IOWA CITY, Iowa -- There would be crickets on the menu; that much was assured. Iowa assistant Jan Jensen had already decide to fly to Thailand with her head coach, Lisa Bluder, the duo planning a 48-hour round trip to seal the deal in their recruitment of Caitlin Clark.
This was 2019, and Clark was playing overseas on the United States U19 team. Why not go all out to land the No. 1 recruit in the Class of 2020? The coaching staff splurging on business class from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to Southeast Asia -- all to see a blue-chip player like Clark -- made total sense.
"If you know Lisa, you don't go somewhere [without doing it all]," Jansen recounted. "When we were at Drake, we were [on a road trip] and took the team to a factory where they made pottery. There were stalactite caves in Springfield, Missouri."
This time, they immersed themselves in the local culture, or least as much as time would allow. So they loaded up on caffeine and saw as much of the TripAdvisor top 10 as they could see in Bangkok. There was the famous Reclining Buddha -- "as long as Carver-Hawkeye Arena, all made out gold," Jensen recalled.
She was dreading having to eat Thai food.
"Now, I love it," she said.
One reason for that dread? Crickets.
"If there was ever a reason to double down," Jensen said of Clark's recruitment.
"They eat bugs and stuff, so I put it on a [Instagram] story to show Caitlin. I said, 'I came all the way to [eat crickets], for you.' I couldn't quite stomach the whole thing. It was like crickets with seasoning. It was crazy. I told Lisa it was one of the most fun 48 hours we ever had."
NCAA recruiting rules dictated that Bluder and Jensen could do no more than show up at the gym to ensure Clark saw them in the stands. No conversations. No hand-written notes. Certainly asking for recommendations of Bangkok cricket joints.
"No bumps," said Jensen, referring to the recruiting practice of accidentally/intentionally running into recruits in a hallway. "We were just going to give it our best shot."
Of course, you know by now none of it worked. Not right then, at least.
Clark -- arguably the best player and biggest story in either NCAA Tournament at the moment, committed to Notre Dame. That's an interesting story, too -- one that, like the trip to Thailand, is a journey in itself.
'The Clark Effect'
As the Caitlin Clark era at Iowa reaches its inevitable conclusion, it's almost as if her impact is just starting to be felt. Across her four years, she transformed a football-centric Big Ten football school into something, well, not-so-football-centric. An exhibition women's basketball game last fall in the middle of football season drew 55,000 fans at Kinnick Stadium. Regular-season games at Carver-Hawkeye have become tentpole events accompanied by outlandish ticket prices on the secondary market.
Through those four years, Clark has shattered every scoring mark worth shattering, including the women's single-season Division I mark for most points, which she claimed Monday night. With her game and panache, the 6-footer from West Des Moines not only drew every recruiter but everyone else into her orbit -- from grade-school girls screaming for her autograph to Tim McGraw. The country star donned a Clark jersey last week at a Des Moines concert.
McGraw wasn't pandering; he was assimilating.
"It is perceived in France that what Caitlin is doing hasn't been seen before," said Remi Vorano, a Canal+ France journalist who came to town, like so many others, to chronicle what has been termed "The Clark Effect."
"We don't have an athlete that is of her magnitude," added someone whose countryman is NBA rookie sensation Victor Wembanyama.
It's a strain to find comparisons for Clark's current across-the-board appeal. What athlete last captured the country's attention like this? Perhaps Tim Tebow on the college level. Kobe Bryant? Patrick Mahomes? Shohei Ohtani? The difference is that Clark has carved out her spot in the sports cosmos without really trying.
Oh, she's got her handlers and marketers and agents, but they don't need much help burnishing that 22-year-old, 3-point assassin-next-door image. A recent Seton Hall Sports Poll concluded Clark was the most popular college basketball player in America.
Just don't get too serious about it. Clark wasn't when asked, philosophically, over the weekend to expound on the person behind the No. 22, the one who has influence from billboards to boardrooms and driveways to frontcourts?
"Holy cow, that's a loaded question," Clark told Vorano when he put the query to her at a recent press conference. "We could go anywhere [for the answer]. You can Google that one."
Clark wasn't being flippant, but you'll be sifting through reams of data in order to fully answer that question. Her game still speaks louder than what she has become off the court -- a bankable star, a marketing icon whose low-key Midwestern persona is almost the antithesis of what she is on the court: flashy, creative, confident -- bordering on cocky.
Clark is as famous for some of her histrionics as her game.
Considering the entire package, the cult of personality, she might be Iowa's Larry Bird.
"Very few times in life, in whatever your chosen profession, are you at Ground Zero with the most amazing person to be at Ground Zero with," Jensen said. "Really, if society was playing like it typically does, that should have been a guy. But with this new NIL stuff, it's a woman, and it's because she does everything a guy can do."
