Let's Row Together

Caitlin Clark's "logo" swish, records still to break, transformational leadership, three dribbles was all we got, a hometown championship, and the redemptive power of the Lady Potters

Veni, vidi, vici

Caitlyn Clark came. Into Iowa’s Carver-Hawkeye arena to roof-splitting cheers of the customary sold-out crowd.

She saw. The hoop. Then, in the first 2 minutes and 12 seconds of the game, Clark drove for a lay-up, hit a 3-pointer deep from the left side, then an even deeper 3 - her logo shot! – for her eighth point - the record-setter (3,528) she needed – in a game last night against Michigan. In that game, she scored 49 points with 13 assists. (She was already the first Division 1 woman to reach 3,000 points AND 1,000 assists.)

She conquered. Setting the NCAA women’s scoring basketball record, which Kelsey Plum, now with the WNBA Aces, had claimed in 2017.

Just WATCH.

transformational leadership in sports

Two women athletes – Billie Jean King in the early 1970s and Caitlin Clark in the mid-2020s – epitomize what it means to inspire change. King courageously led top players in a game-changing protest to bring equal pay to tennis – and the ripple effects still spill into women’s battles for equity today; Caitlin’s joyous style, half-court swishes, stealth passes, and on-court leadership draws more eyes (and funding) to women’s sports than ever had happened before – and her ripple effects will, I predict, be felt 50 years from now as people speak of her year as the key turning point for women and sports, as King’s efforts are remembered today.

“My favorite athletes are those who are champions in sports and champions in life, and Caitlin Clark is one of those,” BJK told ESPN. “She is the hottest star in basketball - all of basketball, and not just women’s basketball - and with that comes a heavy responsibility to be a leader on the off the court. She gets it, and this is part of the reason she will have an opportunity to be one of the best in her sport and a role model for future generations.”

But is Caitlin Clark the leading women’s scorer in collegiate basketball?

Here we encounter the (temporary) *

Lynette Woodward, a magnificently versatile and dominant player in the late 1970s and early 1980s, graduated from the University of Kansas after scoring more points - 3649 - than any woman basketball player at a large college. So why isn’t Woodward’s the women’s collegiate record? It all boils down to how the men in charge of NCAA sports treated the women back then - and the answer is NOT WELL! It took until 1982 for the NCAA – having done all it could do to try to push the women aside after the 1972 passage of Title IX – to convince the AIWA (Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women) to transfer oversight of the women’s game to them.

A casualty of this 1982 handover:

When the NCAA took control of women’s collegiate sports, it opened its own record books. What women athletes did before was viewed as insignificant to the NCAA. So, Woodward’s scoring record is invisible to the NCAA in monitoring records for women collegiate athletes.

3649 is within her reach this season. (Clark is averaging 32.1 points per game; 34 in the past five games. She has four regular season games, the Big Ten Tournament, and NCAA tournament ahead.)

Then, there is the overall AIAW record – 3,884, scored by Pearl Moore playing at tiny Francis Marion (1975-1979)

When Clark’s college career ends - probably this spring – it is likely she’ll be the first Division 1 player to lead the nation in scoring in three seasons.

As impressive as Caitlin Clark’s NCAA record is, prominent basketball figures believe that her NCAA scoring record should (for now) carry the Woodward *

In this Feb 8 Wall Street Journal story (above), the winningest college basketball coach, Stanford’s Tara VanDerveer said: “I think the overall record by Lynette Woodward is THE RECORD.” Others agree. VanDerveer noted that what sets Woodward’s scoring feat apart is that she earned it before the 3-point shot existed.

Clark and Woodward. Illustration by Timmy Huynh/Wall Street Journal, Michael Reaves/Getty Images, University of Kansas.

Locker Room Talk: Blurb Alert!

Six kind people wrote about my book, Locker Room Talk: A Woman’s Struggle to Get Inside in “blurbs” – the publishing industry’s shorthand for endorsements. Their words will appear on Locker Room Talk’s back cover when it is published in August. In future Substacks, I’ll share the other five blurbs, but today I’ll show you what the only man among them wrote.

Seems only fitting today since he directs is pro basketball.

“Melissa Ludtke’s trailblazing career in sports media is a lesson in moral courage, perseverance and equality.  Her deeply personal reflections underscore the challenges she faced and the progress she championed.” – Adam Silver, NBA Commissioner

ROW, ROW, ROW (in a crew shell) … SOON!

