IOWA CITY, Iowa (AP) — Caitlin Clark’s skills were so advanced when she was in grade school that her parents signed her up to play on boys teams. By the time she entered middle school she was well-known in basketball circles across Iowa.
This was long before Clark became one of the faces of women’s basketball and, now, on the cusp of setting the NCAA Division I scoring record.
Clark was in sixth grade when Jan Jensen first heard about her. Not long after, Iowa’s associate head coach and chief recruiter went to watch the prodigy from West Des Moines.
She saw a confident player making pinpoint passes often too hot for her teammates to handle, someone who was creative on drives to the hoop and of course someone willing to launch the deep 3-pointers that would become her signature and one of the reasons she’s one of the United States’ highest-profile female athletes.
“It didn’t take but a second, maybe a minute,” Jensen said. “That little step-back sassy 3, this little seventh-, eighth-grader. Yeah, she’s diff. You could just tell. They’re easy to identify but really hard to get. Everybody can see the true, true ones. The trick is to get them.”