Iowa’s Caitlin Clark surpassed the hype. Charlotte — and women’s basketball — won, too.
Iowa basketball star Caitlin Clark played in Charlotte for the first time Thursday night, and in one way the Queen City had never seen anyone quite like her.
In another, it certainly had.
Clark surpassed the hype Thursday, scoring 44 points as her No. 3 Iowa team edged No. 8 Virginia Tech, 80-76, in a rollicking women’s college basketball game at Spectrum Center.
The newly-minted Ally Tipoff drew 15,196 fans, which organizers said ranked as the highest attendance for any women’s college basketball game played in North Carolina.
Many of them came to see Clark, and wow, did they get a full dose of that. Clark played all 40 minutes, scored 55% of her team’s points and needed every bit of it to win.
I said in one way the Queen City had never seen anything like Clark, but in another way it certainly has. That person grew up in Charlotte, in fact, and his name is Steph Curry.
Clark to women’s basketball is what Steph Curry is to the men’s game — a transcendent superstar who has stretched the boundaries of what is possible on a court.
To draw 15,000-plus fans on a Thursday night in November to a women’s college basketball game in Charlotte, with no team from the Carolinas in the contest and with the Panthers playing a nationally televised game in Chicago at the same time?
That’s remarkable, and a testament to the drawing power of Clark. Curry was the same way when he played at Davidson — people like LeBron James would randomly show up at his games, just wanting to get a glimpse of the circus.
Virginia Tech had a serious fan base at this game as well, and the Hokies outnumbered Iowa fans altogether. But the arena exploded in some way every time Clark did something, which was about once every 20 seconds. She’s every bit as talented as what you see on TV, but what is far more apparent in person is how darn hard she works to do it.
Clark’s 3-point shooting was pedestrian by her “reigning college player of the year” standards Thursday — she was 5-for-16 from beyond the arc. But she got to 44 points anyway — and added eight rebounds and six assists — by repeatedly driving into the paint through contact. She drew 16 fouls in the game, and got knocked to the ground numerous times by a tough Virginia Tech team that made the women’s Final Four for the first time last season and is a threat to do it again.
Still, she wasn’t overjoyed with how she played.
“We’ll shoot the ball better,” Clark said afterward, adding that most of the game felt a little “choppy.”
To Virginia Tech, though, Clark was otherworldly.
“Sometimes you’re playing checkers and she’s playing chess,” Virginia Tech coach Kenny Brooks said.
“She’s been gifted by every single god you can imagine,” Virginia Tech point guard Georgia Amoore said.
With Clark doubling her No. 22 uniform number in points and Virginia Tech staying with Iowa nearly every step of the way, the game delivered as promised.
The crowd, incidentally, was about 900 fans more than the Charlotte Hornets drew the night before, when the Hornets lost a home game against Washington and had 14,267 in attendance.
Credit also goes to the Charlotte Sports Foundation, which created this game out of thin air in the spring after Clark had dazzled the NCAA tournament on the way to Iowa’s berth in the finals (and loss to LSU).
Danny Morrison and his staff at the CSF lured Iowa first, with the promise of a $150,000 guarantee to play the game and an additional $50,000 to pay for the team’s travel. Then Morrison and his team had to find an opponent — Dawn Staley’s dynasty at South Carolina would have been ideal but already had an early-season date in France.
Virginia Tech said it would gladly come and got a $150,000 guarantee, too, which is big money in women’s college athletics and provided both teams with an early-season showcase that was broadcast by ESPN2.
Amoore, a 5-6 dynamo for Virginia Tech, matched Clark shot for shot for much of the game and ended up with 31 points. Amoore, in fact, hit the game’s longest three-pointer — a 50-footer from just before the halfcourt line at the first-quarter buzzer.
“To be put in a spotlight in an NBA arena with a great opponent, that’s just what you dream of,” Amoore said.
“We went to the Final Four last year and this atmosphere rivals it,” Brooks added. “It was electric. ... It was like a dream come true. We’re disappointed as hell losing the game, but it was a fantastic game.”
That it was, with Clark’s 44 ending up just two points off her career high of 46 points, going 13-for-31 from the field and 13-of-17 from the free-throw line. She could have had 50, pretty easily.
“A lot of mine felt like they were going in,” Clark said.
That’s the sort of night Steph Curry still sometimes has — he scores 44 points and somehow it didn’t even seem like he shot that well. The great ones can do that, because they can score in so many ways. Clark did it Thursday, and the raucous crowd made it all the better.
Said Clark: “It’s very hard to wrap my head around the environments we get to play in… It’s incredible honestly.”
And it was incredible, for a sport on the rise and the superstar helping to lift it even higher.
