Iowa packs football stadium for women’s hoops game
Just before the Iowa women’s basketball team tipped off in an exhibition game against DePaul on Sunday in Kinnick Stadium, 55,646 fans, many of them young kids, roared for Caitlin Clark and the Hawkeyes as Big Ten Network analyst Christy Winters-Scott made a comment that perfectly speaks to this moment, when women’s sports are exploding and taking over every corner of the sports world.
“For these little girls,” Winters-Scott said, as the camera panned to a crowd packed with young girls bundled up in sweatshirts and Clark jerseys, “this is normal.”
Surely Winters-Scott, who played at Maryland (1986-90), knows that playing basketball in a football stadium in November, when it’s 54 degrees with the wind blowing at 14 mph, isn’t normal. Or at least, it didn’t used to be.
But in the Hawkeye State, which has long been a women’s basketball hotbed, filling a football stadium with hoops junkies has become, if not normal, at least not surprising. That’s because Clark, the reigning national player of the year, the darling of the NCAA Tournament and the best passer in college basketball regardless of gender, continues to draw fans to the game. Last season, Iowa finished second in overall women’s attendance, behind only South Carolina and the house Dawn Staley built.
But Clark’s far from the only one putting behinds in seats.
The idea of sellouts for women’s sporting events, whether they’re at Kinnick or elsewhere – like maybe Barclays Center, where Game 3 of the WNBA Finals was going on at the same time as Iowa-DePaul – are becoming increasingly common. In Brooklyn, 17,143 hungry fans witnessed the New York Liberty upend the Las Vegas Aces for their first playoff win since 1999.
It’s more than just packed areas though: It’s the energy in those arenas. It’s rabid fans waving fat heads of their favorite players, women and men dressed in women’s jerseys, little kids demanding more women’s players have their own signature shoe (and in Las Vegas last week, at least one young fan offering to trade her sibling for a pair of signature shoes).
Scroll through the uglier parts of social media and you might think “no one cares about women’s sports.” That’s what the trolls say anyway, and they say it repeatedly. But no matter how loud they shout, the numbers don’t back up that unoriginal, dated argument.
On Sunday – an NFL Sunday, no less – two rabid crowds showed up in two very different parts of the country to cheer for their favorite female athletes. Iowa and its 55,656 fans shattered the all-time women’s basketball attendance record (29,619, set during the 2002 NCAA Tournament) as the Hawkeyes won 94-72 behind 34 points, 11 rebounds and 10 assists from Clark, who recently became the first college athlete to secure an NIL deal with State Farm.
This comes just six weeks after Nebraska, a powerhouse in NCAA women’s volleyball, held an outdoor match at its football stadium, as 92,003 screaming fans set the record for the largest crowd to ever watch a women’s sporting event in the United States.
It’s not only on-court events bringing in spectators, either: Big crowds were expected for numerous NWSL regularseason finales on Sunday.
Talk to players, coaches and executives around women’s sports and they’ll tell you these crowds don’t just need to become normal, but necessary. They’re starting to be expected and demanded.
When Breanna Stewart, the 2023 WNBA MVP, walked into the postgame press conference following Sunday’s win in the Finals, she was holding Ruby, her 2-year-old toddler whose stolen hearts, and attention, all season. At her MVP acceptance speech a couple of weeks ago, Stewart talked about how much it meant to her to be a role model for Ruby and that “it keeps me going.”
Asked why people are finally now getting on board and supporting women’s games in droves, Stewart joked, “I don’t know. We’ve been telling them the whole time they should get behind us.”
The moment isn’t lost on her, no matter how long it took everyone else to catch up. “Seeing people showing up, it’s unbelievable,” she said. “We’re going to continue to be role models, continue to be great, and continue to demand more. We’re continuing to show young kids, and a lot of others, the potential and possible of making this normal.
“Ruby expects this (crowd) every time she walks into a WNBA arena. … And we’re going to make sure we keep raising the bar.”
In one or two years, depending on which WNBA draft she decides to declare for, Clark will bring even more fans to the league, which is set to expand in 2025. The timing couldn’t be better for her, for women’s basketball or for the thousands of women athletes who sweat and sacrificed, often in empty arenas, for decades. Finally, people are paying attention and finally, women’s sports are being given a platform that allows them to prove what many women, and some men, have known for years: these athletes and these games are more than worthy of your time.