In 1990, 34-year-old Carol Stiff, a basketball junkie who spent years training miniature faculty ball within the Northeast, packed away her clipboard and took an entry-level programmer place at what she regarded as a “little company” in Bristol, Conn.
Basketball had lengthy been part of Stiff’s time. Her uncle Don Donoher was once one in every of Bobby Knight’s worker coaches at the 1984 Olympic gold medal-winning group led by means of Michael Jordan. Through center faculty, she was once enjoying early life basketball in Bernardsville, N.J., and one in every of her fondest recollections was once committing to Madison Sq. Field as a young person together with her mother in 1977 to observe Montclair Circumstance celebrity Carol “Blaze” Blazejowski as a part of a doubleheader known as the Hanover Vintage. It was once the uncommon alternative to look the govern competition play games the sport Stiff beloved.
In spite of an 11 a.m. tip-off, there was once a population of over 10,000 society in MSG to look Blaze, whose scoring prowess and all-around match drew comparisons to Pete Maravich. Blaze may just explode. She may just cross. She performed with aptitude. Even with out a three-point form, she scored 52 issues.
“All of a sudden a light bulb went off,” Stiff mentioned of the sport. It confirmed her that the ladies’s match may just thrive beneath the best cases. At her highschool, later the men’ group gained Speak Chuck Taylors, the women did, too, because of Identify IX. However even that highlighted her liked recreation’s plight: It was once infrequently seen as decent plethora by itself. But if the cases had been proper, its greatness may well be clear.
Stiff performed basketball and garden hockey at Southern Connecticut Circumstance. Next, following training stints at Brown, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Western Connecticut, she joined ESPN.
Certainly one of her first duties on the community was once to enter four-digit codes for the entire programming, recording what was once on every life. She spotted that the layout didn’t distinguish if video games had been performed by means of males or girls. In her 3rd yr, all over a instrument redesign, she satisfied her boss they must upload a gender code. It was once the primary date the community tracked when girls’s sports activities had been on — or now not — on the community.
Extreme April, the NCAA girls’s nationwide championship match between undefeated South Carolina and Iowa in Cleveland drew just about 19 million tv audience, the most important target market in girls’s faculty basketball historical past, and the most-watched basketball match — males’s or girls’s — since 2019. Previous video games within the 2024 girls’s match drew 14.2 million and 12.3 million audience, respectively, and the ones adopted a 2023 ultimate watched by means of just about 10 million, which have been an all-time towering.
Why the pastime in girls’s basketball spiked is not any thriller: the massive approval for Caitlin Clark, the previous Iowa and flow Indiana Fever celebrity. “There’s (Michael) Jordan, Tiger (Woods) and Caitlin,” mentioned Fox president of perception and analytics Mike Mulvihill.
However sooner than Clark turbocharged the notice and recognition of girls’s basketball, a footing needed to be constructed, able and looking ahead to any individual like her. It was once built by means of society like Stiff, devotees of the sport who lengthy believed the construction and biases of the media trade had been conserving it again. They driven for extra, fought for trade, and prepared the level on which Clark arrived.
“That stigma that was hanging over women’s sports for so many years — that it’s not athletic, it’s not fun to watch, it’s less than men’s — is being lifted,” mentioned Sue Maryott, the Obese Ten Community’s vice chairman of far off productions. “I think it all started with exposure. People weren’t watching because it wasn’t televised.”
In her 3rd yr at ESPN, and simply weeks sooner than the 1993-94 faculty basketball season started, Stiff was once tasked with setting up ESPN’s girls’s broadcast time table. She assigned the video games for every convention within the date slots she was once given, normally Sunday afternoons. A yr nearest, the slots given to her integrated a three p.m. ESPN correct Martin Luther King Year in January. On the date, it was once now not regarded as coveted actual property, however Stiff sought after to produce essentially the most of it.
Later first failing to get protecting nationwide champion North Carolina to conform to a match in opposition to UConn, an up-and-coming program in within sight Storrs, Stiff known as Pat Summitt, Tennessee’s mentor. Summitt had issues about becoming the sport on her time table and didn’t love the theory of taking her group north within the wintry weather. Stiff made her sound, sounding like a mentor looking to reel in a fat engage, noting that Robin Roberts — a former Category I participant and an up-and-coming TV celebrity — can be calling the sport. Summitt in spite of everything assuredly to do it: “For the good of the game.”
