The Elevation of Caitlin Clark Highlights Sports Media's Misogynoir Problem

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In this op-ed, writer Ruth Etiesit Samuel explores the “Caitlin Clark Effect” and misogynoir in sports media.

“With the first pick in the 2024 WNBA draft, the Indiana Fever select…”

Those words recently uttered by WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert encompass the dreams of so many young athletes. They represent a years-long culmination of hard work, sacrifice, and dedication. They point to a storied legacy in what USA Today calls “the toughest professional league in the world to make.”

Engelbert said those very words in 2023, when the South Carolina Gamecocks’ Aliyah Boston was the top draftee. According to ESPN PR, it was the most-watched WNBA draft since 2004 when the Phoenix Mercury’s Diana Taurasi was the first-overall pick. The momentous event garnered 572,000 viewers, a historic 42% increase from 2022.

This year, that statistic skyrocketed. On Monday, the 2024 WNBA draft took place at the Brooklyn Academy of Music; open to the public for the first time since 2016, tickets sold out in 15 minutes. Peaking at 3.09 million viewers, a record-breaking average of 2.45 million people tuned in to the 2024 WNBA draft. Up 307% from last year, it surpassed the viewership of the last seven drafts combined.

Audiences, analysts, and sports networks are attributing this accomplishment to the “Caitlin Clark Effect,” a term often used to describe the Iowa Hawkeye standout’s unprecedented economic impact on the game (i.e. advance ticket sales, sold out arenas, etc.). As projected months ago, she was the number one pick in Monday night’s draft. The meteoric rise of such a generational talent has been a sight to behold, and rightfully so. Clark’s gameplay is exhilarating, her story of being “snubbed” by UConn is resonant, and her deep range, as analyst Rebecca Lobo said, distinguishes her from any other player we’ve seen before.

But to credit the WNBA’s growth solely to Clark would be ahistoric, a sentiment even she has echoed in her adoration for the Minnesota Lynx franchise and most recently, on “Saturday Night Live.” However, it seems that sports media has neglected to hear her, as outlets have published half-baked analyses about the ostensible hatred she has received rather than interrogating how they have put Clark on a pedestal as the league’s next “Great White Hope.” Clark deserves recognition for her extraordinary talent, but her accompanied whiteness seems to be the vehicle driving at least some of the flurry around her, laying bare what the powers that be deem as the next and most marketable face of the sport.

A common adage among women's basketball fans is "grow the game" — but at what expense? Sports media's obsession with exceptionalizing whiteness, in a sport “played by more Black athletes (40.7%) than any other race in Division I” per the Associated Press, not only obfuscates women’s basketball history, but it feeds a vicious combination of tropes rooted in misogynoir, respectability, and desirability politics. When such dynamics lend themselves to unequal coverage and parity for Black players, has the game actually progressed? And if so, for whom?

In March, a Los Angeles Times article that is now partially retracted referred to LSU’s predominantly Black women’s team as “dirty debutantes.” Laden with microaggressions and racist connotations, the absent-minded alliteration juxtaposed the assumed purity and whiteness of “America’s Sweethearts,” the UCLA squad. After LSU beat UCLA, Angel Reese, Flau'jae Johnson and Aneesah Morrow advanced to face off against Clark and the Iowa Hawkeyes in the Elite Eight. When the Hawkeyes won, former Celtics player Paul Pierce invoked anti-Black stereotypes to praise Clark’s performance on FS1’s “Undisputed” program.

“We saw a white girl in Iowa do it to a bunch of Black girls…That gained my respect,” said Pierce. “She didn’t do this to some other little white girls that were over in Colorado or wherever. She did it to some girls from LSU who we thought were some dogs!...And put ‘em on their knee and spanked them. I didn’t expect that.” Pierce’s remarks reinforced the masculinization of Black girls by emphasizing Clark’s whiteness, playing into notions of femininity and daintiness that Black girls are not afforded, and ultimately infantilizing Clark in the process.

Sports media insists on weaponizing whiteness to assert Clark’s dominance as “the best” of women’s basketball, at the expense of Black athletes. Black girls have been relegated to “big bad wolves” while Clark is a sanctified Little Red Riding Hood. Yet in her “Saturday Night Live” appearance, Clark credited the trailblazers before her: Cynthia Cooper, Lisa Leslie, Dawn Staley, her personal hero Maya Moore, and Sheryl Swoopes, the first player signed to the WNBA. Clark said, “These are the girls that kicked down the door, so I could walk inside. So I want to thank them tonight for laying down the foundation.”

Generations of Black women athletes walked so that Clark could run. Long-awaited developments, such as the expansion of broadcast rights to the NCAA finally assigning “March Madness” branding to the women’s tournament in 2022, have been carried on the backs of A’ja Wilson, Skylar Diggins-Smith, Candace Parker, and so many others. Their careers and trajectories have given way to another exceptional generation of players, who each have rich personal narratives.

