Covering Caitlin

My mission: see Iowa basketball star Caitlin Clark play against Northwestern. The problem: it's sold out. The solution: report on the game, my first Big Ten basketball coverage since 1988.

When’s the last time a woman has been, indisputably, the most famous active athlete in all of collegiate sports?

When’s the last time the Northwestern University women’s basketball team played before a sold-out home crowd?

When’s the last time I covered a Big Ten basketball game?

The answers: never, never and 36 years ago.

The singular figure behind both of those firsts and that first-in-a-really-really-long-time is Caitlin Clark, the University of Iowa guard whose fame has skyrocketed over the past year.

The reigning National Player of the Year and two-time All-American is well on her way to repeating those feats this season, with the added element of becoming a household name via State Farm, Gatorade and other endorsement deals.

The word “historic” is overused, as I’ve previously noted in a grumpy-old-journalist missive. But this past Wednesday evening at Welsh-Ryan Arena legitimately qualified as a significant moment in time.

It’s why I made a point of being there, overcoming its sold-out status by securing an assignment to cover the game for the Daily Herald in suburban Chicago.

As a college freshman in 1987 I’d written a few stories for The Daily Northwestern on the Wildcat women’s basketball team. The next year, my beat included covering the men’s team, a squad that struggled through a last-place Big Ten season.

Reflecting on my latest round of college basketball coverage, some significant “then vs. now” differences emerge.

For example, back in the 1980s, press row was right alongside the court, across from the team benches. It made for an intimate, in-your-face experience.

Nowadays, media members are seated midway up the since-renovated arena. It’s an OK angle to observe the action (below is a four-second clip of one of Clark’s baskets) but I missed having the potential to catch a deflected ball flying at my head or to hear some on-court trash-talking.

Another obvious contrast: as a college sophomore, I was younger than most of the players and every other reporter; now, as the dad of two college juniors, I was one of the oldest reporters among the 30 or so who crowded into the press conference after the game.

(Side note: though she didn’t get a press credential, my daughter Maggie Rose posted updates throughout the game for her outlet, North by Northwestern, from the NU student section.)

About an hour before tip-off, the Barons in the NU student section.

As an undergrad covering the entire Big Ten season, trekking to campuses throughout the Midwest—places like Michigan, Ohio State, Indiana and Minnesota---I arrived courtside as soon as I could, but sometimes with not much time to spare.

On Wednesday evening, I made a point of arriving two hours before tip-off. I knew that the game was a sell-out, but I was still astonished by the line of fans that snaked around the arena, their eagerness owing to Welsh-Ryan’s general seating policy for non-season ticket holders.

I spoke with the family in the front—they’d been there since 10 a.m. Turns out, they didn’t have to try so hard—the man next in line had arrived at 2 p.m. and folks only 50 feet behind them reported coming only a half-hour earlier.

A view from the front of the line that stretched around an adjoining facility next to Welsh-Ryan Arena.

A few other behind-the-scenes reflections:

With age has come an enhanced ability to spot my opening to pose questions.

Those openings are all of one-quarter of a second, maybe less—check out the news conference and you’ll see how reporters verbally vie to get their questions across, almost talking over Clark as she comes up for air.

My questions came at the 2:34 and 6:18 marks, the first one about her final basket, an almost comically wide-open layup. (Her reply was in my story.)

Covering games on deadline is still exhilarating…and stressful!

With the game ending at 9:02 p.m. and my deadline 58 minutes away, my challenge was gathering post-game remarks and weaving them into various chunks of observations that I’d made throughout the game. Until blending those bits and pieces, I never try to become too attached to anything I jot down.

Caitlin Clark was poised fielding questions after the game.

I slipped out of the press conference at 9:27 p.m., just as Wildcat coach Joe McKeown began making his remarks. Less than 45 seconds earlier, one of his players made a comment that would serve as the article's closing quote:

“I thought it was going to be a much closer game,” said NU forward Paige Mott. "We didn’t show up for 40 minutes…this was a rare occurrence that’ll never happen again.”

I took the elevator back up to the media section, where a handful of other reporters had their heads down as they pushed their stories across the finish line. While arena staff collected garbage and did other housekeeping chores around us, those old adrenaline-flowing, exhilarating, stressful feelings of being on deadline flooded back.

Bounded & hounded by space and time.

I didn’t love my lede (“The Caitlin Clark Experience came to Evanston…”) but I thought it was serviceable. Rather than devote time I didn’t have to craft a more sensational start, I zeroed in on the rest of my draft.

I double- and triple-checked every name’s spelling, including the two women Clark had passed on the all-time scoring chart.

I conferred with another reporter on what he perceived to be the proportion of Iowa fans on hand—someone else had estimated 90% but I felt that was too high. Factoring in the strong turnout of Northwestern students, I settled on “at least three-quarters” as a safe accounting and sought to capture the colorful collage with “gold and black garb vastly outnumbered NU purple.”

The view from my perch: somewhere in the fourth row behind the Iowa bench were Caitlin’s parents. Neither was wearing a Clark jersey.

I was tempted to note the prevalence of Clark jerseys in the stands but was limited by time and space (500 words max, my editor had instructed).

Giving my lede another look, at the last moment I decided to drop in “and 10 assists” to make the point that Clark's performance was more than scoring points.

Having alerted my editor at 9:45 p.m. that I was “gonna be going right up to 10 pm,” I figured that recent communication might afford me a few minutes of grace. But I dreaded the prospect of seeing an incoming e-mail along the lines of “Where’s your story!!??!!”

At 10:08 p.m., having nudged my word count up to 545 and without my usual practice of providing a suggested headline, I took a deep breath and pressed “send.”

Six minutes later, the story went ‘live’ online.