Women’s basketball has experienced an unprecedented growth in popularity in the last few years, a fact that many have attributed to Caitlin Clark. Now about to enter her second year in the WNBA with the Indiana Fever, Clark took the world by storm as a college player at the University of Iowa.
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In her time with the Hawkeyes, she became the all-time leading scorer in women’s basketball history, and she wowed fans with her unlimited shooting range and flair for the dramatic pass. As she led Iowa to two consecutive national championship game appearances, the Caitlin Clark effect was born, resulting in record attendance, viewership, and interest in the women’s game.
Clark’s popularity carried over into the WNBA, where attendance rose 48 percent from 2023, but it seems that the college game has taken a step back in her absence. According to Front Office Sports, attendance at the first two rounds of this year’s NCAA Women’s Tournament is down about 30 percent.
This season has seen attendance at top-four seed campuses for first- and second-round games stand at 224,972. This is lower than the record-setting 292,456 that was set in 2024 and just below the levels set in 2023, when it reached 231,677. This begs the question: Is the “Caitlin Clark Effect” over?
In the words of Lee Corso, not so fast, my friend. The popularity of the WNBA in Clark’s first season proves that she still has the juice; it’s just followed her to the pros. That’s had a trickle-down effect all over the sport, as more than just her own games experienced an upshot in ratings.
Unrivaled, the women’s 3-on-3 league that just finished its inaugural season (which Clark turned down an invitation to play in, at least for now), was a big success, and with a new collective bargaining agreement needing to be negotiated before October, it’s widely expected that WNBA players are going to get a much bigger piece of the ever-widening pie.
What about the women’s college game?
People tend to tune into sports for two things: teams and players. Clark may not be in the Women’s NCAA Tournament, but her influence isn’t totally gone. The women’s game still has popular stars that draw fans, such as Paige Bueckers of UConn, Hannah Hidalgo of Notre Dame, and JuJu Watkins of USC.
All three are phenomenal players, but none have quite been able to capture the public’s imagination the way Clark did. That’s OK, though it certainly hurts that Watkins just went down with a torn ACL last week. Still, there are great players to watch, which is why attendance is still higher than any time before 2023, and TV viewership is the second-highest it’s ever been, trailing only last year.
The talent pool in the women’s game is larger than ever, but there’s still a disconnect between the haves and the have-nots. This results in a largely predictable first couple of rounds of the tournament, with more than a few blowouts. Buecker’s Huskies won their first-round game over Arkansas State by a score of 103-34, for example.
Now that the Sweet 16 is set, that should change, as there are great matchups up and down the bracket, with some extremely tantalizing possibilities for the Final Four. Just in this round alone, Notre Dame will face TCU, Texas will face Tennessee, and Duke will face archrival North Carolina. Future possibilities include UConn possibly having to go through three 1-seeds in a row in USC, UCLA, and South Carolina.
Attendance and viewership should be great from this point forward, because Clark left the women’s game in a much better place than she found it. Growth isn’t always a straight line, and if having the second- or third-highest ratings ever is a “down” year, then the Caitlin Clark Effect will have done its job to raise both the floor and the ceiling of what’s possible for the women’s game.
