Clark’s pursuit of scoring record started long ago
Tales of Iowa senior’s basketball prowess began in sixth grade
IOWA CITY, Iowa — Caitlin
Clark’s skills were so advanced when she was in grade school that her parents signed her up to play on boys teams. By the time she entered middle school she was well-known in basketball circles across Iowa.
This was long before Clark became one of the faces of women’s basketball and, now, on the cusp of setting the NCAA Division I scoring record.
Clark was in sixth grade when Jan Jensen first heard about her. Not long after, Iowa’s associate head coach and chief recruiter went to watch the prodigy from West Des Moines.
She saw a confident player making pinpoint passes often too hot for her teammates to handle, someone who was creative on drives to the hoop and of course someone willing to launch the deep 3-pointers that would become her signature and one of the reasons she’s one of the United States’ highest-profile female athletes.
“It didn’t take but a second, maybe a minute,” Jensen said. “That little step-back sassy 3, this little seventh-, eighth-grader. Yeah, she’s diff. You could just tell. They’re easy to identify but really hard to get. Everybody can see the true, true ones. The trick is to get them.”
Clark needs 66 points to break the NCAA career record of 3,527 by Washington’s Kelsey Plum (201317), now an All-star with the Aces. The Hawkeyes play Penn State at home on Thursday. With an average of 32.4 points per game, Clark is on track to break the record at Nebraska on Sunday or Feb. 15 at home against Michigan.
“I didn’t predict this to happen, but just knowing her work ethic, knowing her passion for the sport, knowing her fearlessness, I’m really not surprised,” said Kristin Meyer, who coached Clark from 2016-20 at Dowling Catholic High in West Des Moines. “More than anything, I’m so happy for her to get to accomplish all of these things, to grow the sport and to grow the popularity of women’s basketball.”
The daughter of Brent Clark and Anne Nizzi-clark grew up as the middle child in a sports-centric family. Caitlin said when she first started playing basketball, she would cry after every game her team lost.
“That’s because of how much I cared,” she said in an interview with The Associated Press. “I’m like 6 years old and it didn’t matter, obviously. But it mattered to me.”
That passion for winning took root when she and brothers Blake and Colin played board games and all kinds of sports against each other. She recalled a basement Nerf basketball game with Colin that got overheated.
“I just threw him into the wall,” she said. “He went flying and his head slapped into it. He put his hand back and it was just full of blood. He runs upstairs to my mom. She goes and gets a bunch of staples in his head.”
Meyer was preparing for her first year as Dowling High coach in 2016 when she first heard about a “stud eighth-grader” who would be joining the team.
“I was, ‘OK, that’s nice. We’ll have a good player,’” Meyer said.
Coaching Clark was sometimes a challenge, Meyer said, because she was so advanced in her skills and basketball IQ. As has happened during her career at Iowa, Clark would show frustration if the target of one of her passes wasn’t ready to catch it or if a play didn’t unfold as designed.
“There were times the competitiveness of her kind of took over or she wasn’t as patient,” Meyer said, “but every high schooler has to grow through some things and, looking back, her skill level was on a different level than other people.”
Clark, who never won a high school state title, ranks No. 4 on the Iowa high school career scoring chart with 2,547 points.
Clark was Gatorade National Player of the Year after averaging
32.6 points per game as a junior. Her defining high school game came late that season at Mason City, where she made a state-record 13 3-pointers, on 17 attempts, and scored 60 points, one off the state record.
“That game, I’m sure, had a lot of foreshadowing of what was to come,” Jensen said.