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Why on Earth wouldn’t UConn head coach Geno Auriemma be interested in recruiting the now two-time Player of the Year Caitlin Clark?
Clark was the Iowa Gatorade Player of the Year (twice), Iowa Miss Basketball, was selected to compete in the McDonald’s All-American Game and the Jordan Brand Classic, and scored 2,547 points during her high school career.
She averaged 32.6 points, 6.8 rebounds, 3.6 assists and 2.3 steals per game as a junior and averaged 33.4 points, eight rebounds, four assists and 2.7 steals per game in her senior year.
Seems like the kind of player that Auriemma, who has been to a whopping 23 Final Fours, would want on the Huskies, right?
Well, it turns out, Geno Auriemma had a very good reason for not recruiting Caitlin Clark: Paige Bueckers.
“Well, there’s a lot of kids we didn’t recruit and there’s a lot of kids who don’t want to go to UConn,” Auriemma said this week. “I committed to Paige Bueckers very, very early and it would have been silly for me to say to Paige, ‘Hey listen, we’re going to put you in the backcourt and then I’m going to try really hard to recruit Caitlin Clark.’ I don’t do it that way.
“Caitlin is obviously a tremendous player, a generational player. But if Caitlin really wanted to come to UConn she would have called me and said, ‘Coach I really want to come to UConn.’ Neither of us lost out. She made the best decision for her and it’s worked out great. We made the decision we thought we needed to make.”
Auriemma joked this week that Caitlin Clark, not Paige Bueckers, is “the best player” in the country, adding that he doesn’t “need to be seeing her drop 50 on us next weekend.”
“There are a lot of great players we see coming through high school, thousands of them,” Auriemma continued. “You’re only going to recruit some. You’re not going to recruit all of them. Some people do recruit all of them, I don’t. I try to lock in on who fits us. We try to lock in on them early and that’s what happened to us and Paige. We felt really, really comfortable with that and we went with it. Those are decisions that are made every day, every year, by every coach.”
Geno Auriemma certainly isn’t wrong. Neither of them lost out.
In fact, because of Bueckers, Clark and others, women’s Final Four tickets on the resale market are selling for twice as much as the men’s tickets.
The reason for that is obvious, even to the biggest basketball star of them all right now, LeBron James.
“I don’t think there’s much difference between the men and women’s game when it comes to college basketball,” James said Wednesday night. “I think … popularity comes in is the icons they have in the women’s games. You look at Angel Reese, you look at JuJu [Watkins], you look at Caitlin Clark, you look at Paige [Bueckers] … you look at [Cameron] Brink … and that’s just to name a few.”