Before roe return to girls’ basketball, I’m pausing for a glimpse of ROWING. On warm winter days in Cambridge, I’ve seen a few rowing shells being rowed on the river. This warms my heart since in a month I’ll be back rowing on the Charles. We start again on Monday, March 18.

Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam, who rows a single, wrote this week about his love for rowing in the wake of the film, “The Boys in the Boat.”

My two takeaways from his essay:

1. A wondrous observation: “You’re trying to perfect a thing by doing something over and over and over almost infinitely. You have to ride the edge between near explosion and meditative calm.” (Joshua Ramus, single sculler)

2. His accurate conclusion: “There’s a reason rowers only want to talk about rowing. Most everything else pales in comparison.”

BEFORE I ROWED, I PLAYED BASKETBALL

as soon as I figured out I could play the game rather cheer for the boys!

(Top photo) I am #74, attentive in our varsity team’s pre-game huddle with coach Betty Lawson, in 1968 when our record was 7-5; Bottom photo) First row, second from right on my Amherst Junior High cheerleading squad, 7th grade

In my university hometown of Amherst, MA, girls had opportunities to play team sports in the 1950s and 1960s. This was a rarity in America, as I later learned. In 7th grade, the “popular” girls were cheerleaders, so I tried out and made the squad, then cheered for the boys to win. By 8th grade, we had a junior high girls’ basketball team. When I discovered this, it took me less than a second to set aside my cheerleading suspenders, hang up my blouse, pack up my skirt, and join the team.

I LOVED every moment of playing the game – even if I got so nervous the night before each game that I had insomnia and ended up sleeping in my parents’ bed after my mother heated up warm milk for me to drink.

We played with rules were designed to make the game less strenuous for us – very much considers the weaker sex. While the boys ran up and down the entire court, dribbling the ball for as long as each boy needed to … we were restricted in where we could play an reined in with how far we could move when we had the ball – all of this supposedly for our own good.

We competed with six players - not as the boys did with five. And four of our players had to stay in only half the court, either as a “stationary” forward or guard. They were not allowed to cross the center court line. Two of our players, aka the “rovers,” could be anywhere on the court, but not even a rover could dribble the ball more than three times before she had to pass it. Consequently, our games were tortuously slow affairs. All movement essentially ceased whenever a girl ran out of dribbles; her opponents knew she would, so they swarmed her which made it tough to pass the ball out of what resembled this rugby scrum surrounding her. These were grinding slogs, with few points scored.

Is it any wonder that nobody came to watch us play?

Second row, far left, the author

How we were told to play basketball mirrored our lives off the court, too, as I observed in these few paragraphs I wrote in an early draft of my book:

No One Cheered For Us

We knew the rules we played by, and accepted them. Even so, I wonder why I and my teammates didn’t wonder why the boys could dribble forever, and we couldn’t. Back and forth, one basket to the other, they freely roamed No line on the court demarcated a forbidden territory for them.

Their opponents didn’t know when a boy would pass the ball. Even if his sneakers screeched, as if he was about to stop, this didn’t signal what would happen next. He might be shifting his direction, getting ready to twist his body and launch himself towards the hoop. By dribbling in circles he’d evade a defender until a teammate was open for a pass, or he just kept on dribbling until he found just the right moment, just the right angle, to take his shot.

Or a boy stopped when he decided to stop. He controlled where, when and what happened on the court. No rules bound him to a time or place when the momentum stopped, unless fouled. In practice, the boys’ coach laid out strategic options for them to gain advantage with one choice or another, while our coach reminded me to count my dribbles before quickly finding a teammate to whom I could pass the ball.

I was oblivious, maybe blithely so, in seeing how our differing ways of playing this game mimicked patterns and trajectories of our off-court lives. There, fewer societal norms roped in the boys. But fairness wasn’t a word I used then, though in retrospect I’m not sure why. Life wasn’t fair for us, as our treatment lived up to the diminished expectations grown-ups had for us in the future. (In 7th grade, I was assigned home economics while the boys created wooden things in shop.) On the court, restrictive rules slowed us down while the boys were free to invent plays as they saw fit.

Off the court, this was also true.

But I noticed a few things about us and them. When the boys played, people came to watch, including me. Hardly anyone watched us. Maybe a few moms came at the start of a game, but they often had to leave early as younger siblings got restless.

The boys had one more thing we never imagined having for ourselves.

Cheerleaders.

I ought to know. I used to be one.

