Caitlin Clark fever has already struck the WNBA.
Shortly after the Indiana Fever chosen her with the No. 1 decide within the WNBA Draft on Monday, most sizes of Clark’s jersey have been sold out on Fanatics within an hour. It is unknown what number of Clark jerseys Fanatics bought, however additional small, medium, giant, additional giant and double-extra giant jerseys have been unavailable to buy on the web site not lengthy after they grew to become obtainable on the market.
Clark’s instant impression on the WNBA is not a lot of a shock. As her school profession at Iowa progressed, Clark introduced additional consideration to women’s college basketball. Iowa‘s residence and highway video games have been continually bought out throughout Clark’s senior season, which noticed her break the all-time Division I scoring document, males’s or girls’s.
The Clark impact additionally translated to record-setting tv rankings for ladies’s school basketball. Her remaining regular-season recreation at Iowa was the most-watched girls’s school basketball regular-season recreation since 1999. Iowa’s remaining three video games within the 2024 NCAA Event broke the document for the most-watched video games in girls’s school basketball historical past. In truth, Iowa’s loss to South Carolina within the girls’s title recreation drew a bigger viewers (18.9 million) than the boys’s nationwide title recreation (14.8 million), marking the primary time that is ever occurred.
Forward of Monday’s WNBA Draft, the league ready itself for the additional consideration Clark will doubtless deliver to the game. The Fever will have 36 of its 40 regular-season games on national television regardless of holding the league’s second-worst document final season. Whereas the Fever have not made any details about ticket gross sales public, the common resale worth for tickets to their video games in 2024 is triple what it was in 2023, according to a recent report from the Wall Street Journal.
On the highway, the two-time defending champion Las Vegas Aces are switching residence arenas when Clark’s Fever come to city on July 2. They’re going to host the Fever at T-Cell Enviornment as an alternative of their regular residence courtroom, Michelob Extremely Enviornment, as the previous has practically 8,000 extra seats. In the meantime, the Phoenix Mercury made tickets obtainable for its June 30 matchup towards the Fever the day after Clark’s school profession ended, using her to promote the event despite the fact that she hadn’t been drafted but. The most cost effective single-seat ticket was $109.
Clark’s first preseason recreation is even bringing additional consideration, too. Tickets for the Fever’s recreation on the Dallas Wings on Might 3 are going for as low-cost as $136 on StubHub as of Tuesday morning. Tickets for the Fever’s first regular-season recreation, which is on the Connecticut Sun on Might 14, are going for as cheap as $107 on StubHub.
Clark’s first regular-season residence recreation with the Fever will come on Might 16, once they host the defending Jap Convention champion New York Liberty.
