Caitlin Clark isn’t just the brightest star in the WNBA – she’s changing the way people watch sports. Her long-range shots and fiery play have packed arenas, smashed TV records and pushed women’s basketball into the cultural mainstream.
For Howard Megdal, the Cherry Hill journalist who wrote the book “Becoming Caitlin Clark,” the excitement feels like long-awaited vindication.
“We’re seeing something we’ve never seen before,” says Megdal, a longtime sports reporter, author of 6 other sports books and founder of The IX Sports, a women’s sports company, and The IX Basketball powered by The Next, a newsroom devoted to women’s athletics.
“But it’s also the product of 100 years of women playing this game, even when the spotlight wasn’t there,” says Megdal.
After years of living in New York and North Jersey, Megdal and his family moved back to Cherry Hill in 2023 – the same year Clark’s record-breaking run turned women’s basketball into must-see TV and ignited a new era for female athletes. It felt like perfect timing – the women’s sports revolution he’d long predicted was suddenly everywhere.
“Women’s sports have always been financially viable – people just needed to see it,” he says.
Q: How did your sports journalism career lead you to focus on women’s sports?
I was that kid obsessed with stats and stories. At Bard College, I broadcast both the men’s and women’s basketball games, and I was drawn to what interested me, not necessarily the biggest story of the day.
When I started writing about sports as a freelance journalist after college, I saw the same thing wherever I worked. There was a huge gap between how men’s and women’s sports were covered. You’d see incredible women athletes and important games, and they’d get almost no attention. I tried to push for more women’s coverage, but I was always limited by what my editor thought was important.
The turning point came in 2015. I was covering the World Series while also covering the WNBA semifinals. That night, Indiana Fever star Tamika Catchings – one of the greatest players in league history – had an unbelievable game at Madison Square Garden. Ten thousand fans were there, the lower bowl was packed, but almost no press showed up. If I hadn’t been there, there wouldn’t have been much of a record of it. I remember coming home and telling my wife, “If this story goes unnoticed, how many others are we missing?”
Q: So that moment led to building your own newsroom. What did you create?
It started with “The IX Sports” newsletters in 2019 – daily coverage across different women’s sports – and was followed by our first full newsroom in 2020 focused on women’s basketball. We reached more than 30 million readers last year through the newsroom and another 12 million through The IX newsletters.
We now have freelance reporters assigned to every WNBA team, along with journalists covering college programs, hockey, soccer and other women’s sports – even an Australian correspondent covering that country’s pro league. It’s giving young reporters a chance to cover beats that traditional media outlets never prioritized in the first place.
This summer we took investment from Monumental Sports & Entertainment – the group that owns the Washington Mystics, Capitals and Wizards – which lets us expand our business operations while staying fully independent editorially. What’s exciting is seeing how many people want to support this.
Q: Why do you think this moment in women’s sports feels different?
There’s always been the ability for women’s sports to be financially successful, but people have kept it from happening, sometimes because of misconceptions, sometimes because they didn’t want to see women be the ones succeeding. A lot of legacy outlets are still run by people who never treated women’s sports with the respect it deserves.
But now the proof of concept is beyond anyone’s ability to pretend otherwise. We’ve seen record audiences and sold-out arenas, and even new teams on the way – including a WNBA franchise planned for Philadelphia.
The bigger the gap between how much people care and how much they’re being served from a media perspective, the bigger the opportunity. And I don’t know that there’s a bigger gap than between the massive number of people who care about women’s sports and the amount of women’s sports media coverage that exists.
Q: What makes Caitlin Clark’s story different?
So much of the conversation around Clark treats her like the start of something, when really she’s the result of everything that came before. There’s been women’s basketball as long as there’s been basketball – but for decades those stories were ignored. In the last 5 years, a set of decisions created the opportunity for her to thrive, and she’s been able to maximize.
Her game is built to captivate – the pinpoint passes, the deep-range shots – things that are valuable on the court and have a real wow factor. A lot of that traces back to Iowa, where women’s basketball has long been part of the landscape. For decades, girls there played a unique “6-on-6” version of the game that emphasized fast passing and outside shooting, and many of Clark’s coaches grew up playing it.
Q: Has being the father of 2 teenage girls shaped how you see this work?
Personally, I think people sometimes use “as the father of daughters” as an excuse to not do the right thing. I want my children to grow up in a world where women who have the talent and drive are able to go after every opportunity.
