Inside Caitlin Clark’s coronation: WNBA’s first draft pick has Indiana basketball fans in a Fever as the league looks to capitalize on her historic NCAA career… and shed its ‘little sister’ label

Maybe it was her white Prada blazer, matching miniskirt, or her diamond cufflinks, but Caitlin Clark was almost unrecognizable at Monday’s WNBA Draft in Brooklyn — a considerable accomplishment for one of America’s most famous athletes.

Before becoming the obvious first-overall pick by the Indiana Fever, Clark spent the last month guiding Iowa to its second consecutive NCAA championship game while garnering the biggest television audiences in tournament history. In the last few days she’s been on Saturday Night Live and NBC’s Today Show, not to mention countless publications, websites, as well as the lips and ears of sports fans across the country.

Interest in this year’s WNBA Draft was so high, the league opened it up to fans for the first time since 2016 thanks to Clark, the all-time NCAA scoring leader. And back in Indianapolis, the Fever reported more than 17,000 attendees at their WNBA Draft watch party. Clark won’t make her WNBA regular-season debut until May 14, but ticket prices on the secondary market have already soared over $500. Meanwhile, the defending-champion Las Vegas Aces have made plans to open up 7,000 more seats when the Fever come to town on May 25.

Clark is accustomed to attention on the basketball court, where her confidence ranks alongside Michael Jordan’s or LeBron James’. But it’s the other side of the business that she’s still learning to tolerate. When her post-draft press conference was completed after weeks of exhausting interviews, Clark quietly turned to a publicist and asked: ‘How much stuff do I have to do?’

Just weeks away from graduating at Iowa, the clearly fatigued 22-year-old was only referring to any potential media obligations over the remainder of the evening. But thanks to her unworldly shooting ability and a deft passing touch that she considers ‘overlooked,’ Clark is now must-see TV. Simply put, the media’s demands on Caitlin Clark are just getting started.

‘I think obviously the course of the last few weeks has been pretty insane in my life,’ she said Monday, trying to remember all the the cities and places she’s passed through on her way to a second NCAA championship appearance.

‘The last two months playing basketball as long as I possibly could in my college career, and then went home for a couple days,’ she continued. ‘I got off the plane when we landed in Iowa City, drove directly home, had cook my mom cook me a meal, and then I drove back to Iowa City the next day.

‘Then I flew to L.A., flew to New York and now I’m here sitting at this stage.’

Clark was likely speaking of the literal stage she was seated on in the draft’s media room or offering a figurative reference to the professional ranks she’s now joining.

But in a broader sense, ‘this stage’ is quickly becoming Clark’s to define at a very opportune time. 

The WNBA has enjoyed an uptick in attendance and television ratings for several years, but the league has never rivaled its big brother, the NBA.

Women’s college hoops is a different story.   

Iowa’s title game loss to second-overall pick Kamilla Cardoso and the South Carolina Gamecocks drew an average of 18.7 million viewers — about four million more than the men’s championship. Admittedly, the men’s game was on cable and not on national TV, like the women’s. But Clark, LSU’s Angel Reese and a growing number of female players actually became more recognizable than NCAA men’s players in 2023-24.

And if there was any doubt about their popularity, Monday night in Brooklyn put an end to it.

The scene was reminiscent of the 2023 NBA Draft 10 months earlier, when the San Antonio Spurs picked 7-foot-4 uber-prospect Victor Wembanyama amid a sea of wild fanfare.

Like Clark, Wembanyama was an obvious choice to be taken first, giving the draft the feel of a scripted coronation. And what’s more, there were countless young fans angling to get the autograph of the presumptive first pick, as had been the case in June of 2023, when the young Frenchman was welcomed into the league.

‘Everyone was pushing and shoving, and she just handled it like a champ and made sure that everybody got her moment with her,’ Reese Gittleman, a 17-year-old from Philadelphia, told DailyMail.com after getting Clark’s signature.

‘She was really, really sweet,’ added Gittleman’s friend, 16-year-old Melina Day.

The difference between Clark and Wembanyama’s respective draft nights was the setting.

Both were selected in Brooklyn, a basketball-savvy borough loaded with knowledgeable and eager fans. But whereas the NBA Draft was held at Barclays Center, a full-sized NBA arena, Monday’s WNBA Draft took place around the corner at the cramped 3,000-seat Brooklyn Academy of Music.

This venue, a grand music hall that first opened in 1861, was cramped on Monday. 

Fans struggled to get a view of Clark and the rest of their favorite players. Aging elevators led reporters to a packed media room in the building’s attic, where players did their first press conferences as professionals underneath a movie poster from a recent Robert Redford film festival.

There was a similar vibe at the Elite 8 in Albany weeks earlier, when Clark and Iowa beat Reese’s LSU in a rematch of the 2023 NCAA Final. The game attracted a whopping 12.3 million viewers and easily sold out Albany’s MVP Arena.

Both that event and Monday’s draft felt bigger than their respective venues, and that’s what makes Clark such a game changer. She’s not just attracting fans to women’s hoops — she’s changing the math for women’s basketball and the WNBA is well aware of the opportunity at its door.

The league already plans to add a new team in 2025, but with Clark’s arrival, there is more expansion talk in the works, not to mention a new media deal that could dwarf the current contract.

‘This is an important year for us around viewership, around attendance, around all the qualitative and quantitative factors that go into the valuation of media rights,’ commissioner Cathy Engelbert said Monday.

‘The one thing I know about sports, you need household names, rivalries and games of consequence,’ she continued, referencing the women’s NCAA tournament. ‘Those are the three things we’ve had over the past couple weeks.’

And with Clark on board, those are the kinds of possibilities for the WNBA’s future.

‘This isn’t something everybody gets to do,’ Clark said Monday. ‘It’s once in a lifetime.’