Caitlin Clark TIME: She's the mag's Athlete of the Year

The accolades and honors keep rolling in for Caitlin Clark.

She's TIME's Athlete of the Year for 2024. Click here to see the cover.

The former two-time college national player of the year at Iowa, the basketball star burst onto the WNBA scene like nobody before her. She drew comparisons to when Larry Bird, Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan entered the NBA.

Of modern-day players, she's been called the female Steph Curry because of her unreal deep shooting skills and her fun swagger.

Back in February, she became the NCAA Division 1 women’s all-time leading scorer. A few weeks later, she broke Hall of Famer Pete Maravich’s scoring mark to become the top scorer, male or female, in college basketball history.

She and her Hawkeyes lost to South Carolina in April's national championship game, the title tilt drew 18.9 million viewers. It was the second-most watched women's sporting event in U.S. history.

Later that month, she was selected first overall in the WNBA Draft by the Indiana Fever.

Take a look at this graph put together by TIME:

WNBA attendance by game / TIME

The WNBA's overall attendance jumped 48 percent to reach its highest level ever.

https://www.thebiglead.com/nba-commissioner-speaks-highly-of-caitlin-clark-for-setting-the-world-on-fire

"No one has been able to capture the kind of magic or lightning in a bottle like Caitlin Clark has done," says Mary Jo Kane, professor emeritus and founding director at the University of Minnesota Tucker Center for Research on Girls & Women in Sport, told NPR in February and who correctly predicted the future of Clark's impact on the WNBA.

Kane added that Clark is an "unprecedented tsunami of impact and influence. "Just in terms of her athletic excellence alone, she is off the charts. Then we can also talk about her as a marketing phenom and the kind of economic impact that she has."

As for her first WNBA season, all Clark managed to do was set a rookie record for most three-pointers made, while also setting new all-time WNBA marks for most assists in a season and most assists in a single game.

She also inked an 8-year $28 million endorsement deal with Nike, the largest ever for a women’s basketball player.

To say she had an immediate, incredible impact on the WNBA, and the sports world overall, is the understatement of the year. The Fever broke the WNBA record for home attendance by a single franchise and her No. 22 jersey sells out regularly and can be seen everywhere, which makes her the most popular female athlete on the planet.

Nobody seems to be capable of fighting the Caitlin Clark fever.

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