MORGANTOWN — By now you’ve heard of the Caitlin Clark effect on women’s college basketball.
We’ll spare you from some type of colorful analogy, because in these parts, Clark isn’t exactly a hero after the refs handled her with kid gloves when Iowa knocked off WVU in last season’s NCAA tournament.
Instead, we’ll stick with two facts you need to know:
** More people watched the women’s championship game last season than the men’s title game.
** The new TV contract the NCAA signed with ESPN in January will allocate $65 million per year over the next eight years toward the women’s NCAA tournament. That’s a 900% — that’s no typo — increase from the 2024 tourney.
The bottom line: We are in the middle of a boom in popularity for women’s hoops, and there has to be credit thrown Clark’s way.
The problem is Clark is now a pro in the WNBA, and what’s left behind has some monumental shoes to fill.
“You roll with the momentum and momentum is a scary thing in sports. That’s what we talk about all the time,” WVU women’s coach Mark Kellogg said. “It can be a dangerous thing either way.”
Simply meaning what is trending one way today, may not be the way it’s trending tomorrow.
There will be much interest in whether or not the women’s game continues to live up to the momentum that’s been built, a question that truly can’t be answered in just a season or two.
What we can tell you now is the increased attention in women’s basketball has made a major impact here in Morgantown.
“We had three times as many kids at our camp this summer than we did a year ago,” Kellogg said. “That tells you a little something that kids are excited, and families are excited to be around the program.
“There is an excitement, people are talking about it. I don’t think that’s going anywhere. Our season-ticket sales are considerably more than what they were a year ago. I think we’re in a good spot.”
You want numbers, we’ve got them, courtesy of Matt Wells, WVU Deputy Athletics Director for External Affairs.
In Kellogg’s first year at WVU last season, 811 season tickets were sold. That doesn’t sound like much — the Coliseum sits 14,000 — but it was a record for the program.
With more than a month remaining before the Mountaineers’ first game this season, season-ticket sales have already reached 1,290.
That’s smashing the previous record by a pretty solid 59%.
“It’s definitely new territory for the program,” Wells said. “You obviously can’t predict how sales will continue to go, but there could be a legitimate chance it gets to 1,500.”
That is grabbing momentum by the horns, and Kellogg certainly has the players this season — at least on paper — to give a new and larger audience something to get excited about.
And there is also something to be said here that the women’s hoops team is now part of a rising up of other WVU sports outside the realm of football and men’s basketball.
What Dan Stratford has accomplished in his five seasons with the men’s soccer team is impressive. The WVU students and fans have noticed, and suddenly Dick Dlesk Stadium is a cool place to be.
What Randy Mazey accomplished during his tenure with WVU baseball was to simply keep setting school attendance records, only to break them over and over at Kendrick Family Ballpark.
It’s Kellogg’s turn now, which has got to bring some added pressure to not only live up to the hype, but to continue to build on it.
“I think our passionate fan base will continue to rally around our program,” Kellogg said. “We want to keep the momentum, and you want to keep moving forward. I want our kids to keep working, so we can continue to grow it in this state.”