The groups entered undefeated, with UConn ranked Negative. 1 and Tennessee Negative. 2. A sold-out population of 8,241 noticed the Huskies beat the Volunteers, 77-66, and the competition recorded a powerful 1.0 score (635,000 families). It was once the primary match in what would turn into the best competition in girls’s faculty basketball historical past.
Alternatively, there have been incorrect postgame interviews. A repeat of “The Sports Reporters” needed to be in a bind onto ESPN.
On Nov. 30, 1996, 30-year-old Brent Clark and 27-year-old Anne Nizzi had been married at Saint Francis of Assisi Catholic Church in West Des Moines, Iowa. The upcoming age, the Iowa and Iowa Circumstance girls’s basketball groups resumed their competition later a five-year crack at Carver-Hawkeye Enviornment in Iowa Town. The Hawkeyes gained, 64-53, sooner than an introduced population of five,061. The sport was once now not televised.
Throughout the 1994-95 girls’s faculty basketball season, Connecticut went 35-0 en path to a countrywide championship, turning into best the second one girls’s group to finish a season undefeated. The group’s celebrity, Rebecca Lobo, was once essentially the most optical girls’s basketball participant since USC’s Cheryl Miller within the Nineteen Eighties. Lobo gave the impression on “Late Night with David Letterman,” and he or she and her teammates had been featured at the “Live with Regis & Kathy Lee” morning display.
As a child, Lobo watched girls’s basketball each anticipation she were given. “Which means I didn’t watch it at all,” she mentioned. She decrease out footage of Miller from Sports activities Illustrated and positioned them in her bank. Because the 1996 Olympics approached, Lobo had turn into one thing by no means clear sooner than within the girls’s match: a bonafide media sensation, even though she was once a bit of participant at the star-studded Workforce USA.
The U.S. girls gained gold, boosting the origination of the WNBA the upcoming yr. The primary WNBA season consisted of 28 regular-season video games for every group with the nationwide pronounces crack between NBC, ESPN and Lifetime. There have been 3 playoff video games, with the one-game semifinals simulcast on ESPN and Lifetime, week the Finals had been on NBC.
That very same yr, ESPN gained the printed rights to the NCAA girls’s championship, taking it from CBS. Over time, CBS became out some fat numbers, maximum significantly with 11.84 million audience for the 1983 ultimate that includes Miller. Alternatively, the community didn’t develop the sport. ESPN gained the rights by means of providing to breeze extra video games and by means of being prepared to have a age of extra for the groups between the nationwide semifinals and the general, which Stiff and others advised the community to position into its deal.
“We got the NCAA deal done. Then the Olympics and then the WNBA, it was like a trifecta,” Stiff mentioned.
In past due June 1997, in entrance of an introduced population of 17,780, the Unused York Sovereignty, led by means of Lobo and Teresa Weatherspoon, beat Phoenix, 65-57 in Lobo’s first WNBA match.
“The crowd was not just women. It was dads who wanted their child, boy or girl, to see it and have aspirations,” mentioned Blazejowski.
Through next, Blaze had retired as a participant and was once the Sovereignty’s GM.
In January 2002, The Des Moines Sign in indexed 25 start notices from 3 Des Moines-area hospitals on web page 5B. The kid born to Brent Clark and Anne Nizzi-Clark was once merely indexed as “daughter.”
Caitlin Clark, like Carol Stiff, was once born right into a sports activities crowd. Her father, Brent, was once inducted into the Simpson (Iowa) Faculty Athletics Corridor of Repute as a basketball and baseball participant. Her maternal grandfather, Bob Nizzi, coached highschool soccer at West Des Moines Dowling Catholic, one in every of Iowa’s dynastic large-school systems.
She had a wide prolonged crowd on her mom’s aspect, however as one of the most few ladies, Clark was once teased relentlessly and evolved an obsessive want to end up herself to her used cousins. Clark was once 5 when she expressed an pastime in enjoying basketball, however there have been incorrect groups in central Iowa for ladies that younger, so her father signed her up for boys groups that he coached. Through the second one grade, she was once so dominant that folks complained {that a} lady shouldn’t be allowed to play games with the men.