Yup, Clark can throw behind-the-back passes that earn comparisons to Pete Maravich. She can nail logo 3-point winners. Her last name and number adorn the spot on the floor where she broke the Division I women's career scoring record with what was at least a 32-foot bomb against Michigan last month.
That shot was made as casually as a recent warmup before Iowa's first-round NCAA Tournament game against Holy Cross. Shooting from all points around the 3-point arc, she made at least 37 of 41.
"She's always in advanced French," Jensen said, "and you're [just] babbling."
The great ones always see things before they happen. Clark's scoring consistency is amazing. She has never averaged fewer than 26.6 points per season. Princeton coach Carla Berube clearly remembers Clark confidently nailing outside shots as a 14-year-old when Berube coached the U.S. U16 team.
"You had a glimpse into the future how successful she could be," Berube said.
Clark's current scoring average, 31.8 points (after dropping 32 on Monday night), would be the third-highest all-time for a season. Despite a substandard .364 shooting percentage in the hard-fought contest, she broke -- and now owns -- that Division I single-season scoring record with 1,113 points.
The NIL age has rewarded Clark richly for her efforts. She is reportedly a millionaire before becoming a professional. Nike has made her one of the shoe giant's main promoters. She's being heavily featured by State Farm Insurance, too.
Monday's sellout was the 33rd of Iowa's 35 games this season. The Common Sense Institute of Iowa concluded Clark has accounted for an $82.5 million statewide economic impact over the last three seasons.
Quite a stark contrast from the B.C. (Before Clark) days.
"They were shoving free tickets down people's throats," said Raequel Lewis, a 2001 Iowa graduate now in her ninth year working concessions at Carver-Hawkeye. "Now, I want to go to a game, but I'm not paying $800. I think it's going to be a movie.
"Ever seen 'Rudy,' the movie? It makes you feel good."
Nike has hung two giant banners in downtown Iowa City. One is Clark, from behind, simply shooting a jump shot. The other shows the Nike swoosh and the Iowa logo positioned above a basket: "This was never a long shot."
Vorano compared it to Adidas hanging a similar banner of French soccer star Zinedine Zidane in his hometown of Marseilles after the 2018 World Cup win.
"We're talking of the best soccer player in the world at that time," Vorano said. "We're talking about Caitlin ... she's a woman, she's a college athlete. She has the same attributes as Zidane would have."
All of it could have gone south quickly. Locker room dynamics, being what they are in college sports during this NIL age, could have divided Iowa's inner sanctum under the weight of Clark's success. But she is the paradigm for why NIL exists -- so an athlete can capitalize on their fame, just like an influencer or podcast host du jour.
Clark has notably shared her largesse on and off the court. She rented a yacht for her teammates in Croatia last summer during Iowa's European basketball tour, as detailed in a recent ESPN story.
That had to be a first: a yacht courtesy a college team's best player.
"She has given us pairs of shoes, Bose headphones," teammate Gabbie Marshall said. "She invites us to things she's invited to. We tag along with her. The mail that she gets, our landlord in our apartment building the other day says, 'Oh, I have a couple of things for you to sign.' She gets home and it's a whole wagon full of items for her to sign."
Clark signed the wagon load.
Pundits break down her every move as if they were signs of the apocalypse. Yes, guilty as charged.
Caitlin bounced the ball off her forehead in frustration!
Caitlin scowled at a ref!
There's Caitlin with 'The Look'!
Oh, yes, The Look. It can be shot at anyone be it an official or even a teammate for some perceived slight.
"She looks at it as being justice," said Kristin Meyer, Clark's former coach at Dowling Catholic High School in Des Moines. "If something is wrong, it should be called. It's black and white. Sometimes, she would get so upset I would sub her out. I would say, 'That 45-year-old man, when you're yelling at him ... do you think he's [going to react by] looking to call more fouls or less?'"
Bluder admitted to having "a really good talk" with her star Sunday regarding such issues. The decks need to be cleared mentally and physically as the Hawkeyes continue their push for a second consecutive Final Four.
A framed letter autographed by Billie Jean King stands inconspicuously in the Iowa locker room. "Pressure," it reads, "is privilege."
"I don't think I've ever seen Caitlin embarrassed -- in life," Meyer said. "If you're around most teenage girls for 5 minutes, they're embarrassed about something they said. [With Caitlin] it's not about cockiness, it's a confidence, but also a little bit, 'I'm probably going to say some stupid things, do some stupid things, but everyone does.'"
Surely Clark has never been embarrassed playing basketball. The ABC affiliate in Cedar Rapids actually created an entire package that sums it up perfectly. They developed a logo for "The Clark Effect" with the "A" in Clark converted into a shadow figure of the player with her palms turned up to the sky.
That could be interpreted two ways -- as a "who me?" celebration after a 3-pointer or a show of frustration after another of those perceived on-court slights. Either way, it's a perfect summation of Clark the player.
