IOWA CITY, Iowa – It’s seven minutes until another mid-October practice inside otherwise unoccupied Carver-Hawkeye Arena, and one of the four portable side baskets is not fully cranked up to the required height. One of Iowa’s male practice players duly walks behind the stanchion. He grabs a lever and begins to turn it. He soon encounters a complication on the job: There is an All-American hanging from the rim.
And up Caitlin Clark goes, holding on with two very valuable hands, getting a good five or six inches off the floor before she lets go and comes back to earth. She is, predictably, smiling and giggling after she does. Which puts this scene in stark contrast to what happened here a few months earlier, and the last time college hoops’ most propulsive scorer came crashing down to earth under this roof.
The story of Iowa women’s basketball remains the pursuit of doing things that haven’t been done in a long time, which is kind of the issue. Those things could have been done last year. And then came March 20, and an NCAA Tournament second-round upset in this gym, leaving a big blank space where a program-defining statement was supposed to be. “Honestly, I feel like I just blacked out after we lost,” Clark says from a courtside chair, firmly grounded once more….