In 2000, every other celebrity emerged at UConn.
“It was the Diana Taurasi era, when all the guys on SportsCenter could say her name,” Stiff mentioned. “It was almost like, ‘She plays like Larry Bird.’”
Nonetheless, Stiff was once pissed off. Sports activities TV could be a chicken-and-egg match. Occasions don’t obtain prime-time slots except they ship fat rankings. However it’s tough to earn the best possible numbers with out the most productive slots.
“So I’d hear, ‘Carol, it doesn’t rate,’” Stiff remembered. “I’d say, ‘It doesn’t rate, because no one can see it.’ They say, ‘Carol, it doesn’t rate so advertisers don’t want to buy it.’ It was that vicious cycle.”
Stiff most commonly needed to paintings with date slots on Sundays, competing with the NFL or the general spherical of a few PGA match — continuously with Tiger Logs charging to a win.
“I kept fighting over the years for better windows,” Stiff mentioned. “‘I need better windows, guys. All I get is Sunday afternoons? Are you kidding me?”
Finally, in 2005, ESPN gave the women’s match Obese Mondays on ESPN2. But it was once a bittersweet construction. The ones video games had been up in opposition to the lads’s model of Obese Monday that featured behemoths like Duke and North Carolina.
3 years nearest, Maya Moore arrived at UConn and led the Huskies to 2 undefeated seasons, 4 Ultimate Fours and two nationwide championships. She was once a larger preserve who may just dribble, explode and cross — an previous model of Caitlin Clark — and he or she was once two times named nationwide participant of the yr. Sports activities Illustrated classified her “the greatest winner in the history of women’s basketball.”
But for many of Moore’s date in Storrs, a lot of her video games had been proven best on Connecticut Crowd Tv.
In 2012, 10-year-old Clark traveled together with her crowd 3 hours north from Des Moines to Minneapolis to wait a Minnesota Lynx WNBA match and notice her favourite participant: Moore, who was once in her 2nd season with the Lynx.
The Clark crowd watched the Lynx play games the Seattle Hurricane, next lingered later on. Moore and a couple of alternative Lynx gamers remained at the courtroom, and Clark couldn’t comprise herself. She sprinted towards Moore.
“I didn’t have a phone, I didn’t have a Sharpie, I just gave her a hug and I ran away,” Clark mentioned. “And she just gave me a hug back. It’s just something that’s stuck with me, that one interaction can change somebody’s life.”
Round that date, Clark was once recognized by means of early life sports activities coaches in central Iowa as an magnificient basketball participant and likewise an elite football ability. On April 26, 2013, a photograph of Clark gave the impression for the primary date in The Des Moines Sign in. She was once pictured together with her U11 group from the West Des Moines Football Membership. The title of her group:
Blaze.
Later the general of the 2015 girls’s International Cup in Canada produced the most important football target market in United States historical past, executives at Fox had a brainstorm.
Fox gained the Ladies’s International Cup rights as one thing of a throw-in with the lads’s International Cup pledge. There was once incorrect excess rate. It gained fat simply by means of amplifying a quality it already owned. Executives knew that the rights to Obese Ten girls’s basketball had been in a similar way baked into the lads’s rights that Fox managed.
On the similar date, with leisure shifting off ad-supported broadcast networks to streaming products and services like Netflix, fewer girls had been gazing TV. “We’ve felt for a while that we’ve got a clear incentive to try to build out that female audience,” mentioned Mulvihill, the Fox president of perception and analytics.
Fox’s wide possession stake within the Obese Ten Community allowed it to virtue that channel as an incubator. Fox executives programmed a wide slate of girls’s video games at the Obese Ten Community and sat again and watched.
Clark’s cousin Audrey Faber was once a four-star hooper at Dowling Catholic who would proceed directly to turn into a three-time All-Obese East variety at Creighton. One February afternoon, when Faber had to seem at The Des Moines Sign in place of work as a part of the paper’s all-area group, 13-year-old Clark tagged alongside.