Decades after my high school graduating in 1969, and with the Amherst girls playing the game the way that boys did, the Lady Hurricanes won the state championship in 1993. Madeleine Blais, a journalism professor at UMass Amherst, chronicled this season in her book that was a National Book Award finalist.

Locker Room Talk NOTE: Maddy Blais will be in conversation with me about my book when I travel to Amherst in the fall of 2024 for my book talk.

A summary of Maddy’s book reminds us of the gross inattention paid to girls’ sports in the time when these girls won the state championship:

“Blais spends part of her book contextualizing the Lady Hurricanes in the eccentric university town of Amherst, Massachusetts. It is situated between three huge university campuses, which are in turn surrounded by farms. Blais shows how the girls’ personalities were informed by the combination of elite intellectual institutions and relatively uneducated rural communities. She also highlights how young women’s sports programs have fewer resources than young men’s sports, and enjoy only minimal representation in literature and culture. She criticizes what she perceives as the routine marginalization of girls’ basketball, especially during the time of the Lady Hurricanes’ victorious season. She contends that biases against women in sports prevented many athletic associations and universities from funding women’s teams. This disenfranchisement affected the Lady Hurricanes personally: many of them, Blais argues, excelled in part because they could only assume there would be few playing opportunities afforded to them in the future. In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle advocates gender equity in basketball and other sports industries as much as it chronicles the Lady Hurricanes’ compelling success story.”

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I knew Dave Kindred from my Sports Illustrated days in the 1970s when I was reporting baseball and he wrote sports for newspapers in Louisville, Washington, D.C. and then Atlanta – becoming a nationally acclaimed sports columnist! When he retired - after winning every sportswriting prize there is – he and his wife, his high-school sweetheart, Cheryl, returned to rural Illinois, content with their small-town life as long as they had each other on a patch of land they knew as home. That was in 2010.

Early on, according to this 2021 Sports Illustrated story, “they met a local teenager—a young, athletic type—and in peppering her with questions, one of the Kindreds asked: ‘Are you going to be a cheerleader?’

“‘No,’ the girl shot back. ‘I’m gonna be the one they cheer for.’”

A sentiment to which I relate.

Soon, Dave and Cheryl were sitting in the bleachers watching her play with the Morton High School Lady Potters in Morton, Illinois. “I couldn’t sit there and not write about what I saw,” Dave recalled, so he volunteered to write about the games, posting his stories to the team’s website and his Facebook page, all in exchange for a box of Milk Duds each game. As coach Bob Becker put it: “the Michael Jordan of sportswriting falls into our lap.”

In April 2014, Dave Kindred’s mother died, followed by the death of his beloved grandson Jared, who at 25 died due to his addiction to drugs and alcohol. (His book about Jared: Leave Out the Tragic Parts: A Grandfather’s Search for a Boy Lost to Addition.) Not long after this, Cheryl suffered a debilitating stroke; unable to communicate, she lived in a nursing home until her death seven years later. Dave visited her every day, and for a while had thought of dropping his Lady Potters’ writing.

A player’s mother convinced him not to quit.

“She was right. I went,” he told Jon Wertheim in this SI story. “And I’ve been going ever since. What had started as fun became life-affirming. It’s what I am. It’s what I do. … My life had turned dark. '[The basketball team was] light. And I knew that light was gonna be there two of three times a week.”

Before Dave wrote his book, My Home Team: A Sportswriter’s Life and the Redemptive Power of Small-Town Girls’ Basketball, he self-published books chronicling the team’s seasons. In several of these years, they won the state championship.

After I started following Dave’s Facebook game stories about the Lady Potters, I wrote him an admiring fan email. And he sent me these three books (above) - he’s written a fourth! You can order them here.

So, let’s say goodbye on a joyful note! For that, I turn to Dave Kindred to lead us out with his opening paragraphs of his December 17, 2016 story about the Lady Potters.

“Talk about happy faces, look at Janey Wharram’s. She’s running off the court. She’s smiling and she’s laughing and she’s aglow. I shouldn’t ask you to look up a word. But look up a word. Look up “incandescent.” Jacey Wharrem, incandescent, is sprinting toward the Lady Potters’ bench, and she’s flying past her teammates, slapping hands in celebration, and she hears Brandi Bisping. Bisping is shouting,”Dude, you got 19 rebounds.”

Hardly slowing dow, Wharram is shouting, “How MANY?!?”

BB: Nineteen.

KW” “Don’t be lying to me.”

She wasn’t.