Rather lose a tooth than a game
"I've loved every single second of wearing 'Iowa' across my chest," Clark said. "That goes for everything that I do in my life. I do it with 110% effort. Maybe, at times, that's bad. But that's just how I go about my life. That's what I'm going to continue to do as I become a professional working adult."
If you've ever watched "The Last Dance," you know Michael Jordan could be motivated by anything -- no matter how trivial. Jensen said Clark's fire will be lit by a sideways glance, her name spelled wrong at a hotel, even a chair out of place.
It doesn't take much when you're that good.
"No one tells her what to say in that [interview] room," Iowa athletic director Beth Goetz shared. "She's authentic and genuine. What makes her awesome and competitive is what makes her harder to harness for 40 minutes. How do you fault somebody for saying, 'You work as hard as I do, I want to be the best, I want you to be the best with me.'"
Clark was one of five seniors who played in their final home game Monday. They've been through this foundry of expectations together. Guard Kate Martin is in her sixth year amid an injured knee and an extra year of eligibility from the pandemic. Maybe others did, but she never backed down to the big shot with the big shot.
"I would take somebody like Caitlin who's fiery, might snap on people, over somebody who doesn't give a crap," Martin said. "I would take that all day."
Despite being close friends, they never played on the same team during summer scrimmages. That wouldn't have been fair. So, there was at least underlying tension because both would rather lose a tooth than lose a game.
"We don't ever punch anyone or punch each other, but, like, we'd go back and forth," Clark said. "I think that just speaks to how badly we want it. It's a summer scrimmage. Really, at the end of the day, it doesn't matter ... but we like our teams to win that badly."
When Meyer got to Dowling in 2016, she hadn't heard of Clark. Why should she have? She came from the western side of the state in Nevada where she had won back-to-back Class 3A championships. When Meyer arrived, Clark was a talented, if petulant, star rising from the local AAU ranks.
Against outgunned opponents, Clark lobbied for going back into the game just because she wanted to play. More. Clark loved talking trash to boys who would be recruited out of the halls to spice up a girls' practice.
Early on, Meyer saw Clark throw a three-quarter-court bounce pass to a teammate in stride. It was so outlandish, so good that Meyer established what she called the "Plus One Rule."
"You can throw that as long as you complete the pass," Meyer told Clark. "'You can [then] add one more. If you throw the behind-the-back pass and you complete it, you get to throw one more. As soon as you have a turnover, we're not throwing those again.'
"She didn't have many turnovers."
While the Maroons never won a state title with Clark, she finished No. 4 on the state's 5-on-5 scoring list. Logo 3s are remembered in a different light. Dowling's court is only 84 feet, which meant Clark was often shooting somewhere near halfcourt when she pulled up for one of her trademark bombs.
"Her mentality to the game is a little different," Meyer said. "She does not have a poker face. ... We would try to work on it. You can't show all of that to your teammates because you're making them intimidated. Also, that's just kind of, you get her 100% and her authenticity. There is nothing that is fake about her.
"I really think that high school basketball was harder for her than college. I think, in high school, [it was] because there were enough things that were frustrating. She wanted to go 10,000 miles an hour. Sometimes in practice, we had to go 12 miles per hour. That would be like a calculus student learning sixth-grade math. Wouldn't you be frustrated at times?"
The spotlight is where Clark and Jensen bond on some level. Jensen was the Clark of her day averaging 66 points per game to lead the country as a high school senior. At Drake, she also led the country as a senior averaging 29.6.
When Clark committed to Notre Dame as the top player in the 2020 class, Jensen sensed something was wrong.
"It had been 48 hours [since she committed], maybe," Jensen recalled. "I didn't feel it. I felt it from everyone else. ... I didn't believe in my heart that's where she wanted to go."
Typically, in these situations, prospects make commitment announcements on social media. Clark was extremely quiet.
Jensen eventually reached out: "What's up?"
"Nothing," Clark replied.
"Can I call; I didn't see anything [on social media]?" Jensen asked.
"I changed my mind," Clark admitted.
"Are we back in?" asked a hopeful Jensen.
"Yup," remarked Clark.
A poker face? In this case, yes.
Jensen knew Clark had committed to Iowa before Clark's mother.
It had all been worth it: The trip to Thailand, the crickets, the 5:45 a.m. practices at Dowling where Jensen would show up because, well, that's what a recruiter does.
"If she does take a different path and keeps her commitment to Notre Dame, is she exactly the same? Does this happen? We'll never know that," Goetz said.
That's not the only philosophical question at play. Jensen contemplates what she and Bluder have wrought during a quarter century together at Iowa. Is this the pinnacle? In one way or another, inside of two weeks, the Clark era will come to a conclusion.
It would be nice for Iowa to get the Hollywood ending -- cutting down nets with confetti falling from the rafters -- but it doesn't absolutely have to end that way.
This school, this state, this game is changed forever because of Clark's presence. They'll always have her, and she'll always have them.
"She wants to be the greatest there ever was," Jensen said, "and when she leaves this place, she wants you to like her."
