After just one season in the WNBA, Caitlin Clark noticed one big difference between women’s basketball at the professional level and basketball at the collegiate level: the IQ needed to thrive.
The 22-year-old Indiana Fever guard was recently named TIME Magazine’s 2024 Athlete of the Year, and in the publication’s profile of her, Clark shared her early impressions of the WNBA’s level of competition.
“Professional players and professional coaches — this is no disrespect to college women’s basketball —are a lot smarter. I love women’s college basketball. But if you go back and watch the way people guarded me in college, it’s almost, like, concerning,” Clark told TIME.
Clark broke numerous records during her time at Iowa, becoming the NCAA Division I women’s career scoring leader and the all-time Division I leader in three-pointers in her final season before leading the Hawkeyes to a second-consecutive national championship game and being named the National Player of the Year.
In her rookie season in the WNBA, she has added more accolades to her résumé, including All-WNBA First Team and Rookie of the Year, after setting the league single-season and single-game records in assists, becoming the first rookie to achieve a triple-double in WNBA history and breaking the rookie…
