(Illustration: Sean Reilly / The Athletic; Photos of Caitlin Clark: Maddie Meyer / Getty Images, David K Purdy / Getty Images, Matthew Holst / Getty Images)
IOWA CITY — The joke about Iowa is that there’s nothing here.
It’s boring. It’s flyover country. It’s so flat that if a breeze comes off the Missouri River, which carves out most of the Western border of the state, you feel it on the Eastern abutting Mississippi River.
They say that there are more cows than people (OK, that one is true).
But here’s what you don’t know if you didn’t grow up here, if you didn’t spend countless weekend mornings driving across this state to gymnasiums scattered around the Midwest: There’s no sunrise in the country quite like an Iowa sunrise. When a state is this flat and you can see this far, your perspective changes. You might be focused on the exit ahead of you, but 20 miles ahead, you see that first bulb of orange peek over the horizon as the rest of the sky somehow fades from black to dark purple. And then, with increasing speed, it all bursts into a gradient of yellows and pinks and blues. You see the full sky, no distractions, while the mile markers whoosh past.
It was on these roads, in the middle of nowhere, that Caitlin Clark spent many mornings of her adolescent life…
