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Early in the 2024 WNBA season, USA Today sportswriter Lindsay Schnell published a power ranking of WNBA rookies. These lists are a staple of in-season coverage, easily digestible snapshots not expected to have much shelf life. Schnell ranked Indiana Fever star Caitlin Clark fourth.
Clark, of course, went on to win rookie of the year honors while reshaping the WNBA in just about every way. She has become her own economy, with TV ratings and sold-out arenas following her across the league. At that moment, though, Schnell was concerned about her turnover problems.
That assessment might have been forgotten had it not been noted in a new book by her colleague at the time, USA Today columnist Christine Brennan. (Schnell has since departed for the Athletic.)
“She didn’t place Clark first. Or second. Or third,” Brennan writes in her new book, “On Her Game: Caitlin Clark and the Revolution in Women’s Sports,” which was published this week by Scribner.
That not-so-subtle chiding captures a main theme of Brennan’s book: that Clark, despite her supernova popularity, has not been properly recognized nor appreciated by the WNBA establishment. Between hard fouls and an Olympic team snub, Brennan argues, players, coaches, media and even the league itself have failed to welcome Clark as the conquering hero she is.
Brennan reports that she was dumbfounded to hear a WNBA official compare Clark’s arrival at the league to that of another star’s, Maya Moore, seemingly unable to recognize Clark’s singularity. “Could the WNBA not see, or perhaps not allow itself to believe, what was on the way?” she writes.
Brennan is not the only author to wade into the Clark phenomenon this summer. In June, Triumph published “Becoming Caitlin Clark: The Unknown Origin Story of a Modern Basketball Superstar” by Howard Megdal, a longtime follower of women’s basketball and the WNBA.
The books have nearly identical covers: a closeup of Clark’s face, headband holding her hair in place and Clark with a large orange and white ball in shooting position. Both books cite the TV ratings she has driven in college and the WNBA and the arenas she has filled with the Indiana Fever since getting drafted. Brennan and Megdal agree that Clark is a transcendent star on the court but even more important off it. She is the closest thing the WNBA has ever had, they argue, to Michael Jordan.
Where the books differ is in how a reader should think about Clark and all she has come to represent. Brennan’s book does not offer much insight into Clark or much new reporting about how she thinks about her place in popular culture. (She never sat for an in-depth interview.) But its point of view is unmistakable. Brennan at one point runs through a list of detractors, citing all of the women’s basketball luminaries who made dismissive comments about Clark: Sheryl Swoopes, Breanna Stewart, Diana Taurasi, Cheryl Reeve and Geno Auriemma.
Megdal also did not do extensive sit-downs with Clark, but he takes a wider lens to the subject. He dedicates chapters to the pioneers of women’s basketball in Iowa. In one passage, he suggests there would be no Clark without women such as Molly Bolin and C. Vivian Stringer, trailblazers on the court in Iowa but unfamiliar names to most fans. Similarly, he cites a study that found Black players in the WNBA have long been under-covered by the news media in comparison to their White counterparts.
Brennan offers some Iowa basketball history and places Clark’s rise in the context of Title IX, citing 50 years of the 1972 law with increasing girls’ participation in sports. And Megdal offers criticism of WNBA stakeholders, including when Washington Mystics co-owner Sheila Jackson suggested Time magazine should have chosen the entire WNBA for its athlete of the year.
Overall, though, the books diverge: Where Brennan’s book portrays a star dragging a league toward greater prominence almost against its will, Megdal sees a transformative figure who arrived after the work of generations of women was starting to bear fruit.
“The women’s basketball moment, the growth and platform and landscape, would have found a hero, an outlet for this excitement,” Megdal writes.
This debate has been central to Clark’s arrival in the WNBA. The sports commentariat, WNBA fans and even political and culture warriors have debated the hard fouls against Clark, the attention heaped on a White player in a majority Black league and whether other players should be grateful for her presence. Jealousy has been key to the Clark debate vocabulary.
And yet, in their common ground, the Clark books highlight something important about the ongoing discourse. There is less debate about Clark – her skills and the interest in them speak for themselves – and more about the WNBA. What was the league before Clark arrived? What, if anything, do other players owe her?
Megdal has been reporting on the WNBA for more than a decade, and his book reflects that. (He founded the Next, a digital outlet that covers women’s basketball.) Brennan is focused on the league, mostly in the context of Clark, as well as her own experience. She includes a lengthy accounting of an incident last year in which the WNBA players union asked to revoke her press credential after she asked a player during the playoffs if she had smacked Clark on purpose.
Brennan is right that to ask for a reporter’s credential smacks of a league not ready for the spotlight. And for both authors, there is plenty of data to support their view. In the end, Megdal provides a more nuanced explanation of the WNBA’s triumphs and shortcomings, though the available evidence suggests there probably are more sports fans who identify with Brennan’s theory.
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