The Athletic has live coverage of Iowa vs. South Carolina in the women’s national championship game.
ALBANY, N.Y. — Caitlin Clark’s final assist of the night won’t count. It came moments after the final buzzer, when she launched the game ball from midcourt to her brother Colin, seated eight rows behind the Iowa team bench. After catching a perfect pass — what else would you expect from Clark? — he tucked the ball under his arm, and later, inside a black jacket to conceal it.
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It will be added — like the other game balls and pieces of championship nets — to Clark’s growing collection of keepsakes in storage at home at her parents’ home in West Des Moines, Iowa. These are the things that are hers to keep. The rest of it — the records (those are on loan until another generational talent comes along) and the wins (those will stay accumulated in the history books of Iowa women’s basketball), she doesn’t carry with her. But these pieces of rubber and nylon are what she’ll keep when she finally leaves this team in two weeks and moves on to the WNBA.
But first, Clark earned a second trip to the Final Four after avenging last season’s championship loss with Monday’s 94-87 win over LSU in the regional final. She was spectacular against the Tigers, finishing with 41 points, 12 assists and seven rebounds. She hit nine 3-pointers, passing Diana Taurasi for the most triples in NCAA Tournament history and tying the tournament record for most 3s in a game. She accounted for 67 points, or 71 percent, of the Hawkeyes’ tally as LSU had no answer for stopping her.
And yet, there’s still more for Clark to do. From here, she is headed to Cleveland.
CLEVELAND!!!!!!!!!! FINAL FOUR!!!!! HAWK FANS LETS GOOOOOO🫶🏻🫶🏻🫶🏻❤️🔥❤️🔥❤️🔥🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻
— Caitlin Clark (@CaitlinClark22) April 2, 2024
She was going there no matter what this week, either with Iowa to the Final Four or Team USA’s Olympic training camp. She had said she hoped to be in Cleveland with “Iowa” across her chest.
“Obviously the Olympics are always your dream,” Clark said. “But to be here with this team and to be able to do what we’ve done and to extend that out another week is all I could have really asked.”
These aren’t the kind of things you can plan. Final Fours tend to fall more under wishes or dreams, but for Clark, this was the plan.
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When Clark was a junior in high school, and the crown jewel of the Hawkeyes’ 2020 recruiting class, the staff was finally able to secure a home visit with the Clarks. There was one night of availability for the visit, the Clarks told coach Lisa Bluder and associate head coach Jan Jensen. It happened to be in between the Elite Eight and the Final Four in Tampa, Fla.
Following the Hawkeyes’ loss in the 2019 Elite Eight to Baylor, Bluder and Jensen flew to Des Moines to meet with Caitlin and her family. Iowa had been led that season by senior forward Megan Gustafson, who would go on to win almost every major individual award available for a college basketball player that season — the Naismith, the AP Player of the Year, the Lisa Leslie Award, among others. But the team suffered a 32-point loss in the Elite Eight.
That was at the heart of the pitch.
Look at how far we got with an elite post. Look at everything Gustafson did. Look at everything our team has done. Now just imagine how much further we can go when we are led by you.
“Lisa said, ‘I need to have you. And if we get you, I believe with all my heart that we are going to be playing in a Final Four. I believe we can go to where we haven’t been,’” Jensen said. “Caitlin believed she could lead us back to the Final Four.”
The next fall, when she committed to Iowa, she told the Des Moines Register, point blank that she was going with the intention “to win a national championship.”
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The process, she knew, wouldn’t be easy.
That season, the Hawkeyes went 1-7 against ranked opponents. In the Big Ten tournament, they won three games in three days before falling to Maryland in the conference title game. In the NCAA Tournament, Clark led the Hawkeyes in scoring and assists in their first two games. When they met UConn in the Sweet 16 — a matchup that was hailed as the first clash in what many assumed would become a years-long-rivalry between Clark and fellow freshman star Paige Bueckers — Clark again led Iowa in scoring and assists but it wasn’t enough. Iowa lost by 20 to UConn.
