Women’s basketball is at a turning point. Will the NCAA rise to the occasion?

Shortly after the women’s NCAA tournament set viewership and attendance records last year when LSU defeated Iowa for the championship, the Charlotte Sports Foundation started calling to see if a major women’s basketball game would be staged to finish the 2023-2024 season to kick.

The first phone call? Iowa. If it could get Caitlin Clark into the building in Charlotte, it knew the tickets would sell. But the group also wanted a second Final Four team, preferably a more local one, where fans could drive to the event. So the next call was made to Virginia Tech.

Finished. Coach Kenny Brooks and his Hokies would like to mark the start of the season with a high-caliber game.

Danny Morrison, director of the foundation, was excited how quickly two Final Four teams jumped at the chance to play a competitive early-season match. But then came what he expected to be the tougher task: a title sponsor. Someone who would throw a lot of money at this game.

Morrison called Ally Financial. Within 24 hours they agreed. It took just days to put together a game – a game that historically would have taken a year to plan.

“Normally you don’t let it happen like that,” Morrison said of how quickly and easily everything came together.

Caitlin Clark started her college career playing in front of cardboard cutouts during the pandemic.

Last night she lost by 44 points at #8 Virginia Tech in front of 15,000 people in Iowa’s second game of the season. pic.twitter.com/shI90qCCiD

— Frontoffice Sport (@FOS) November 10, 2023

But you also don’t normally have the peak of the women’s national title game with 13 million viewers. And normally you don’t have stars like women’s basketball has right now with Clark, Angel Reese, Paige Bueckers and so many others. Normally you don’t have that many elite teams in one season.

But that is about the special moments and the special season that take a sport to a higher level. They are rare. Normally they don’t happen. And the only way this can happen more often is if opportunities within those seasons are taken advantage of.

Possibilities include a huge matchup in Charlotte between Final Four teams. Opportunities like South Carolina and Notre Dame kick off the season in Paris. Opportunities like Iowa putting 100 feet of hardwood in a football stadium and tipping for it.

Normally this doesn’t happen like this.

With each of these opportunities, teams and players have shown that they can more than rise to the occasion. And just as important: the stakeholders surrounding those teams and games also came to the conclusion.

Because the Charlotte game won’t happen unless Iowa coach Lisa Bluder and Brooks agree to play a tough game before their teams have laughed. That only happens if Morrison gets Ally to pay the bill. The exact amount of Ally’s sponsorship is unknown. Each team got $150,000 and Iowa got another $50,000 for travel, according to the Charlotte Sports Foundation, although it did not say whether Ally paid all those costs.

And it doesn’t get the attention it deserves when Georgia Amoore, one of several elite point guards this season, disagrees with Clark.

Paris isn’t possible unless Lea Miller-Tooley, the president of Complete Sports Management (which organized the game), thinks outside the box about hosting the first college basketball game in Paris. Or if Dawn Staley and Niele Ivey aren’t on board to fly their teams halfway around the world to test themselves on that stage. And it won’t be seen in the way it deserves unless ESPN sends its top crew across the Atlantic to broadcast from there – and not remotely – from Bristol.

And 56,000 people won’t show up on a cold Sunday in Iowa City with Clark at the center unless the university and its athletic department are behind the event.

Women’s college basketball is at an inflection point and so many people within the game see it as such.

But if we want to unleash all the potential this season has to grow the sport as much as possible, more people need to see this season for what it is: a huge opportunity to make things happen.

Charlie Baker, the president of the NCAA, and his team face a monumental decision: Will the organization split the women’s tournament from the other championships and sell the television rights as its own entity? The (non-profit) NCAA, which runs college football like a Fortune 500 company, probably has a chance to make about $100 million more if it does that. This season he should have called every Top 25 coach to build relationships and understand how they see the sport, where they see it fitting within the ecosystem of American sports. The NCAA should have held a summit this summer with football’s biggest stakeholders to figure out how to capitalize on women’s basketball this season.

(Narrator: They didn’t have that top.)

Big Ten commissioner Tony Pettiti, who is in his first year on the job, inherited a conference that houses Clark, perhaps college sports’ most recognizable athlete. Next year, the Big Ten will become the nation’s first bi-coastal conference where, in addition to Clark, there will be some of the brightest young stars in the game who could take her mantle. Few hold more vital keys to the growth of women’s basketball than Petitti. He should have a team studying how stars, especially in women’s college hoops, are shaped and made through social media and traditional media exposure, and he should prepare to apply those lessons to Ohio State’s Cotie McMahon and JuJu USC’s Watkins and who comes next. to boost the Big Ten.

(Narrator: There is no team studying Clark.)

ESPN, which smartly moved the national title game to ABC last season, giving the title game more reach, will hold the national championship on ABC. But it won’t be played in prime time, and the company has opted not to move the Final Four matchups to ABC either.

(Narrator: Le sighs)

Women’s basketball is potentially the largest fast-growing entity in collegiate sports. There are fans waiting to be let in, and the people holding the keys have to unlock the doors on the left and right. Because the players and teams have shown that once fans are in the arenas or watching on TV, there will be a show. Early returns are promising for another huge year.

On the first day of the NCAA season, South Carolina-Notre Dame was the most watched college basketball game of the day, even though it aired during an inauspicious 1 p.m. window (to account for the time change). NC State’s upset over No. 2 UConn on Sunday night, which ESPN broadcast on ABC, drew 625,000 viewers. That ranks as ABC’s fourth-best women’s college hoops regular-season game ever.

This season, the No. 1 and No. 2 teams have already fallen. South Carolina, a program known for its dominant defensive performances, has turned away multiple 100-point games.

Sunday night in a decisive 32-point win over then-No. 9 Indiana, Stanford — in the midst of the Pac-12 swan song — reminded everyone why it doesn’t belong anywhere and why exactly the game’s winningest coach lives in Palo Alto.

There is a plethora of star power and elite teams this season. There’s no shortage of storylines surrounding the sport’s personalities. The conversation buzzes with excitement.

And no, it doesn’t normally happen this way.

This season could be the season that changes this sport.

If so many people come to watch Caitlin Clark, the least women’s basketball stakeholders can do is follow the example of the brightest star: shoot for the 3 logo.

(Photo by Caitlin Clark: G Fiume/Getty Images)