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Caitlin Clark breaks Lynette Woodard's forgotten scoring record, 18 points from passing Pete Maravich

Jack Baer
Staff writer
·2 min read
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Caitlin Clark broke the NCAA women's basketball scoring record two weeks ago, but it was only on Wednesday she became the all-time leading scorer among female college basketball players.

The Iowa star passed Lynette Woodard's 3,649 career points with Kansas, erasing a significant asterisk in the NCAA's all-time scoring list. She also moved to only 18 points shy of breaking Pete Maravich's 3,667 mark for the NCAA scoring record among both men and women.

With an average of more than 30 points per game, Clark is well on pace to pass Maravich in her next game, the Iowa regular-season finale against No. 2 Ohio State on Sunday.

Minutes before passing Woodard, Clark grabbed another official NCAA record, scoring her 155th 3-pointer of the season to break the single-season mark previously held by Idaho's Taylor Pierce in 2019.

The performance was part of a triple-double with 33 points, 12 assists and 10 rebounds for Clark in a 108-60 Iowa blowout of Minnesota. She entered the game needing 32 points to match Woodard and got nearly halfway there in four minutes.

Woodard scored her points between 1977 and 1981, a time when women's college basketball was governed by the Association of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women. The NCAA didn't officially sanction women's college basketball until 1982 and does not acknowledge any players or stats from before that year.

So for decades, Woodard stood above every female college basketball player, but wasn't recognized as the all-time leading scorer. As one historical observer told Yahoo Sports' Eden Laase:

“When you don’t know the history-makers, it cheats them and the current players,” Elizabeth Galloway-Mcquitter said. “One of the greats of our game is constantly kept in the shadows. And I imagine Caitlin [Clark] would want to know whose record she is really chasing.”

The NCAA also doesn't acknowledge Hall of Famer Pearl Moore, who scored 4,061 points for Division II Francis Marion University from 1975 to 1979.

Clark has finally put that discrepancy in the record book to bed, with much more to do over the last few games of her Iowa career (assuming she doesn't spurn the WNBA for a fifth year of college ball).

The remainder of Clark's season consists of the Hawkeyes' game against Ohio State, the Big Ten Tournament and the NCAA tournament. With Iowa currently ranking third in the Big Ten and on track for a double-bye in the conference tournament, that leaves as many as 10 games left for Clark to play.