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“That’s the reason I came here because there was a true belief we were going to make the Final Four someday,” Clark said in the postgame press conference. “We didn’t say we were going to do it in my first year here. We knew it was going to be a process. We knew we had to put all the pieces together.”
Clark thinks back to that moment now and sees the pieces she and the Hawkeyes were missing. They were young then — besides Clark, the Hawkeyes started three sophomores and a junior. But Clark was young, then, too.
As a freshman, she struggled with the transition to the college game at times. Not because of the game itself, but everything else that was woven into it. She would get frustrated with teammates for not catching passes, angered that no one seemed as competitive as she. No one except Kate Martin, then, a redshirt sophomore who would pull Clark aside for private conversations to try and keep her in line. Clark was maybe a bit too hotheaded then, a little too quick to react. She wanted everyone to be on her level and didn’t want to have to meet people where they were.
Iowa guards coach Abby Stamp would go over game film one-on-one with the freshman and point out all of the easy passes and assists she had made during games. It didn’t have to be a thousand miles an hour or behind the back, the six-foot bounce pass was perfectly fine, she’d explain. Stamp went out and bought a bunch of stickers and began giving Clark stickers for every easy assist she made.
“I think she just threw them away,” Stamp said.
In Clark’s sophomore season, Iowa returned all five starters and their season ended in a shocking second-round upset at home to Creighton. The loss stunned her and changed her. And when she came back as a junior, again with the same batch of starters, they were different. She was different. She molded to fit her teammates, met them where they were, and made the easy passes (even when she no longer had stickers as incentives).
“I feel like that’s what I’m the most proud of over the course of these last two years, just being calm, cool, collected and dialed in to what we need to do. I’m not worried about what the other team is doing. I’m not worried about what call the ref is making. I’m worried about Iowa’s needs,” Clark said. “When I’m able to do that, I feel like that helps my teammates a lot, and I feel like that’s the biggest way that I’ve grown over the last two years. … And I’ve always had the basketball skill, it’s just been my mind, making my mind better.”
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On Monday night in Albany, Clark had plenty of reasons to be distracted. The rematch with LSU was among the most highly-anticipated women’s basketball games ever. It almost assuredly crushed the television records for non-Final Four viewership that the Hawkeyes have twice set during this tournament. The discourse around the game often came back to the trash-talk between Clark and Angel Reese, and Clark knew all eyes would be on her and Reese.
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And yet, the coaches saw a different player in the regional final huddles than the recruit to whom they pitched a Final Four, the player who arrived on campus with maybe a bit too much fire at times. Even as LSU made runs, she was instead the voice of reason.
“There were times in the huddle when she took over a little bit,” Stamp said. “Sometimes as a coach, you feel like you’ve gotta go in there and this, that, or the other. But this team needs their space. And Caitlin’s voice tonight — in those times when it was just them — was the most confident, the most calming.”
This week, she’ll travel to Cleveland for the Hawkeyes’ second-consecutive Final Four. They’ll play UConn, the same team that beat them during Clark’s freshman season.
Clark’s plan is still intact. With 80 more minutes of play, she could cut one more net and steal another game ball. But those nets, probably like the others, will end up gathering dust. She might lose some in a move — they’re so small, how could you not? Someday, someone will pull a game ball out of a box in an attic and she’ll have to guess its significance. Maybe it was from this record-breaking game or another.
But this is the reason she came to Iowa. To build something here, to take a team to the Final Four. To win championships.
Clark never said she would do it in her freshman season. She knew it was a process, and it would take time. Iowa had to gather the pieces — the wins and the losses; the lessons and hard talks — to get to a place where they could be complete. She had to get older. She had to change, and also not change. In two weeks, she will leave this team and never wear an Iowa uniform again. Because of what she has taken from Iowa over her past four seasons here, she might just be able to bring with her one more piece of net and one more game ball.
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(Photo: Scott Taetsch / NCAA Photos via Getty Images)