Inside Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese’s influence on males’s basketball

Faculty basketball is coming off of a quick period of matriarchy. However is it even over? 

The 2024 faculty basketball recruiting class is coming into the game within the aftermath of a historic reputation shift. This 12 months, for the primary time in March Insanity historical past, extra individuals tuned in to look at the ladies’s championship recreation than the lads’s. 

The NCAA Girls’s ultimate had 18.9 million viewers, whereas the lads had simply 14.8 million. 

There is no such thing as a denying it, Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese have been the explanations for this. A mixture of star energy and controversy fueled a surge in demand for girls’s basketball. On-line conversations ran rampant over the 2 gamers, hitting delicate strain factors in social and political dialog, for not one, however two Remaining 4 runs in a row.

Now, if there’s a reputation contest between the 2 sports activities, the subsequent technology of males’s basketball stars are paying shut consideration to the opposite aspect as they start their faculty careers. 

For a few of the prime males’s recruits, the traces between the sports activities are blurring. 

“I simply suppose we’re all the identical, and to categorize us as completely different, as a result of we’re all the identical individuals on the finish of the day,” stated Dylan Harper, the No. 2 nationally-ranked recruit within the class of 2024, who dedicated to Rutgers, declining gives from powerhouse packages Duke, Indiana and Kansas. 

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Harper informed Fox Information Digital at Rutgers males’s basketball media day on Tuesday that he has gotten recommendation from Michael Jordan since he was a child, via numerous telephone calls arrange by his father, Ron Harper Sr., who gained 5 NBA championships and three as Jordan’s teammate on the Chicago Bulls within the late Nineteen Nineties. Nevertheless, Jordan’s recommendation was solely half the story. Dylan’s mother, Maria Harper, has labored as a ladies’s basketball coach since Dylan was a child, and he has appeared to that sport for inspiration simply as a lot through the years. 

Now, as a university participant, that half of his expertise may play into his management. 

“All of us need to be a pacesetter in any facet that we are able to,” Harper stated when requested if he would look to Clark and Reese as management function fashions throughout his time at Rutgers. 

Harper just isn’t alone amongst prime recruits or his personal teammates. 

Ace Bailey, the No. 3 ranked recruit within the nation this 12 months who dedicated to Rutgers earlier than Harper, declining a suggestion from powerhouse Kentucky, is with him. Bailey informed Fox Information Digital at his media day on Tuesday that, in contrast to Harper, he solely began following ladies’s basketball in “the final three years” due to gamers like Clark and Reese.

“With their management, particularly Clark, she brings a whole lot of power to get her staff going, whether or not it’s an extended shot, bounce shot,” Bailey stated. 

Bailey then pointed to a particular a part of Clark’s recreation, relating to how she talks to opponents on the courtroom, particularly in opposition to Reese and Clark’s different former LSU rival, Flau’jae Johnson. 

“She talkin’ to em in detrimental methods, nevertheless it’s constructive towards her teammates, it’s simply the way in which she does that, particularly with Angel Reese. They’re aggressive, Flau’jae, all of them aggressive, they only compete and so they love the sport,” Bailey stated. 

Reese and Johnson beat Clark’s Iowa Hawkeyes within the nationwide championship recreation in 2023 however then misplaced to Iowa on this 12 months’s Remaining 4. 

Clark’s fame as a trash talker has been publicly referred to as out by Las Vegas Aces head coach Becky Hammon, who stated, “They jaw at one another, no person talks extra crap than Caitlin too … it’s a distinct technology!” of Clark and Reese at a press convention on June 27.

Nevertheless, Bailey can be impressed by how Clark handles trash discuss. 

“She don’t fear about nothin’ what different individuals speak about, you’ll be able to inform she missed some photographs within the one recreation, however going into the subsequent recreation she was on hearth, she ain’t anxious about anyone else, she is aware of what she’s able to and simply retains getting higher,” Bailey stated. 

FEVER MUST SIGN ‘ENFORCER’ TO ‘PROTECT’ CAITLIN CLARK, SAYS FORMER NBA ALL-STAR WHO’S BEEN ON BOTH SIDES OF THE ROLE

Ace Bailey, a five-star recruit for the Rutgers Scarlet Knights, watches because the Scarlet Knights play the Stonehill Skyhawks at Jersey Mike’s Enviornment on Dec. 30, 2023 in Piscataway, New Jersey. (Wealthy Schultz/Getty Pictures)

Regardless of Clark’s fame, the truth that she turned the unanimous WNBA Rookie of the Yr this 12 months and her alleged trash speaking abilities, Bailey stated he would nonetheless select to pursue Reese for recommendation if he may solely discuss to 1 huge ladies’s basketball star. 