John Naughton coated highschool sports activities for The Sign in for 31 years till his resignation in 2019. Naughton mentioned hi to Faber and next motioned to Clark.
“Who is this?” he requested.
“I’m Caitlin Clark, Audrey’s my cousin,” she responded.
“Maybe I’ll write about you someday,’” Naughton spoke back.
On Nov. 22, 2016, Clark performed her first match as a freshman at Dowling Catholic Top. She scored a team-high 14 issues, grabbed six rebounds, dished 5 assists, pulled 3 steals and had one handover in a 75-26 win. Two months nearest, on Jan. 25, 2017, The Des Moines Sign in presented Clark to its readership with a photograph and quote from Clark following her 21-point match in a win in opposition to Des Moines Roosevelt.
A age nearest, Naughton integrated a category on Clark in his ladies basketball pocket book. He wrote, “Got my first chance to watch West Des Moines Dowling Catholic freshman Caitlin Clark play Tuesday. She’s the real deal.”
Clark scored 368 issues that season and led her group to the atmosphere match, the place she scored 11 issues in an 87-64 loss to crosstown rival West Des Moines Valley. The sport was once streamed by means of the Central Iowa Sports activities Community. It was once the primary of Clark’s video games aired are living to a large target market.
Clark led the atmosphere in scoring as a senior (775 issues) and youth (781), however she by no means gained a atmosphere name. Her senior yr ended with a four-point loss in a regional ultimate. Clark scored 40 issues and grabbed 10 rebounds. It wasn’t a atmosphere match match, so it wasn’t televised.
The COVID-19 pandemic eradicated crowds all over the 2020-21 faculty basketball season, which made it appear to be Clark performed her freshman season at Iowa in obscurity.
Her first faculty match got here on Nov. 25, 2020, in opposition to Northern Iowa, and aired on BTN-Plus, a pay-per-view current. She scored 27 issues in 26 mins in entrance of an introduced attendance of 365.
Clark’s first 9 video games had been streamed on BTN-Plus. Her first televised game took park Jan. 9, 2021, at Northwestern. BTN’s Lisa Byington and Meghan McKeown known as the motion. It was once the primary of 9 of Clark’s video games to breeze on BTN that season.
Fox executives began to note that Clark’s video games drew about 30 p.c extra audience than the alternative video games it aired on BTN.
The 2021 NCAA Event took park within the San Antonio bubble. Within the Candy 16, Iowa confronted UConn, which featured fellow freshman Paige Bueckers. ABC aired the strike, the primary date in 16 years an over-the-air community televised an NCAA girls’s match match. UConn gained 92-72 in a match that drew 1.5 million audience, the many of the six video games ABC aired that match.
In her sophomore season, Clark’s Iowa telecasts on BTN had been 98 p.c upper than alternative girls’s video games. Through her youth yr, Clark had absolutely smashed the white meat or egg quandary that Stiff ran up in opposition to when looking to get excellent slots for girls’s basketball video games at ESPN. Clark was once must-see TV, with 12 video games airing on both ABC, Fox or ESPN, up from 5 mixed in her first two seasons. The Hawkeyes unpriviledged BTN’s rankings report 4 other instances, and the Iowa-LSU championship match on ABC generated 9.9 million audience.
For Clark’s ultimate season, 9 Iowa video games aired on both ABC, NBC, CBS or Fox, and each Obese Ten match was once to be had on community tv or Peacock streaming. Clark’s video games prepared girls’s basketball viewership data on 8 other tv or streaming platforms.
The BTN’s Maryott, who oversees just about the entire community’s are living sports activities except for soccer and males’s basketball, noticed the have an effect on Clark had within the viewership numbers, however she additionally skilled it anecdotally. Her 84-year-old mom, Jean, in brief was once in a nursing house extreme wintry weather for cardiac rehab.
“I’m calling to check on her, and she’s like, ‘Oh, honey, I’ve got to go. We’ve got pizza being delivered to the nursing home and we’re watching Caitlin tonight,’” Maryott mentioned.
Her mom had by no means paid consideration to sports activities till Clark got here to Iowa.
