From Caitlin Clark to Lynette Woodard: It’s Time We Embrace the Full History of Women’s Basketball

The sport has long allowed just a handful of stars to shine until they are forgotten. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

“She shot and passed and dribbled to prominence in the shadow of Nancy Lieberman and before Cheryl Miller, which is like winning tennis tournaments between Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova. So how come nobody knows Lynette Woodard the way everybody knows Chris Evert…? Well, that’s how it is in women’s basketball. You remember women’s basketball.”

So began a brief item on Lynette Woodard that ran in Sports Illustrated in July 1984. The pithy commentary at the end there was very much of its particular moment—a statement on the mainstream perception of the game and the few players afforded the space to become major stars then. But the idea feels resonant even now. The question is fair, and the answer is, too.

How come nobody knows Lynette Woodard…? Well, that’s how it is in women’s basketball.

As Clark (left) continues to breaks college basketball records, Woodard (right) and her place in women’s basketball has been discussed more and more.  :: Matt Krohn/USA TODAY Sports (Clark); Richard Mackson/Sports Illustrated (Woodard)

The last few weeks have been filled with bids to make sure that people do, in fact, know Woodard. There have been pieces in the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post and a video interview with ESPN. The impetus has been Iowa Hawkeyes senior guard Caitlin Clark, the fiery, transcendent shooter whose season has been a persistent march toward various scoring records. She passed the NCAA women’s career scoring mark of 3,527 career points set by Kelsey Plum two weeks ago. She is now within comfortable reach of Pete Maravich’s 3,667, the all-time record for both men and women in NCAA Division I. And there’s another record Clark broke in between.

With 33 points on Wednesday, Clark passed Woodard’s career mark of 3,649 points, which she set with the Kansas Jayhawks from 1977 to ’81 and which, in a fairer, more reasonable world, would have been considered the women’s major college record.

Any sports record is a product of its context; leagues expand, seasons grow longer, competition improves. Every game changes. There are no easy, direct comparisons to be made across decades. It’s the basis of a million different sports debates: one generation’s star versus another’s, figuring out where to make concessions, weighing the importance of rule changes and new styles of play. (The point is salient now as Clark pursues Maravich, who played for the LSU Tigers in a time before freshman eligibility, before three-point shots and before the full integration of the SEC, but it’s hardly unique.) Yet the conversation around Woodard’s record does not quite fit this model. It’s not a question of whether her scoring can be directly compared to any modern counterpart. It’s a question of whether it should be recognized. It should.

The NCAA did not include women’s sports when Woodard started playing in college. For years, in fact, the organization explicitly worked to shut women’s sports out after Title IX was passed in 1972. Which meant the growth of a separate governing body, the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women, or AIAW. By the early ’80s, the NCAA had changed its stance and laid the foundation for a takeover, and the AIAW ultimately oversaw its last championship season in ’82. But in the years Woodard was playing at Kansas? The AIAW was women’s college basketball. It was not a secondary option or a different league. It was all there was.

"The AIAW record that Lynette Woodard held—that was the real one," Iowa coach Lisa Bluder said after Clark passed Woodard’s total on Wednesday. "There's no reason why that should not be the true record. At a school like Iowa, that has been so rich in AIAW history, I just make sure we acknowledge Lynette's accomplishments in the game of basketball."

Caitlin Clark Is Heading Out on Her Own Terms

The NCAA already recognizes coaching records from the AIAW. (When Tara VanDerveer became the all-time winningest coach in college basketball history in January, her recognized total included the victories from her earliest seasons, four of which were in the AIAW.) It’s a logical stance: For years, women’s college basketball was overseen by the AIAW, not the NCAA, and when the sport became subject to a new governing body, there was a natural argument for its records to carry over. This was not a case of two leagues playing side by side with different standards and competition pools. (It was not, say, the NBA and the ABA: The former absorbed select teams from the latter but does not recognize its records.) It was instead two organizations that had originally run in completely different lanes. There was no women’s basketball under the NCAA through 1981. All women’s college sports had been overseen by the AIAW. And there’s no room for the NCAA to claim that it doesn’t recognize the existence of women’s basketball prior to its governance: It already recognizes those coaching records. It’s hard to argue the playing records should be treated any differently.

In January 1981, when Woodard set the AIAW record, SI profiled her. Here is the opening paragraph:

“Three weeks ago, Lynette Woodard of Kansas University hit a 15-foot jumper early in a victory over Stephen F. Austin to score her 3,206th career point and become the top scorer in the history of women’s college basketball. When the season ends, the 6-foot senior forward is a sure bet to join former UCLA star Ann Meyers as the only four-time women All-Americas. But Woodard is doing more than rewriting record books. In addition to her array of spin-moves and fancy passes, she has an extraordinary leaping ability that is changing the face of women’s basketball.”

Woodard’s next real mention in the magazine would be the previously excerpted item ahead of the Olympics in 1984. In three years, coverage had gone from “changing the face of women’s basketball” to “How come nobody knows Lynette Woodard…? Well, that’s how it is in women’s basketball.” There’s some truth to that final line. Mainstream coverage has traditionally been inconsistent at best. Leagues have come and gone. National focus is prone to collapsing in on just one or two stars to the exclusion of all other story lines. (It’s no accident that the ’84 blurb assumed the reader would remember Lieberman and Miller but no one else; SI, then and now, is as guilty of this as any publication.) It’s all but assumed that whatever history is remembered will soon be forgotten: a slate that wipes itself clean every few years, ready to be filled with new stars who can be hailed as potential saviors of the game, only for the cycle to repeat. Well, that’s how it is in women’s basketball. But it doesn’t have to be.