PARIS — Shortly after she found out last month that she’d been left off the U.S. Olympic women’s basketball team roster, Caitlin Clark received a text from her high school coach.
Kristin Meyer wanted to remind Clark how she responded the last time anyone dared tell her she wasn’t good enough.
In May 2018, as Clark was finishing her sophomore year of high school, she flew to Colorado Springs to try out for the U.S. U-17 World Cup team. Clark expected to make the cut since she had been a rotation player on the team that helped the U.S. qualify for the U-17 World Cup the previous summer.
In those days, Clark wasn’t yet inundated with autograph requests, social media followers or endorsement deals, but glimpses of her now-familiar splashy game were already visible. Here was this wisp of a girl bombing long-range 3s, whipping high-risk passes through traffic and shaking defenders in transition with behind-the-back dribbles.
Meyer remembers thinking Clark “played well” during tryouts, but the USA Basketball youth selection committee had a wealth of future college stars to pick from. Eight of the 12 players from the previous year’s U-16 team made the cut. Clark was the highest-ranked prospect of the four that the committee chose not to bring back.
“She actually broke her pinkie early in the tryouts, but I don’t think that was necessarily the determining factor,” Meyer told Yahoo Sports. “There were just some players that I guess the committee thought played better.”
At the same time that the likes of Haley Jones, Paige Bueckers and Aliyah Boston began preparing to lead the U.S. U-17 World Cup team to a gold medal in Belarus, Clark returned home to Des Moines, Iowa, to work on her craft. The embarrassment of getting cut and the realization that there were other players ahead of her inspired Clark to keep searching for ways to improve instead of coasting on her talent.
“She always worked hard and loved being in the gym, but there was a different level of maturity to her that summer,” Meyer said. “She just had this kind of locked-in attitude when she was in the gym. She was really driven to get better.”
Between the end of tryouts and the start of her junior season, Clark made a big leap. All the key elements of her game became sharper, Meyer said, from her handle, to her decisions with the ball in her hands, to her shooting percentages at all three levels.
Caitlin 1.0 might go for an unnecessarily risky no-look pass or rise and fire from 27 feet early in the shot clock. Caitlin 2.0 resisted that temptation more often and became more efficient when she did attempt an audacious play.
Caitlin 1.0 might stomp away or throw her hands up in frustration if a referee botched a call or if a pinpoint pass ricocheted off the hands of an unsuspecting teammate. Caitlin 2.0 was still a heart-on-her-sleeve competitor — she just started to understand how her body language and temperament affected those around her.
At the end of her junior year at Dowling Catholic, Clark was among the youngest players invited to try out for the team that would represent the U.S. at the U-19 World Championships in Bangkok later that summer. At 17, Clark made a star-laden roster headlined by Rhyne Howard, Bueckers and Boston.
Though Clark averaged a modest 14.7 minutes in seven games in Bangkok, coach Jeff Walz showed faith in her with the U.S. trailing by three in the final minute of the gold-medal game against Australia. Walz called upon Clark to shoot free throws after an Australian player’s elbow struck Howard in the nose, temporarily forcing her out of the game.
Two years later, after Clark averaged 26.6 points per game as a freshman at Iowa, she was an obvious choice to make the 2021 version of the U.S. U-19 World Championship team. This time, she guided the U.S. to a 7-0 record, averaged a team-best 14.3 points and 5.6 assists and earned tournament MVP honors.
Over the next three years, Clark went from basketball-famous to famous-famous as she led Iowa to a pair of title game appearances and the world awakened to her incandescent talent. The size of her stage expanded with every logo 3-pointer, every YouTube-worthy assist, every brazen behind-the-back dribble and every Jordan shrug.
Fans who previously didn’t follow women’s sports huddled in front of their living room TVs and packed arenas to watch Clark play. Sports debate shows that previously ignored women’s basketball devoted segment after segment to Clark’s trash talk and scoring exploits.
Clark is now one of the biggest draws in sports, but USA Basketball officials insisted her ability to attract new eyeballs to the sport wouldn’t matter when they were selecting the Olympic team. As USA Basketball selection committee chair Jen Rizzotti told the Associated Press earlier this summer, “It wasn’t the purview of our committee to decide how many people would watch or how many people would root for the U.S. It was our purview to create the best team we could.”
Since Iowa participated in the women’s Final Four the same weekend as USA Basketball held its Olympic training camp, Clark was unable to attend. As a result, the committee only had the opening four weeks of Clark’s rookie season to study when evaluating her against WNBA competition.
USA Basketball officials informed Clark that she hadn’t made the Olympic team when she was on the Indiana Fever bus on the way to a game. Clark responded to the snub with grace during interviews with reporters, but it’s telling what she apparently told Fever coach Christie Sides.
“Hey coach, they woke a monster,” Sides recalls Clark saying.
The text that Clark received from her former high school coach encouraged her to lean into that mindset. Meyer reminded Clark that the biggest jumps in her game came between her sophomore and junior year of high school after not making the U.S. U-17 World Cup team and between her sophomore and junior year of college after Iowa’s stunning second-round NCAA tournament exit against Creighton.
“When adversity hits, either you kind of crumble and feel sorry for yourself or it causes you to dig a little deeper,” Meyer said. “Those things that really hurt you and disappoint you to the core have in the past helped take her to the next level in her game, in her attitude, in her preparation and in her work ethic.”
Already, Meyer has seen signs from afar that history is repeating itself. In her 11 games before being left off the U.S. roster, Clark averaged 15.6 points and 6.3 assists. In the 15 games since, she’s averaged 18.2 and 9.5 assists. In one game, she recorded the first triple-double by a WNBA rookie. In another, she broke the WNBA single-game record with 19 assists.
“There’s few people who have watched Caitlin play as much basketball as I have, and I’m still shocked at some of the things she can do against that level of competition,” Meyer said. “When I think she can’t surprise me anymore, she comes out with a pass or a shot or a read on the court that I have to rewind and watch three or four times.”
When Clark helped the WNBA all-stars defeat the U.S. Olympic team on July 20, she insisted that the victory wasn’t “vindication” for her. Clark said she’s looking forward to resting for a few weeks and to watching the U.S. women “dominate” without her.
No hard feelings.
Just four years of motivation.
Source Agencies
