COLLEGE BASKETBALL
As Caitlin Clark breaks all the records, the NCAA can correct its own

Perspective by Sally Jenkins
Columnist
March 1, 2024 at 6:06 a.m. EST



Fans applaud Iowa guard Caitlin Clark Kelsey Plum's NCAA scoring record. (Matthew Putney/AP)

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The NCAA badly needs a victory, and Iowa’s Caitlin Clark is trying to hand it one, if the hole-dwelling gollums who keep the record book will only seize it. Tickets to see Clark’s last regular season collegiate game have gone for as much as $877, which seems almost worth it to witness the shot she brandishes with such a combination of darting and languor. The NCAA should honor the architects of that stroke, acknowledge those who built her burgeoning game, and quit claiming false credit.

It’s fun to live through a historical phenomenon, isn’t it? To witness a performance so sustainedly aerodynamic that it signals a lasting cultural uplift. That’s what Clark is accomplishing, as she approaches Pete Maravich’s NCAA Division I points record with her logo three-pointers, all gathered tension and free unwinding and ruffling of the net. But Clark’s performances couldn’t come without the elevations of the past, and especially without the surehanded 62-year-old coach Lisa Bluder, one of the original pathfinders of the women’s game.

Bluder has kept Clark’s head and body so straight in the face of double teams and jersey grabs all year, so consistently in alignment, feet, hips, elbow, wrist and flow. ... Yet NCAA record-keepers don’t acknowledge women’s basketball existed before it took the game over in the 1980s. Exactly when do they think women acquired their knowledge of the game? From online seminars?

“For some reason, the NCAA doesn’t want to recognize the basketball that was played prior to 1982, and that’s wrong,” Bluder said this week, after Clark passed what Bluder called “the real record” for women’s major collegiate scoring. That was set by the smoother-than-licorice Lynette Woodard at Kansas from 1978-1981, under the AIAW, before the NCAA deigned to care. ... “We played basketball back then,” Bluder added. “They just don’t want to recognize it. That hurts the rest of us that were playing at that time.”

(snip}

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By Sally Jenkins
Sally Jenkins is a sports columnist for The Washington Post. She began her second stint at The Washington Post in 2000 after spending the previous decade working as a book author and as a magazine writer.