crowds during the 2020-21 college basketball season, which made it seem like Clark played her freshman season at Iowa in obscurity.

Her first college game came on Nov. 25, 2020, against Northern Iowa, and aired on BTN-Plus, a pay-per-view stream. She scored 27 points in 26 minutes in front of an announced attendance of 365.

Clark’s first nine games were streamed on BTN-Plus. Her first televised contest took place Jan. 9, 2021, at Northwestern. BTN’s Lisa Byington and Meghan McKeown called the action. It was the first of nine of Clark’s games to air on BTN that season.

Fox executives started to notice that Clark’s games drew about 30 percent more viewers than the other games it aired on BTN.

The 2021 NCAA Tournament took place in the San Antonio bubble. In the Sweet 16, Iowa faced UConn, which featured fellow freshman Paige Bueckers. ABC aired the clash, the first time in 16 years an over-the-air network televised an NCAA women’s tournament game. UConn won 92-72 in a game that drew 1.5 million viewers, the most of the six games ABC aired that tournament.

In her sophomore season, Clark’s Iowa telecasts on BTN were 98 percent higher than other women’s games. By her junior year, Clark had fully smashed the chicken or egg dilemma that Stiff ran up against when trying to get good slots for women’s basketball games at ESPN. Clark was must-see TV, with 12 games airing on either ABC, Fox or ESPN, up from five combined in her first two seasons. The Hawkeyes broke BTN’s ratings record four different times, and the Iowa-LSU championship game on ABC generated 9.9 million viewers.

For Clark’s final season, nine Iowa games aired on either ABC, NBC, CBS or Fox, and every Big Ten game was available on network television or Peacock streaming. Clark’s games set women’s basketball viewership records on eight different television or streaming platforms.

The BTN’s Maryott, who oversees nearly all of the network’s live sports except football and men’s basketball, saw the impact Clark had in the viewership numbers, but she also experienced it anecdotally. Her 84-year-old mother, Jean, briefly was in a nursing home last winter for cardiac rehab.

“I’m calling to check on her, and she’s like, ‘Oh, honey, I’ve got to go. We’ve got pizza being delivered to the nursing home and we’re watching Caitlin tonight,’” Maryott said.

Her mother had never paid attention to sports until Clark came to Iowa.

Fox began to look for successes outside of Iowa and Clark. Last Thanksgiving, following its Lions-Packers’ 12:30 p.m. game, Fox aired a men’s college game that drew 5 million viewers and then a women’s game — Indiana and Tennessee — that drew 1.18 million. It was a new record for a women’s basketball game on that network.

Clark played on BTN 43 times during her four years at Iowa, counting the Crossover at Kinnick exhibition in which the school set the women’s basketball single-game attendance record (55,646). Her final appearance was a win over Michigan in a 2024 Big Ten tournament semifinal. Clark came out of a postgame interview session and saw Maryott in the hallway.

“I’ll see you guys tomorrow,’” she said.

Maryott corrected Clark. Her game the next day would air on CBS.

“Then her face kind of fell,” Maryott recalled. “I said, ‘Caitlin, it’s been a thrill. Thank you.’ And she grabs me and hugs me and hugs Meghan, and she says, ‘Thank you guys for everything you did.’ That hit me so hard, because I’m thinking, ‘Thank you for what you did.’”

Caitlin Clark after being selected No. 1 overall by the Indiana Fever in the 2024 WNBA Draft. ((Sarah Stier / Getty Images)

Viewers followed Clark into the WNBA this season. Her regular-season games were watched by 1.178 million viewers compared to 394,000 for all other non-Clark WNBA games, a 199 percent difference. While she is definitely the main attraction, the league over the last five years under commissioner Cathy Englebert has increased the number of nationally televised games from 80 to 200.

“It was the confluence of all this coming together at the same time,” Englebert said.

The WNBA receives $200 million per season in the NBA’s new television contract with ABC/ESPN, NBC/Peacock and Amazon Prime Video. The WNBA was previously taking in around $65 million per season. There are budding stars and rivalries, with Englebert citing Clark, Angel Reese, Cameron Brink and the next generation emerging in college, including UConn’s Bueckers and USC’s JuJu Watkins.

“You are looking at the solid next decade of real stars in this league,” Engelbert said. She added: “Whenever anyone asks me, ‘What is next? Expansion? Check. Media? Check. Globalization of this game.”

In 2021, Stiff retired from ESPN during a round of layoffs. She was honored by the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame and won the John W. Bunn Lifetime Achievement Award. Her reach extended beyond basketball; she was instrumental in the expansion of softball coverage at ESPN.

She was among the millions who watched Clark and Iowa versus LSU in the title game on ABC, and she was pleased with the attention it received, but she also wondered what the number would have been if it had aired in prime time rather than on a Sunday afternoon.

In an email to his staff after the game, ESPN president of content Burke Magnus mentioned Stiff and former top ESPN producer Pat Lowry, another women’s hoops advocate.

“While the future is bright, I thought a lot about the many contributors like Pat Lowry and Carol Stiff, who worked tirelessly for decades to build up women’s basketball slowly but surely,” Magnus wrote. “Everything we witnessed in Cleveland would not have been possible without their efforts.”

ESPN’s chairman Jimmy Pitaro and Disney CEO Bob Iger followed that up with text messages to Stiff, thanking her for her advocacy through the years.

Stiff, now the president of the Women’s Sports Network, played a role in helping broker a game between UConn and the University of Southern California for Dec. 21, with Bueckers and Watkins stepping in as the must-see stars.

That game, played in the 16,000-capacity XL Center in Hartford, will be shown on Fox right after a special Saturday NFL matchup between the rival Steelers and Ravens.

“Clearly, we want to capitalize on the momentum behind women’s basketball and help establish new stars post-Caitlin,” Mulvihill said.

That had long been Stiff’s dream, to see what would happen if a women’s game got a prime slot and lead-in like that.

Said Stiff: “It’s going to be a fabulous game.”

(Illustration: Meech Robinson / The Athletic; Photos: Elsa, Mike Powell, Damian Strohmeyer, Nathaniel S. Butler, Daniel, Andy Lyons / Getty Images)