It’s not hard to imagine a future in which this past week is seen as one that changed women’s basketball.
The NCAA championship Sunday represented the biggest television audience ever for a women’s college game. It spurred discussion that kept going for days: The conversation about LSU forward Angel Reese and Iowa guard Caitlin Clark represented a rare instance of women’s basketball capturing sustained, mainstream attention (which made it all the more unfortunate that so much of the dialogue had to rebut ugly double standards around who gets to talk trash and why). The tournament featured some jaw-dropping highlights and broke attendance records. And it’s hard to have asked for all this at a better time. The NCAA is just a year away from the chance to break out the women’s tournament as a candidate for its own stand-alone television deal for the first time—a long-awaited opportunity to demonstrate its value.
Yet it would be a mistake to see this as just a single moment. None of this attention is isolated. Instead, the current momentum is the product of consistent, steady growth.