“I might most likely discuss to Angel Reese, her competitiveness for positive, what retains her driving,” Bailey stated. 

Because the staff’s prime recruits, Harper and Bailey are much less centered on drawing nationwide consideration to themselves as people the way in which Clark and Reese did this previous 12 months. 

When requested what they need the nation to see within the inevitable nationwide protection this system is about to obtain this 12 months, each Bailey and Harper insisted that they hope the eye goes to their teammates as an alternative of them. 

“You’ll be able to’t win alone, you gotta win as an entire group of fellows,“ Harper stated.  

“I would like them to see my staff!” Bailey added.

The recruits and head coach Steve Pikiell are doubtless banking on this strategy to assist maintain the staff grounded and centered on a attainable historic run via the NCAA event this 12 months. Nevertheless, whether or not that strategy will probably be sufficient to assist the lads’s event compete with the ladies’s event by way of TV rankings is but to be seen. 

Whereas Clark and Reese have moved on to the WNBA, ladies’s faculty basketball continues to be anchored by higher-profile stars like Paige Bueckers, Juju Watkins, Hailey Van Lith and Johnson. It is because, in contrast to the pipeline between males’s faculty basketball and the NBA, the WNBA requires gamers to be no less than 22, have accomplished their faculty eligibility and graduated from a four-year faculty. The one-and-done rule within the NBA, permitting gamers to declare for the draft after only one faculty season, has drained the game of lengthy careers of prime professional prospects for years.

Harper, Bailey and Duke freshman Cooper Flagg, who was the No. 1 ranked recruit nationally this 12 months, are set to be the largest stars of this males’s faculty season, however every of them may very well be within the NBA Draft by 2025. 

Outdoors of that, the ladies’s recreation might need one other basic benefit by way of partaking TV viewership, in accordance with ESPN faculty soccer ladies’s basketball broadcaster Holly Rowe. 

Rowe stated final month that males’s basketball ought to even take into account rule modifications to make it extra like ladies’s basketball. 

“I don’t know if the lads will overtake them,” Rowe stated. “I really like that the ladies play quarters, the sport strikes quicker, it’s extra thrilling. You’ll be able to sit at a males’s faculty basketball recreation, and then you definitely go to a ladies’s, and also you’re identical to, ‘I don’t know, it simply flows higher.’ So I do suppose that the lads’s recreation may gain advantage from some rule modifications to make the sport circulate a bit bit higher.” 

Males’s faculty basketball has been performed with two halves as an alternative of 4 quarters since 1954. It has turn into one of many sport’s iconic signature buildings that units it other than different ranges of basketball. But, Rowe believes that the viewing expertise can be improved by following the identical four-quarter construction utilized by the NBA, WNBA and ladies’s faculty recreation. 

Whether or not the NCAA finally ends up altering the lads’s guidelines to be similar to the ladies’s recreation at any level over the subsequent few years will probably be telling on simply how huge of an influence Clark and Reese left on the panorama of school basketball throughout their heated faculty rivalry. 

It may additionally be telling as to how huge of an influence Clark particularly can have on the professional sports activities panorama. 

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Angel Reese, proper, and Caitlin Clark look on through the second half in opposition to the Chicago Sky on June 23, 2024 at Wintrust Enviornment in Chicago. (Melissa Tamez/Icon Sportswire by way of Getty Pictures)

In simply her rookie season within the league, Clark has confirmed she will make the WNBA aggressive with the NFL – lengthy seen because the unchallengeable American sports activities juggernaut by way of TV demand. 

Earlier this month, Clark’s Indiana Fever performed in entrance of a TV viewers of 1.26 million viewers, in a recreation in opposition to the Minnesota Lynx that was performed concurrently a Week-1 Friday night time NFL recreation between the Philadelphia Eagles and Inexperienced Bay Packers. 

Nevertheless, issues bought much more uncommon on Sunday, when Clark’s first ever playoff recreation in opposition to the Connecticut Solar was watched by a median of 1.84 million, even though it came about throughout a number of NFL Sunday afternoon video games, and even though Clark’s recreation become a blowout within the second half.

Reese was not even taking part in reverse of Clark in these matchups. 

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