Earlier this month, Iowa star Caitlin Clark surpassed basketball legend Pete Maravich to grow to be the all-time main scorer in Division I basketball historical past—the primary time a lady has held this distinction.
However amid the jubilation over this milestone have been disappointing reminders of simply how a lot of ladies’s basketball historical past is forgotten—typically on the expense of the Black ladies who helped nurture and develop the game when it was thought-about an afterthought.
NCAA data present that Clark unseated the College of Washington guard Kelsey Plum because the main scorer for girls. However that’s fallacious: One other participant named Lynette Woodard really held that document.
Woodard scored these factors again when ladies’s sports activities had been ruled by the Affiliation for Intercollegiate Athletics for Girls (AIAW), which tracked particular person participant data. When the NCAA took over the group, within the early ’80s, it counted solely particular person teaching accomplishments and college win-and-loss data. It didn’t protect particular person participant statistics, which signifies that many athletes haven’t acquired the credit score they deserved for shaping the sport.
None of that is Clark’s fault. She introduced this month that she is forgoing a fifth 12 months of eligibility to enter the WNBA draft, and has been taking part in brilliantly. Clark has introduced unprecedented consideration to the ladies’s recreation, as evidenced by the record-setting crowd she helped draw to the Massive Ten event in Minneapolis final week. The truth is, Clark has been promoting out arenas all season; many followers have lined up for hours to see her play.
Final 12 months, the NCAA ladies’s basketball nationwide championship recreation was the most-watched ladies’s basketball recreation ever, largely due to the budding rivalry between Clark and Angel Reese of Louisiana State College, who defeated Iowa 102–85. With this being Clark’s ultimate NCAA event, the expectation is that this 12 months’s ladies’s event can be a fair larger rankings blockbuster, particularly if the Hawkeyes make it to the Last 4.
Sadly, it’s taken Clark’s large reputation—and her breaking some hallowed all-time scoring data—to resurface not solely Woodard’s historic accomplishment and her general impeccable profession however the achievements of so many different ladies who’ve been essential to the game’s success.
Woodard was an Olympic gold medalist who joined the Harlem Globetrotters in 1985, turning into the primary lady to ever play for a males’s skilled crew. Whereas she was in attendance for Clark’s notable efficiency in opposition to Ohio State, she informed ESPN, “I don’t suppose Lynette Woodard would have this second with out Caitlin Clark.”
And never simply Woodard. Pearl Moore really scored extra factors whereas at a small faculty than Clark, Woodard, and Maravich when she performed for Francis Marion Faculty in Florence, South Carolina, from 1975 to 1979.
The NCAA has a protracted historical past of failing to correctly assist ladies’s sports activities. Simply two years in the past the NCAA was compelled to publicly apologize after the previous College of Oregon participant Sedona Prince posted a video on social media exhibiting how substandard the coaching amenities had been for the ladies’s gamers competing within the event in contrast with the lads’s. This identical group fought in opposition to the passage of Title IX—the landmark laws handed in 1972 that prohibited discrimination in federally funded higher-education establishments primarily based on gender and mandated honest alternatives for feminine athletes. In 1976, the NCAA tried unsuccessfully to sue its approach out of complying with Title IX. The NCAA finally complied with the regulation by primarily executing a hostile takeover of the AIAW.
Perhaps a few of that hostility stays, as a result of the refusal to acknowledge the person AIAW data doesn’t make any sense, and it does a disservice to not solely Clark however the brand new followers she’s dropped at the sport who can be higher served realizing the sport’s full historical past. For instance, as exceptional as it’s that Clark is averaging 32 factors a recreation this season, throughout the AIAW days, Carol Blazejowski averaged 38.6 factors a recreation in her ultimate season at Montclair State Faculty—the very best single-season scoring common for a girl. However in response to the NCAA, that document doesn’t exist both.
Different outstanding sports activities leagues have efficiently built-in data from preexisting and competing leagues. In 2020, Main League Baseball introduced that it was including Negro League baseball statistics to its official data, recognizing about 3,400 Negro League baseball gamers as MLB gamers. The NFL additionally built-in statistics from its onetime rival, the American Soccer League, which the NFL merged with in 1970.
However Clark’s reputation and the NCAA’s shoddy conduct are rather more than simply entry factors to debate equitable document maintaining. The eye Clark has drawn additionally opens a wider dialog about what number of Black ladies, resembling Woodard and Moore, have been marginalized on this sport regardless of their invaluable contributions.
Though each Moore and Woodard have been inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Corridor of Fame—maybe the very best honor for a basketball participant—the NCAA not recognizing their scoring data is an insult to their legacies. Sports activities media have additionally performed a job in dismissing the magnitude of what these athletes have achieved. The College of Massachusetts researchers E. Nicole Melton and Risa Isard launched a examine in 2021 that confirmed a deep discrepancy in media protection between white and Black WNBA gamers. The analysis centered on 2020, when Black ladies accounted for 80 p.c of the postseason WNBA awards, together with the Most Beneficial Participant award. In response to the report, Black WNBA gamers on common acquired 52 media mentions whereas their white counterparts acquired 118. A’ja Wilson, the 2020 WNBA MVP, as an example, acquired half the media protection of the white participant Sabrina Ionescu that season, although Ionescu performed in solely three video games that 12 months resulting from harm.
White gamers are conscious of this disparity. When the College of Connecticut star Paige Bueckers accepted her award for finest feminine faculty athlete on the 2021 ESPYs, she expressed her gratitude for the Black ladies in basketball, as a result of she knew their contributions tended to not be seen with the respect they deserve.
“With the sunshine that I’ve now as a white lady who leads a Black-led sport and celebrated right here, I need to shed a lightweight on Black ladies,” stated Bueckers, who was the reigning Naismith nationwide participant of the 12 months on the time. “They don’t get the media protection that they deserve. They’ve given a lot to the game, the neighborhood, and society as a complete, and their worth is plain.”
Whereas celebrating Clark’s accomplishments and embellished NCAA profession, we must also bear in mind the pioneers who helped carry her to this inflection level within the sport. The very least that legends resembling Moore, Blazejowski, and Woodard deserve is having their accomplishments correctly included within the historical past of the sport.