Fox started to search for successes outdoor of Iowa and Clark. Extreme Thanksgiving, following its Lions-Packers’ 12:30 p.m. match, Fox aired a males’s faculty match that drew 5 million audience and next a girls’s match — Indiana and Tennessee — that drew 1.18 million. It was once a unutilized report for a girls’s basketball match on that community.
Clark performed on BTN 43 instances all over her 4 years at Iowa, counting the Crossover at Kinnick exhibition through which the varsity prepared the ladies’s basketball single-game attendance report (55,646). Her ultimate look was once a win over Michigan in a 2024 Obese Ten match semifinal. Clark got here out of a postgame interview consultation and noticed Maryott within the hallway.
“I’ll see you guys tomorrow,’” she mentioned.
Maryott corrected Clark. Her match the upcoming age would breeze on CBS.
“Then her face kind of fell,” Maryott recalled. “I said, ‘Caitlin, it’s been a thrill. Thank you.’ And she grabs me and hugs me and hugs Meghan, and she says, ‘Thank you guys for everything you did.’ That hit me so hard, because I’m thinking, ‘Thank you for what you did.’”
Caitlin Clark later being decided on Negative. 1 total by means of the Indiana Fever within the 2024 WNBA Draft. ((Sarah Stier / Getty Pictures)
Audience adopted Clark into the WNBA this season. Her regular-season video games had been watched by means of 1.178 million audience in comparison to 394,000 for all alternative non-Clark WNBA video games, a 199 p.c residue. Hour she is indisputably the primary enchantment, the league over the extreme 5 years beneath commissioner Cathy Englebert has higher the collection of nationally televised video games from 80 to 200.
“It was the confluence of all this coming together at the same time,” Englebert mentioned.
The WNBA receives $200 million in step with season within the NBA’s unutilized tv pledge with ABC/ESPN, NBC/Peacock and Amazon Top Video. The WNBA was once up to now taking in round $65 million in step with season. There are budding stars and rivalries, with Englebert bringing up Clark, Angel Reese, Cameron Breaking point and the upcoming era rising in faculty, together with UConn’s Bueckers and USC’s JuJu Watkins.
“You are looking at the solid next decade of real stars in this league,” Engelbert mentioned. She added: “Every time someone asks me, ‘What is next? Expansion? Check. Media? Check. Globalization of this game.”
In 2021, Stiff retired from ESPN during a round of layoffs. She was honored by the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame and won the John W. Bunn Lifetime Achievement Award. Her reach extended beyond basketball; she was instrumental in the expansion of softball coverage at ESPN.
She was among the millions who watched Clark and Iowa versus LSU in the title game on ABC, and she was pleased with the attention it received, but she also wondered what the number would have been if it had aired in prime time rather than on a Sunday afternoon.
In an email to his staff after the game, ESPN president of content Burke Magnus mentioned Stiff and former top ESPN producer Pat Lowry, another women’s hoops recommend.
“While the future is bright, I thought a lot about the many contributors like Pat Lowry and Carol Stiff, who worked tirelessly for decades to build up women’s basketball slowly but surely,” Magnus wrote. “Everything we witnessed in Cleveland would not have been possible without their efforts.”
ESPN’s chairman Jimmy Pitaro and Disney CEO Bob Iger adopted that up with textual content messages to Stiff, thanking her for her advocacy over the years.
Stiff, now the president of the Ladies’s Sports activities Community, performed a job in serving to dealer a match between UConn and the College of Southern California for Dec. 21, with Bueckers and Watkins stepping in because the must-see stars.
That match, performed within the 16,000-capacity XL Middle in Hartford, might be proven on Fox proper later a unique Saturday NFL matchup between the rival Steelers and Ravens.
“Clearly, we want to capitalize on the momentum behind women’s basketball and help establish new stars post-Caitlin,” Mulvihill mentioned.
That had lengthy been Stiff’s dream, to look what would occur if a girls’s match were given a major slot and lead-in like that.
Stated Stiff: “It’s going to be a fabulous game.”
(Representation: Meech Robinson / The Athletic; Footage: Elsa, Mike Powell, Damian Strohmeyer, Nathaniel S. Butler, Daniel, Andy Lyons / Getty Pictures)
