Akron-area coaches weigh in on women's NCAA Final Four, Iowa's Caitlin Clark

Carley Whitney can remember a time when women's college basketball wasn't quite the trendy product it has become in the last few years.

"I remember in grade school and high school, my dad would wake me up at 11 and we would watch Tennessee on the tape delay," the St. Vincent-St. Mary girls basketball coach said. "So you now have women's sports in mainstream media. You have them on at 7, at 9, on a Friday, Monday, Saturday. We didn't have that back then. So now you have a large portion of the United States watching them in prime time, regardless of what streaming or cable that you have."

For some in Northeast Ohio, they won't even need a cable or streaming package to watch them this week. For a very fortunate group, they'll be able to drive to Cleveland and see the last four Division I women's college basketball teams standing — South Carolina, North Carolina State, Iowa and Connecticut — compete in the Women's Final Four.

Those fortunate to have a ticket to either Friday night's semifinals or Sunday afternoon's championship game will be able to see some of the players who have transformed the sport from, as Whitney said, "tape delay" to prime-time, must-watch television. Those faces go beyond just Iowa's Caitlin Clark — the best scorer in the history of men's or women's Division I college basketball — to players like UConn's Paige Bueckers, N.C. State's Aziaha James and South Carolina's Kamilla Cardoso.

Even the coaches, like the Gamecocks' Dawn Staley and the Huskies' Geno Auriemma, have taken on larger-than-life personalities. Having all of those personalities, be it walking the sidelines or running up and down the court, in the backyard of so many younger players who can watch them will have a trickle-down impact on the younger ones.

"Making memories, for sure," Hoban girls basketball coach Pam Davis said. "Even if you can't actually see the game, there's the all-star college game, there's the practice that is free to the public. There are other avenues to get close to that experience, and there's nothing like it. I went to the one in Columbus a few years back, and it was just a phenomenal atmosphere.

"And just to see all the young girls all the way to people like me who've been in the game for decades, it's fabulous of how much this game has grown, and I am hopeful that it will just continue. I don't believe it'll ever get to the men's platform, but it's going to be pretty darn close."

Jackson High School girls basketball coach Anthony Butch was in attendance a year ago when the Final Four was in Dallas. He witnessed the game that served as the launching point into this season, when Clark's Iowa team was beaten in the national championship game by mostly the same LSU team the Hawkeyes defeated Monday night to return to the Final Four.

Clark has become the face of the national growth of the sport, with the Hawkeyes having multiple games this season among the most watched sporting events — college or professional, men or women — on TV. Iowa's regional-final win over LSU drew 12.3 million viewers, according to ESPN, which outdrew every 2023 World Series game and all but one game in last June's NBA Finals.

However, Butch didn't have to squint hard to see a through-line to one of his own former players. While former Polar Bear star Taylor Mikesell, who recently signed a deal with the WNBA's Los Angeles Sparks, may not have reached Clark-like status in the sport, she certainly reached once-in-a-lifetime status for the high school program for which she played.

Mikesell, who played collegiately at Maryland, Oregon and Ohio State, graduated from Jackson as Stark County's career scoring leader with 2,175 points, a mark passed the next season by McKinley's Kierstan Bell, who Davis coached. It's not the points, though, that Butch believes is the lasting legacy a player like Clark or Mikesell leaves.

"So the impact for us, and I would say for anybody that's been around Caitlin as well, is the process," Butch said. "You don't become a shooter like that overnight. I mean, it's hundreds of thousands of shots. … I mean, the process and the work that it takes and the time that it takes is way more than even I realized or knew when I started coaching, and that's the trickle-down effect for Taylor.

"She laid the blueprint and it's not any secret that anyone else can't do. It's just nobody puts that commitment and time into it. Caitlin Clark and Taylor's routines, I would bet, are very, very similar as far as how many shots they get up and just kind of the obsessed nature that they have."

Clark's next step is to join Mikesell and Bell, who currently plays for the WNBA champion Las Vegas Aces, at the highest level of women's basketball. The Indiana Fever, who own the No. 1 overall pick in the WNBA draft, have all but announced they're taking the Iowa star.

However, Bueckers has already announced she's returning for one final season at UConn, and James will also be back. They're going to join several players who won't even be on the Final Four stage in Cleveland who have added to the growth of the sport this season, including freshmen sensations JuJu Watkins of USC and Hannah Hidalgo of Notre Dame.

"I think we, not finally, but we have national star power now where people are tuning in more than just your average women's college basketball fan," Whitney said. "So you have these young women who are leading the charge and this uprising in making something a spectacle out of something that we've all loved before.

"So I think that downtown is going to be electric. … I'm excited to see how Cleveland shows out and shows up for women's basketball."

Chris Easterling can be reached at ceasterling@thebeaconjournal.com. Follow him on X at @ceasterlingABJ

This article originally appeared on Akron Beacon Journal: Akron coaches weigh in on women's Final Four, Iowa's Caitlin Clark