ST. BONAVENTURE, N.Y. — Jim Crowley isn’t entirely sure how he’d game plan for Caitlin Clark. “I wouldn’t know until I had to make the decision,” he said from his Reilly Center office last week.
For Crowley, however, who’s spent nearly the last three decades as a Division I women’s head basketball coach, there’s an added element to watching Clark play, aside from appreciating her greatness:
Trying to figure out how to step her.
Or, probably more accurately, how to contain her.
“As a coach, what would you do? If you see a player who’s that dominant, how do you change the game?” he asked. “So, strategically, that’s always fun when you’re watching great players within your game. How do you figure out what to do against that?”
Geno Auriemma, Crowley’s former conference colleague, had Nika Muhl, who defends relentlessly and has a non-stop motor. But the Nikka Muhls of the world are few and far between, for Crowley or anyone else (“those kids, they’re just not there,” he noted). And so, most will go one of the two traditional routes:
You try to stop Clark and force other players to beat you. You make her purely a passer. But that’s easier said than done given that Clark could sleepwalk to 20 points.
Or …
“I would probably lean toward consistently mixing ball screen defense on her and trying to limit — don’t let (Kate) Martin or (Gabbie) Marshall score,” Crowley said. “Nobody else gets to 15. Just say, if (Clark) gets 40, fine, but no one else gets to 10-12. And that 40 needs to be on multiple shots.”
CROWLEY, of course, has had a front row seat for the staggering, and stunning, growth of the women’s game over the last decade.
He’s been a major contributor to it.
In 2012, his best-ever St. Bonaventure team went 31-4 en route to the Sweet 16. It was an incredible accomplishment, one that “nobody can ever take away,” but it came at a time when the general public didn’t, and couldn’t, care the way it does today (though Bona proved even then, if you build a winning program with talented, fun-to-watch players, the fans will come.)
Most people weren’t tuning in. The common refrain when someone mentioned a women’s game was, “who cares?” There was still tremendous inequity between the men’s and women’s tournaments.
“Oh, I could tell you a hundred stories,” Crowley said of his team’s NCAA trips in 2012 and ‘16. “But you didn’t care because you were like, ‘we’re in the tournament.’”
And so, when Crowley reflects on the Clark-fueled explosion that’s taken place over the last year in particular, the true arrival of the women’s game, the glass ceilings that have been broken through … it moves him.
THE WOMEN’S national title game, featuring Iowa and South Carolina, outdrew the men’s contest (an average of 18.9 million viewers to 14.82 million). Attendance records were shattered (not to mention viewership totals from Tuesday’s WNBA Draft).
Clark became the college game’s biggest singular star, male or female.
To Crowley, however, most impressive about this year’s women’s NCAA Tournament was this: Finally, the entire world was watching, captivated by Clark’s transcendence and those that challenged her run, from defending champion LSU, to mighty UConn, to undefeated South Carolina.
Finally, there was a ton of deserved buzz.
And these women, despite the immense accompanying pressure, delivered on it.
“You have all this hype, Iowa-LSU, and then you watch that first quarter, and it delivered, and then some,” Crowley said of that Elite 8 contest, which was 31-26, and back-and-forth, through one. “A lot of times when there’s hype, that swallows things up, especially in a game like basketball, where it can get sloppy and slow down.”
“They all know the weight of this moment. They all know that they’re carrying forward and riding the shoulders of (Diana) Taurasi and (Sheryl) Swoopes and all those folks. … And then to deliver like they did with these games and these moments, and to come through, I thought that was amazing.”
And the ripple effect, across both the national and local landscape, has been equally compelling.
THE WOMEN’S game has become more competitive — it isn’t just UConn and Tennessee anymore — and, as a result, so has the Atlantic 10. “Even back to our time when we were here, our league got really good and there was a high level of competitiveness,” Crowley noted, “and it just continues to head in that direction.”
The caliber of these players, and these games — the shot-making, the wire-to-wire action, the drama — has made it virtually impossible for trolls to have their day. Dwindling are the “who cares?” responses in the comments.
“Because how can you?” Crowley interjected.
There’s also now an entire generation — from Clark to Cameron Brink to Kamilla Cardoso — that young girls (and boys) have seen excel on this level, whom they can look up to and emulate. “Hey I’ve seen this person do all of these amazing things,” said Crowley, now a year into his second stint with the Bonnies. “Now, they can see themselves doing it.”
And as both an ambassador for the game and the father of a young daughter, this makes Crowley proud.
“As a coach, I’m just so proud of the people delivering and so proud of the coaches helping them do that,” he said. “As a dad of a daughter, to have these women, even within our program, as incredible role models. … We always try to tell our kids, male or female, you can do anything. And now, there’s even more examples of that for women.”
DESPITE THE fact that Clark has moved on, the declaration has been made: things are different now. And there’s no going back.
Bona once thrived in an era when the locals cared, when maybe a few diehards noticed. To return to that stage under a genuine spotlight, to play in today’s Big Dance, with much more of the world watching? It’s exciting, Crowley said. Motivating.
“All you can hope for in life is an opportunity, and then you decide what you do with it,” he said. “And we have the opportunity. Obviously, that’s exciting, and we want to get folks who believe in what we can do with that opportunity.
“It’s great that we did it before … but we want to do it again, and we want to do it in the new era.”
