Caitlin Clark

I would be remiss not to put some kind of tribute to Caitlin Clark and the Iowa Hawkeyes here. They gave us a wonderful season and changed women's basketball forever.

As a Hawkeye fan, I got drawn in early and got special notice that Hannah Stuelke is a relative of mine (second step-cousins, twice removed, to be exact). I wasn't able to actually watch any games so didn't get drawn in so much by the live-action angle of it; I just read about them afterward and occasionally posted using home-made pop art.

There are many reasons Caitlin got a wide range of fans, intense national interest, and status as a huge star. Yes, this was in spite of the fact that the South Carolina team was actually way better than the Hawkeyes. Caitlin kind of just drew in her audience with her way of being. She's a kind of combination of very competitive and super-polite, self-effacing Iowa farm girl, and people just responded to that, or maybe they were just ready for that new kind of hero. Girls especially, and I mean young white ones mostly here, especially respondsed to it, in Iowa in particular.

Some say that Iowa's theocratic backward state politics have led Iowans into despair and self-loathing, which made the state itself ripe for a hero who is strong, competent, and still clearly Iowan to the core. The fact that Caitlin is from West Des Moines and Hannah is from Cedar Rapids made me at least feel that the team was home-state Iowan, unlike many basketball teams today that are a product of super-effective national recruiting machines. Iowa had to pay a premium probably to ensure they stuck with the team and didn't wander off to some lucrative transfer option. But they wanted to play for Iowa. And they made the season for everyone.

She said all the right things when she was interviewed and she gave proper credit to her teammates who have indeed carried a lot of the weight. I like how she's humble when she needs to be, and she's pretty in a natural, confident, strong kind of way. It's hard to define exactly what about her attracted fans' adulation. On the court, it appeared that it was that she could always make threes, and often did, and this made her a threat every minute that she had the ball. That also put her in the class of male athletes like Stephen Curry who can make baskets from anywhere on the court.

I still have an old feud with the ugly Hawkeye logo, of course, but I'm finding it a lot more fun to be a loyal fan of my alma mater (one of them anyway - I went to Iowa twice) - and proud to be associated with this team. I'm a huge Caitlin fan.