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Caitlin Clark’s time is now.
The 22-year-old was named Time magazine’s Athlete of the Year in 2024, a year in which she shattered both college basketball and WNBA records.
After leading the Iowa Hawkeyes to the national championship game and setting college basketball’s all-time scoring record, Clark made the leap to the WNBA with the Indiana Fever. From there, she set new WNBA rookie records for points and 3-pointers in a season and a new league record for assists, en route to earning WNBA Rookie of the Year honors.
Clark’s record-setting year went far beyond the box score. WNBA viewership and ticket sales soared during Clark’s rookie year, especially for the Fever.
Team attendance increased 182% from 2023 as teams around the league moved home games against Indiana to NBA arenas. The Fever’s game against the Mystics on September 19 in Washington, D.C., set an all-time WNBA attendance record of 20,711.
Clark and fellow Chicago Sky rookie Angel Reese drew an average of 2.25 million viewers to the June 16 showdown in Indiana, making it the most-watched WNBA game since 2001.
“We were able to attract a lot of people who had never even watched women’s sports, let alone women’s basketball, and turn them into fans,” Clark told Time magazine.
Clark was named a WNBA All-Star and earned All-WNBA honors, but one tournament in particular she didn’t attend was the 2024 Paris Olympics. Although she did not make the 12-man roster for the U.S. team that won eight consecutive Olympic titles, she said being left off the roster “definitely motivates me throughout my career.”
Clark found herself at the center of other controversies throughout the year, but in almost all of them she did nothing to incite. Between the role her race played in her marketability, hard fouls against her by athletes, Olympic exclusion, and more, Clark’s “defenders” push racist, misogynistic, and anti-LGBTQ rhetoric. , some of whom directly threatened other WNBA players. Clark wrote about the toxicity in Time, calling it “infuriating and awful.”
“Stop it,” Clark said of people using her name to harass others. “Because that’s not me.”
Looking ahead, Clark is just beginning to make an impact in basketball and beyond.
“Personally, I’m just scratching the surface of what I can do and how I can hopefully change the world and impact people,” she said.
The 2024 All-WNBA team was announced Wednesday, with Ace A’ja Wilson, Lynx forward Napheesa Collier and Fever rookie Caitlin Clark selected to the first team.
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