The purpose of records is not to satisfy the incurable enthusiasm of men with sweating beer bottles in raucous bar discussions about obscure decimals. It is intended to serve as a reminder of great deeds. Iowa's Caitlin Clark is poised for a great feat, but the NCAA record book cheapens her by crushing women's basketball in the past. The leading scorer in major college women's history is not Clark, but Kansas' Lynette Woodard. You'd never know, though, because the old NCAA had no respect for Woodard's era, so they canceled it and gave it an asterisk.
What's most notable about Woodard's 3,649-point mark, which she scored at Kansas between 1978 and 1981, is that she scored many of those points after being put in a van because no one wanted to pay for female athletes to fly. Woodard got the most airtime as she raced to the rim. Despite hours of being cramped, she was able to throw a shot into the net like a pianist touching keys – the tallest women suffered the most in these vans. Yet Woodard's achievement is not officially in the record books because NCAA male administrators flatly refused to recognize or fund women's sports until 1982, when the schools/teams in question were NCAA members.”
In summary, the NCAA does not consider women's basketball records as records because the NCAA did not want women in its organization before 1982.
“These data sets should have been merged a long time ago,” Woodard said. “…We are so quick to delete anything we don’t like or think we don’t like. It's just not fair. There’s a lot of history behind it and it just shouldn’t be dismissed.”
What exactly is a record? It is a symbol of “continuous searching,” as Norwegian philosophy professor Dr. Sigmund Loland got to the heart of the question in an essay in “The Philosophy of Sport”. As Loland notes, a recording is not an exact mathematical comparison of points or seconds within a standard spatiotemporal framework. Records are actually inaccurate simply because of time and progress. Johnny Weissmuller's pool was not Michael Phelps'. Yet they occupy the same human book. Records are symbolic messages that contain potential, history and memory all in one.
The true history and memory of women's basketball is this: In the 1970s, the NCAA was a male empire of crew-cut athletic directors who thought that a dime spent on a women's sport came directly at the expense of a man. When a coach named Marynell Meadors suggested starting a women's basketball team at Tennessee Tech and asked for funding, her athletic director scoffed, “I'll give you a hundred dollars.” She had to drive her team in a small bus that was so dilapidated , that the sliding door wouldn't close completely and she was worried she would lose a player on the highway. Such things.
There was only one way to change things for women: by winning. You changed things by winning. So ostracized university women themselves formed an organization called AIAW and for a decade funded and ran their own championship events—and grew them. They set records in cheap polyester uniforms that didn't breathe and jerseys that grew heavier with sweat. They held bake sales and washed cars to raise money and forced their long bodies into 12-seater vans with their knees up, packed bologna sandwiches and drove across the country to tournaments.
“Ten hours was not uncommon,” recalls Stanford coach Tara VanDerveer.
At the first women's basketball championship in 1972 in Normal, Illinois, teams stayed in motels, four to a room. That didn't appease the nuns from Immaculata University, who had come all the way from Pennsylvania and expressed their fanatical enthusiasm for Cathy Rush's team by ringing pots and pans so loudly that their noisemakers had to be banned.
Over the next decade, the arc of achievement grew at a staggering rate – even as players like Woodard starved as women had to wait hours for the last, worst and most unknown male athlete to leave Allen Fieldhouse in Kansas before they were allowed on the floor.
“Every day was a struggle just to get training time,” Woodard remembers. “And to keep yourself full, because if we practiced in the evening, the cafeterias would close.”
But they wouldn't have traded the experience because it gave them a sense of pride in their possessions and a sense of being the architects of themselves and their game. Their success was entirely self-earned; nothing was given to them. They did it without anything in return and out of pure love for the cause, and because there was a lot to be said for building yourself up from the ground up.
“I navigated with my soul,” Woodard says.
By 1981, the AIAW hosted 41 championships in 19 sports and put women's basketball on national television. It was at this point that the NCAA launched a hostile takeover, urging universities to abandon the AIAW and take over what the women had built. And they put an asterisk on the AIAW records at the end of the book, perhaps hoping that everyone would forget the sexist past of the NCAA leaders.
Records should not be about whether something was completed under the proper organizational alphabet, the runes of the NCAA. After all, the NCAA is just a series of “call letters,” Woodard notes.
There's nothing trivial about that. It is an act of erasure. Example: The NCAA considers Michigan the record holder for most college football wins of all time with 989. But the NCAA didn't come into being until 1910 and Michigan started football in 1879. The NCAA doesn't go on strike or put an asterisk “before NCAA” on everything Michigan won. Otherwise, there's Fielding Yost and his 56-game winning streak and much of Michigan's seasons. The NCAA wouldn't dream of ignoring those years.
Yet they do so in women’s basketball. You're taking away everything that was done before NCAA – and here are some of the people and things you're losing. Ann Meyers, Lusia Harris, Nancy Lieberman, Cindy Brogdon, Carol Blazejowski. It's as if they never existed. Go to the NCAA record book online and try to find a trace of them. They are not here.
The first seven seasons of Pat Summitt's career were outside the NCAA blessings. So do the first 10 from C. Vivian Stringer and the first three from VanDerveer. And everything by Margaret Wade. Yet strangely, in the ultimate illogicality, the record book actually contains women's coaching victories that came before the NCAA.
“It’s inconsistent,” VanDerveer noted in an email exchange. “These are basketball records. And women’s basketball was played at a high level before the NCAA took control of the women’s game.”
Therefore, it is of great importance to give Woodard's achievement the respect and recognition it deserves. The perfect opportunity to remedy that is now, so that when Clark sets the record, the real record, it means what it should be. With three games left in the regular season, Clark was still 56 points behind Woodard and 75 points behind men's record holder Pete Maravich and should break both records by March. When it happens, we should remember that without Woodard and all the other heroines of the AIAW era, there simply is no Caitlin Clark.
“Caitlin has had a wonderful, sensational career, and a high tide floats all boats,” says Woodard. “There are so many things that she brings to people's attention, and I think that's a great thing. But I just hope that if the call letters on 'NCAA' ever change, their records might get mixed up.”