In addition to Clark, comeback kid Paige Bueckers, “Bayou Barbie” Angel Reese, Steph Curry’s godsister Cameron Brink, and South Carolina’s Kamilla Cardoso, who emigrated to Chattanooga, Tennessee at the age of 15 from Brazil to pursue basketball, were the top 5 high school recruits in the class of 2020. With the exception of Bueckers, who will be returning to UConn, all of the aforementioned athletes were first round draft picks on Monday.

Enter freshman hoopers Hannah Hidalgo, JuJu Watkins, and MiLaysia Fulwiley, who have already taken center stage. Syracuse veteran Dyaisha Fair became the 3rd leading scorer in NCAA DI women's basketball and was drafted by the back-to-back WNBA champions, the Las Vegas Aces. Lest we forget the Gamecocks clinching the national championship with an all-new starting five and coach Dawn Staley making history twice in one night: becoming the first Black coach to win three NCAA titles and the only Black coach in Division I college basketball to complete an undefeated season.

However, newfound spectators who have been drawn by Clark’s presence wouldn’t know — because sports media has made little effort to tell them.

The team that won the record-breaking NCAA tournament championship, the South Carolina Gamecocks, did not receive a special edition 96-page spread on their historic feat. Instead, they got a poorly crafted tweet from CNN with a since-changed thumbnail featuring the losing team. Neither Dawn Staley nor her players have appeared on "Saturday Night Live" or any late-night shows. Those opportunities are, ironically, reserved for one member of the losing team: Caitlin Clark.

One could argue that Clark’s well-deserved status as a first-overall pick affords her those opportunities — but I don’t recall any late-night appearances being extended to Indiana Fever’s Boston when the Gamecocks failed to make it to the championship in 2023. What I do remember is when ESPN announced that journalist Holly Rowe assumed a new position strictly to follow Clark’s journey, an outsized response to an out-of-this world talent.

She was not dispatched to follow Baylor’s phenom Brittney Griner, who became the second woman to dunk in an NCAA tournament game during her junior year. (The first was Candace Parker at the University of Tennessee.) Rowe did not drop planned coverage to chronicle Notre Dame guard Skylar Diggins’ ascent, who was regularly name-dropped by one of the most prolific rappers of all-time during her collegiate career: Lil’ Wayne.

Despite the wealth of stories that could be generated from the Gamecocks’ success, it is clear to me that the media was not prepared for, nor did they necessarily want, a predominantly-Black team from the Deep South to win. As respectability politics rears its ugly head again, headlines were more focused on Coach Staley "being classy" in applauding Clark for her contributions to basketball rather than what Staley has accomplished as one of few Black woman head coaches.

When three-time Olympic gold medalist Staley won her first NCAA championship in 2017, she was just the second Black female coach to do so after Purdue’s Carolyn Peck. At the 2021 women’s basketball tournament, of the 64 head coaches who brought their teams to compete in San Antonio, 8 were Black women though an estimated “45% of Division I players are Black” per USA Today. According to reporting from Andscape, during the 2020-2021 season of DI women’s college basketball, only 21% of head coaches identified as Black women.

At the 2021 ESPYs Awards, UConn’s Bueckers called out the media’s lopsided coverage of Black and white players. “With the light I have now as a white woman who leads a Black-led sport, I want to show a light on Black women,” Bueckers said. “They don’t get the media coverage they deserve…and the WNBA last season, the postseason awards, 80% of the winners were Black but they got half the coverage of the white athletes.”

Much of that could be credited to how desirability politics dictate marketability in the eyes of decision makers. Although the WNBA is made up 80% by women of color, per the New York Times, the WNBA Players’ Association president Nneka Ogwumike said “when it comes to the perception, the reception, and the marketing,” Black women “don’t get the credit” despite propelling the game forward.

Numerous players have identified that if you’re not straight-passing, femme-presenting, and white in the league, visibility could be limited. “Even though our league is predominantly Black, I think it's hard for our league to push us, in a sense, because they still have to market, in their mind, what is marketable," Las Vegas Aces player A'ja Wilson told ESPN. "Sometimes a Black woman doesn't check off those boxes." Three years after Bueckers’ speech, it seems little has changed, even at the collegiate level and in the era of Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) deals. As WNBA Commissioner Engelbert boasts a new marketing tactic, questions still abound regarding who will be getting media attention and why.

Clark has undeniably had a phenomenal impact on the game’s growth and will continue to do so, as her WNBA jersey sales have already indicated. But it did not start, nor will it end, with her; there are legends before her and there will be after her. As Clark joins forces with Boston on the Fever, whose own jersey has strangely yet to hit the market, sports media has a duty follow the next generation of talent — and not just one player — into their burgeoning collegiate careers. If they want to claim to invest in women’s basketball, then invest in all women.

Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue